Teeth

About 12 years ago, Carrie Lemon started losing teeth. One by one, to curb pain, Lemon had most of her teeth extracted. Today, at 72, she has only six left. Eating has become a daily chore, and Lemon wants desperately to be fitted for a set of dentures. "I've just been going from one dentist to another, but all of them tell me that our medical system doesn't cover it," Lemon said. "I don't have the money to get them."

Let's face it: Ice hockey has been a tough sell in Washington, particularly since the lockout. In 2005-06, the first year back, the Capitals ranked 28th out of 30 NHL teams in average attendance. Last season, they were No. 27. This year through 20 games, they're No. 29, averaging 13,642. The franchises in Columbus, Ohio, and Nashville, Tenn., do better with teams that, like the Caps, are treading water. Yet, Washington just gave 22-year-old superstar Alex Ovechkin a 13-year, $124 million extension.

The closest thing China has to a tooth fairy might be Dwayne Arola, an engineering professor from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who has a thing for Asian choppers. Not long ago, Arola returned from a trip to Shanghai with a plastic lunch box containing a dozen prime specimens from Chinese dental patients - large, cavity-free wisdom teeth - destined to endure a regimen of abuse that he once reserved for aircraft parts. How the Chinese molars hold up under Arola's stress tests may explain why Chinese teeth are more brittle than American teeth.

"Show me your smile," the dentist, wielding a flashlight, said to the slightly apprehensive 3-year-old girl standing before her. "You brought your teeth with you?" At that, the little girl grinned. Maybe this wasn't going to be so bad after all. The dentist, Dr. Patricia L. Bell-McDuffie, director of oral health services for the Baltimore City Health Department, was one of several medical professionals who gathered this morning at an East Baltimore community center to inspect the mouths of about 300 children ages 3 and 4 and enrolled in Head Start programs.

Tombstones sprout like mushrooms in the Center Stage orchestra pit, seeming to grow loose and wild among the grass. We don't even notice them at first. Instead, the audience's gaze lingers on the artifacts of Victorian gentility crammed into a rooming house in Brooklyn in 1941: the lace tablecloths, crocheted doilies, cut-crystal decanters. If there was a grandfather clock in the Brewsters' sitting room, it would chime decorously. But once we notice that cemetery, it's hard to focus on anything else.

Even before Mattel recalled more than 19 million Chinese-made toys last week, I wasn't sure what was safe for my little teether's mouth. Plastic was out, because until we know more about the effects of their chemicals, I didn't want him gnawing on softened products that contain phthalates. And last week, a federal panel ruled the compound used to make hard polycarbonate plastic -- bisphenol-A -- could pose a risk to the brain development of fetuses, infants, babies and older children. So I gave him wooden toys.

An adverse reaction to a vaccine sent Erin MacPherson crashing face-first onto the floor, cutting her neck, fracturing her jaw and cracking six teeth - two months before her Miss Teen America competition. For two weeks in April, MacPherson, the current Miss Teen Maryland, couldn't talk because a compression bandage wound tightly around her chin clamped her jaws shut. The Bel Air teen swallowed pureed bananas and chicken-vegetable mush, and drank lots of milkshakes. She scribbled on a whiteboard to communicate with her friends.

Harley Garbani excused himself, ducked out of the room and returned with a savage set of 6-inch teeth and claws. "Take a look," he said, displaying the finer, if sharper points of a Tyrannosaurus rex. "If he picks you up with these, you can kiss your butt goodbye." That fate seems unlikely these days even if Garbani's home is more appropriate to, say, Jurassic Park than the trailer park in Hemet, Calif., where he lives. Moving from room to room is a journey of a few feet spanning millions of years.

Six-year-old Mychael Greene doesn't like the look of the hooked tool that dentists use to scrape plaque from teeth, or the sour taste their latex-gloved hands leave in his mouth. But his mother, Shawn Greene, made sure her son opened wide during a recent checkup at the University of Maryland Dental School in Baltimore. Her reason: the death earlier this year of Deamonte Driver, a 12-year-old Prince George's County boy who died after an infection from an abscessed tooth spread to his brain.

So the Weinstein Co., disappointed with the relatively poor box office of Grindhouse (less than $12 million its first week), is thinking about sawing the double-feature in half, releasing each of the two films it encompasses - Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof - separately? Two problems with that: 1) Won't that defeat part of the purpose, which was to replicate the experience of going to those fabled second-rate movie houses back in the early '70s, where sleazy double features were the rule?