Buffed

Speaking of bad words . . . nude doesn’t go well with prime-time network TV.

Until now. And where else but on “St. Elsewhere,” the much-lauded series in its final season on NBC. In a carefully photographed episode scheduled for April 27, Dr. Jackie Wade, played by actress Sagan Lewis, will perform an operation in the nude, testing out claims by Scandinavian doctors that surgery is more hygienic when practiced without clothes.

“We didn’t make this up, you know,” explained Lewis, a regular on the show since its inception. “The writers found a story in a Scandinavian health journal that theorized that you’d have less staph infections if you performed operations in the nude. The point really isn’t the nudity. The writers have been looking for ways to make my character less introspective and more assertive. So this is a way of showing that I’m willing to take a risk.”

Was Lewis nervous? She’d done scenes before “in towels and in a sauna or under a sheet, but never completely nude.”

“Sure, I had a few butterflies in my stomach,” she said. “But in a way it was OK to be nervous, since that’s what the scene called for. After a while, you just forget you’re there in the buff.”

Several other characters--male and female--are also nude in the scene, which did make Lewis a wee bit self-conscious. “I have to admit that before we started to shoot, I did look (at the actresses in the scene) to make sure there weren’t any 10’s in the room. I didn’t want a Bo Derek-type standing beside me the whole time!”