Speaker’s corner

WHATEVER happened to creative dentistry? A reader, F Brady of Krugersdorp, has sent me a column I wrote about “CD” (as it came to be called) in 1993 in which I wondered what it was. I am still unsure, but surmise it must be about finding imaginative ways to stick needles in people’s gums and pulling out teeth.

My dentist at the time – Peter Bow in Randburg (long retired to the Eastern Cape) – said “CD” covered every aspect of dentistry and mentioned an American dentist who treated children while wearing a tutu. Now that’s creative. Children thought he was the tooth fairy.

He wouldn’t have fooled me. I wouldn’t even go to get my hair cut without an 11-round fight.

I recall my mother dragging me squealing (I was doing the squealing not my mother) into a barber’s shop where they obviously specialised in children because instead of those seats that look like Alcatraz’s electric chair they had brightly painted horses and other animals – the sort children ride on fairground roundabouts.

I was sat upon a big yellow duck. I suppose I felt that my human rights were being violated and I must have gone into a 130-decibel tantrum.

The barber advised my mother to wait outside or do some shopping while he handled the situation.

When she’d gone, he snapped his fingers and from a neutral corner came what I now surmise must have been the resident psychologist.

Ten minutes later, I was shorn like a lamb and walking down the street with mother. She asked me what the “kind man” had said.

I can’t now recall his exact words but they were something like, “If you don’t sit still and keep your bloody trap shut I’ll bash your bloody skull in like an egg and pour salt into your brain”.

But creative hairdressing aside, how can a dentist be creative?

I am told some dentists have paintings on their ceilings so that, as you lie there and while he is placing spanners and pliers into your mouth and then climbing in himself, you have something to look at to take your mind off the blood and flying bits of gum bone.

I was told subsequently of a dentist who had four pictures on the ceiling – a girlie picture for men, a landscape for women, a Walt Disney scene for children and an aerial picture. He found that most of his patients stared at the aerial picture.

Let’s not kid ourselves

You spend the first two years of their life teaching your children to walk and talk. Then you spend the next 16 telling them to sit down and shut up.

Grandchildren are God’s reward for not killing your children.

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like raking leaves from your lawn while the wind is still blowing.

There is only one pretty child in the world and every mother has it. (Chinese proverb)

Mothers of teens know why animals eat their young.

Children are natural mimics, who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn’t have said.

The main purpose of holding children’s parties is to remind yourself that there are children more awful than your own.

A friend tells me she child-proofed her home three years ago but they’re still getting in.

Say it isn’t so

Do you realise that in about 40 years we’ll have thousands of old men and old women running around with tattoos?

And rap music will be the Golden Oldies?