Word: gumming
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Four showgirls stride onto the Radio City Music Hall stage to play a fanfare. It is fitting that one of the strumpets with trumpets is chewing gum, for she and her sisters are introducing a supremely brassy babe. Crescendo! Curtain! Giant cotton-swab clouds! And there, radiant on a throne, sits the Arch Angel of Pop and Schlock. The message is clear: Bette Midler has lived up to her self-promotion. She is divine...
...eating the things, really I did. I chipped away at a drumstick, pried off a morsel, chewed, and chewed some more. When it got lodged in my throat, I drank some soda to get it down. Big mistake. I expect it will float around in my gastrointestinal tract, chewing gum style, for the next seven years...
Chevy Chase's sights are less celestial. "There are these gaps of seven minutes I have to fill between commercials," he allows. "And we'll have some guests on. Ultimately, you have to understand that this is only TV. Silliness. Chewing gum." And what is the show for Fox boss Rupert Murdoch, who is banking big on the show, and to whom Chase jovially offered the job of bandleader? "For Rupert, it's just a breath mint...
Financial considerations aside, there are some real medical issues to resolve. Perhaps the most serious is the concern that widespread use of antibiotics in the mouth could create super-virulent strains of gum-ravaging bacteria that would resist any attempts at treatment. "A lot of the new therapies are just at the tinkering, research stage right now," says Ray Williams, chairman of Harvard University's periodontal department. Until the gum-disease treatments get FDA approval, most people's options will remain the same as always: brush, floss and visit the dentist regularly -- or face the knife...
...unlucky ones stay on the streets. They live hand to mouth, wrapped in tattered gray blankets or plastic bags at night, washing windshields, selling gum, running drugs, begging, stealing in order to eat. Or they die, victims not just of poverty but of murder as well...