Soap

I have become obsessive about washing my hands. All the news reports about the shortage of flu vaccine stress the importance of washing hands. Now they are red and rough and getting worse by the day. My work requires that I shake a lot of hands, and I can't always get to a bathroom to wash up. How effective are waterless hand sanitizers? This might come as a surprise, but alcohol-based hand sanitizers are less irritating than liquid soap. They are as effective as soap and water and do not require wetting hands or drying them off. They work best if you put a dime-sized dollop in your palm and rub vigorously until the alcohol has dried and disinfected your skin.

Steady now, ladies. Eric Braeden, the suavely vulnerable star of the hottest daytime soap opera on television, CBS's "The Young and the Restless," says he likes to meet his fans, answer their questions and sign autographs.But he cannot say why he has become one of TV's most popular leading men. Earlier this month, he won the first People's Choice Award given in the category of favorite male performer in a daytime show."I don't know. I truly don't know," Mr. Braeden said this week over the telephone from his dressing room at the show's production studios in Los Angeles.

MOSCOW -- The long lines are still here outside stores, but instead of waiting in the cold and wind for bread or milk, today's Muscovite is jostling for strawberry-scented glycerin soap and rose shower gel.Life has changed drastically here in the last few years, and depending on whom you're talking to, it's unimaginably better or critically worse.Just over two years ago, people were lining up all over Russia for the bare necessities. In Moscow, GUM -- the huge Victorian shopping arcade that lines one side of Red Square -- was full of tired faces waiting endlessly for ill-fitting, clunky shoes and garish chartreuse ties.

Desperate to keep marauding deer from treating their plants like canapes, gardeners in the area are shaving pungent deodorant soap, blasting country music all night and decorating freshly tilled soil with cotton puffs soaked in coyote urine."

MOSCOW -- At a key moment during last week's bashing of Boris N. Yeltsin by the Congress of People's Deputies, there was a sudden rush toward the few scattered television sets. The president, they said, was about to make an appeal to the people.He was going to go over the heads of these entrenched, hostile, powerful legislators. This could be the moment of truth.The sets were found, tuned in. And soap operas filled the screen. Drama and passion of a decidedly non-political flavor poured out into the Great Kremlin Palace.

Move over, J. T. Make room for J. K. C.Now that the nation has grown tired of J. R. Ewing, it's time for a new prime-time soap opera based on the life and times of a colorful tycoon.Let's call it Middleburg, the home of Jack Kent Cooke's Virginia estate.Cooke, the billionaire owner of the Washington Redskins, is a larger-than-life character whose rise from door-to-door encyclopedia salesman to tycoon seems made for the tube.After all, his first divorce was granted by Judge Wapner. Yesthat Judge Wapner.

In a fictional town of Harmony, Fancy Crane is the hottest new fashion designer on the NBC soap opera Passions. All the rich and stylish people in Fancy's world would just kill for her clothes. But network officials are hoping that fans of the daytime drama will spend real dollars on Fancy Crane's flirty collection, which they started selling earlier this year. It's the first time a soap opera has launched a clothing line, Passions executives say. And some marketing experts are wondering why no one has thought of the idea before.

In the old days, it used to go like this: Mom watched soap opera. Kid got home from school. Kid sat down and watched soap opera with mom. Kid grew attached to soap opera. Kid continued watching soap opera into adulthood, and passed the addiction on to the next generation. Soap characters like Luke and Laura from "General Hospital" and Roman and Marlena from "Days of Our Lives" became as familiar to kids as their friends at school -- extramarital affairs, demonic possession and diabolical twins notwithstanding.

WHAT DOES it say about American society that the talk of the country isn't the presidential election but tonight's finale of the television miniseries "Survivor"? Week after week, we tuned in to see which of the original 16 contestants, deposited on a deserted tropical island near Malaysia in the South China Sea, would be eliminated in this last-person-standing-wins-$1 million contest. It's fictional soap opera with a twist -- real-life survival for 39 days on an island with few resources.

As the scene opens, two girls are discussing their sneakers in front of lockers on the third floor at Francis M. Wood Senior High School. It seems the $95 pair owned by one girl is no longer chic."