Catching Up With Andrea Simakis

[caption id="attachment_5643" align="alignleft" width="79" caption="Andrea "The Diva" Simakis"][/caption]

Get caught up with Andrea "The Diva" Simakis, as she dives into the world of a zombie makeover:

A rotting corpse, shedding skin, clutching a microphone in her three-fingered hand, works the red carpet at this year's Golden Globes.

She lurches toward Brad and Angelina, dragging her Jimmy Choo-clad broken foot behind her. In keeping with tradition, the zombie correspondent -- we'll call her Joan Rivers -- asks the petrified A-listers who they are wearing.

"V-versace . . .," Angelina croaks, her eyes saucer-wide with terror"Fabulous," Zombie Joan gurgles, gesturing to the glistening entrails slung around her throat like a bejeweled necklace.

"I'm in Ryan Gosling." This is the image that claws its way into the Diva's brain as she sits before a massive, lighted mirror and watches special-effects artist Beki Ingram, now competing on the Syfy reality series "Face Off," tunnel a bullet hole into her mottled forehead. Sure, zombification is a gas -- really, how often do you undergo a makeover that highlights, nay, celebrates, those tar-black circles under your eyes rather than covers them up?

Still, nothing brings you putrid cheek by decaying jowl with your own mortality like being transformed into one of the flesh-eaters that stalk pop-culture consciousness. From George Romero's classic "Night of the Living Dead" to the British parody "Shaun of the Dead" to AMC's sleeper hit "The Walking Dead," zombies keep shambling along, no matter how many slugs to the cranium.

Perhaps it's because they are so close to our day-to-day selves, as Romero suggested when he set one of his sequels in a mall: The undead shoppers looked a lot like the living consumers, only grayer. Or maybe zombies' popularity stems from our love of second chances.

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