Choppers

Not that the chance ever came up, or that I ever tried to make it happen, but I could never be an on-air personality.  My smile is not white enough, straight, or so encompassing that it fills my face when I grin, preen, laugh, or otherwise just take every opportunity there is to show off my choppers. My smile is meant for radio.

And I don't really mind. Never having the chance to be on-air, I don't miss it. Somewhere in my youth my parents—principally my mother—stopped taking me to the dentist. The dentist that saw me through my baby teeth and incoming molars moved. My mother took me to a new dentist who wanted to start me off with dental x-rays.

I never had x-rays, and maybe my mother never did either, although she was a nurse in the Army during WW II. But as soon as they were recommended, I was out of the chair and never brought back.

By the time I was a teen-ager and needed a dental exam every six months for gym class in public high school, it was too late to straighten out my teeth. No tin grin for me. I made my own dental appointments with a dentist a block from the flower shop, and ever since then have always kept up visits.

I don't think my father ever saw a dentist beyond what they might have examined when he was in the Army during WW 11. His teeth were a mess, and never got any attention until he was in his 70s and needed heart surgery. 

It was determined that rotting teeth were infecting his mitral valve. They needed to be pulled. Seventeen of them before the surgery, which was a success, but left him with a pair of false teeth, which he occasionally put it.

Whenever I watch a news show or see talk show hosts I can't help but realize that if it wasn't for their pearly. straight whites (and many of them) they would have never been considered for the job.

No one sitting behind a desk, in front of a weather map, or perched on a couch has a bad set of teeth. I really don't know how they keep them so white.

One on-air personality has probably lead me to write this—Tina Cervasio of Fox News—whose ear-to-ear grin can resemble the white keys of a Steinway. She does seem to have 52 of them, as she never seems to stop flashing them. 

She is the sports reporter and appears regularly in segments as part of Good Day New York, Fox's early morning talk and news show. Occasionally she fills in for a vacationing Rosanna Scotto, the principal host of the three-hour telecast. 

Frankly, I get the biggest kick of watching Tina flash her dental grin. I've never stooped to count how many times she grins per minute, but it's at least as many outfits as Lesley Stahl wears when she does a 60 Minutes segment.

I don't know what piece of bad news it would take to wipe the grin off Tina's face.

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