Mayor Willie Brown had his head cut off in San Francisco yesterday.

It was inside a green box at Fisherman's Wharf. Meanwhile, the mayor's body was in a Union Street clothing store, and two of his fingers were in City Hall.

It was a complicated situation. It had something to do with wax museums, the cut of $3,750 suits and the way the mayor feels about his pinkies.

For the past year, the wax museum at Fisherman's Wharf has been sculpting a likeness of the mayor for its main entrance, where it will stand alongside a fellow clotheshorse known as Cleopatra.

This week, the sculpting hit a snag, however, when the mayor was shown the wax hands that the museum proposed to attach to his wax body. The hands were missing the distinctive bend in the large joint of the mayor's pinkies, an anomaly from childbirth. Sculptor Kahn Gasimov figured he was doing the mayor a favor by straightening the fingers but soon learned that Brown feels attached to his pinkies just the way they are.

Yesterday, Brown invited Gasimov to his office, to have his pinkies redone.

For 20 minutes, Brown held his pinkies in two plastic cups full of squishy molding compound, while Gasimov kept reminding the mayor that if he were to allow the pinkies to come in contact with the sides of the cups, the mold would be ruined and the whole thing would have to be done over.

"Don't touch the cup," said Gasimov. "Are your fingers touching the cup?"

"They're not," replied the mayor. "My pinkies are not touching anything."

Both men sat in silence, thinking the kind of thoughts that men think at such times. A sculpture of Abe Lincoln watched the proceedings from a display table.

After a while, the mayor spoke.

"There is nothing glamorous about this process," he said.

While the mayor's pinkies were in the goop, his headless torso was inside a Union Square boutique, where clothiers were trying to fix a minor flaw in the drape of the Italian suit that will adorn the sculpture when it goes on display at the museum later this month. The mayor insisted that the nearly invisible flare on the jacket's right vent be smoothed before he would allow his wax body to go inside.

Clothier Wilkes Bashford, a pal of the mayor, said it is not a waste to dress a statue in a $3,750 suit, $295 shirt, $135 tie and $625 shoes.

"We'll get a lot of wear out of the suit, I suspect," he said. "And we do want the wax figure to look its best."

Bashford said it had been essential for the mayor's wax head to be attached to the torso for the fitting of the collar but not merely to fix the drape of the jacket. The head could come off for that, he said, and it did.

Back at the wax museum workshop, directly adjoining the chamber of horrors, Gasimov removed the mayor's head from its storage box and prepared to repair a nick in the wax neck. Later he will graft the new pinkies onto the existing wax hands, attach the wax feet, adjust the eyeballs and slap the entire thing together in time for its unveiling on June 13.

Before making the final adjustments, Gasimov studied a chart with no fewer than 61 measurements of Brown's body, including one specifying that the distance from the mayoral spine to the mayoral belly button is 24.5 centimeters.

Gasimov will need to perform the pinkie grafting with due diligence, for the invitations to the unveiling have already been mailed out.

"I can do it," he said. "I was going to spend next week working on Leonardo Di Caprio, but he can wait."

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Media Contact: Jeanette Guire +1 415 202 0416 jguire@waxmuseum.com