Capping Off an Obsessive Plan for Perfection

I can’t tell you how obsessed I have become with teeth.

Teeth are critical physical assets; far more important than gravity-defying breasts or extra-big biceps. Good teeth signal health and happiness. Bad ones signal poverty, irrational fear of dentistry or, God forbid, overconsumption of sugar.

Like snowflakes, no two teeth are alike, but good ones share certain desirable traits: They are white, bright and straight. Passports to a successful life. Crooked, dingy and snaggled need not apply.

I am sure I have not made this up. Just watch TV, where we are exposed relentlessly to dental perfection. Everyone on TV has the kind of blinding teeth that make sunglasses an important indoor accessory. Furthermore, everyone on TV has perfect capped teeth.

Capped teeth are a major part of my obsession.

Why? Because they raise more questions than they answer.

Most people who opt for caps do only the four top front ones, and leave the rest yellowy, pitted and normal looking. Don’t cappees realize that when they smile (and they are always smiling; that’s the whole reason they’ve gone to the trouble of capping their teeth) it’s apparent even to the unobsessed eye which teeth are capped and which have been left to fend for themselves?

You start to focus on a thing like that during the evening news, and pretty soon you’re so distracted you have no idea what critical new information they’ve just reported about Marcia Clark’s hemlines.

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I know a lot of non-TV types who are capping their teeth these days. And why not? We all fancy ourselves discoverable.

It’s not uncommon, for instance, for newspaper reporters to find themselves in front of TV cameras. Wretches who used to chain themselves to typewriters smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee now unleash themselves regularly to hold forth on TV talk shows. (It’s as close to discovered as we can hope for.)

The punditry industry has produced a subgenre of professionals who are both ink-stained and vain (and who also don’t know how to shop for TV clothes, which explains why they often wear suits that ripple on-screen as though underwater).

I’ve been reading a book of columns by one pundit in particular--Molly Ivins--who is shown on the cover of “Nothin’ But Good Times Ahead” guffawing in some Texas pool hall over a couple of long-neck beers.

I see Ivins on TV now and again. I love the way she looks: part wench, part cowgirl. Clearly not a slave to fashion, nor to cosmetic dentistry. You would think. And yet . . . it appears that Molly Ivins has caps. On her book cover, I think I can tell exactly which of her teeth have been fixed and which have not. This drives me crazy.

Does the social contract have a clause in it whereby we are to pretend not to notice disparities between teeth that are capped/veneered/bonded/bleached and those that are not?

If other people can tell where your caps end and your real teeth start, does that mean your caps don’t count?

And, most disturbing, what kind of superficial bimbo worries about this sort of thing?

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Not to duck blame, but this is 1995 in America, and my shortcomings, as I have learned from Court TV, are someone else’s fault. It takes a more secure woman than I to live in Los Angeles and not regard the quality of her smile as a moral issue. (Good people have beautiful teeth. This, too, I learned from TV.)

Even if you can resist the pressure to attain dental perfection, chances are that caps, bonding, braces or bleach will at some point cross your mind as a possibility. Your dentist may make an offhand remark about having just re-veneered every tooth in, say, Morgan Fairchild’s head, and it could get you thinking.

My childhood dentist made the mouthpiece that gave Marlon Brando jowls for “The Godfather.” Impressive? I remember that story more clearly than my first root canal.

Once, many cappuccinos ago, I had teeth that were light, bright and straight. When I smiled for photographs, my friends called me “Jaws.” Then a front bottom tooth started tipping inward, straining toward my tonsils like some enamel analog of Pisa’s misengineered tower. My orthodontist spoke gravely of “immense forces at work in the mouth,” which brought back haunting memories of the speech therapy I had as a child for “tongue thrusting” (don’t ask). I gave him thousands of dollars; he gave me a set of retainers. I never wore the damn things, so the damn teeth never straightened out. Bottom teeth. Who cares?

When the top ones began shifting around, however, I had a panic the likes of which I had not felt since I was nine months pregnant and realized that, short of cutting me open, there was only one way that baby was coming out.

And so I have become obsessed.

Pathetic, yes, but hardly my fault.

Next week: Take this Wonderbra and shove it--one woman’s courageous story.

* Robin Abcarian’s column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.