DATE: Thursday, July 3, 1997                TAG: 9707030657

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell 

                                            LENGTH:   53 lines

BOSH TO THEORY THAT BARBERSHOP QUARTET SINGING KEEPS COLDS AT BAY!

An increasing number of scientists in America are in rebellion against their mothers. For shame!

News of yet another revelation of mother repulsion suggests we are in the grip of a trend.

Scientists' latest outbreak against their mothers' regimen would have us believe that people involved in a variety of activities ``such as work, church, family, soccer and barbershop quartets'' get fewer colds than those who are exposed to the same number of people but have only a few things to occupy them.

To which, I say, ``Oh, bosh!''

The notion that people build immunity to colds by singing in a barbershop quartet is ludicrous on its face. For one thing, barbershop quartets are a vanishing specimen.

To bring back the barbershop quartet would take a careful program of selective breeding such as the one repopulating the West with the buffalo.

The decline in close harmony quartets began with the loss of their natural habitat, the barbershop, just as scarcity of habitat was a clue in dwindling herds of buffalos.

Long time ago, most any barbershop you chanced upon you could count on four fellows singing ``I want a girl just like the girl that married dear old Dad.''

What set back the barbershop quartet was the rise of unisex salons. You just couldn't expect fellows waving straw hats to burst upon a hushed, upscale unisex salon singing, ``Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream!''

``Someone who works, has a family and goes bowling with a group has an edge on a person whose whole life is work,'' said the lead author, a psychologist.

But few bowlers are left in whose company one may build up immunity. Used to be, one could name half a dozen friends given to bowling. Now the only ones that come to mind are Dagwood and Herb, and they're in a comic strip.

How depressing to read the other day that TV will not renew coverage of the International Bowling League. There goes another habitat! Soon they'll be putting bowlers, stuffed, into the Smithsonian.

Bent on proving they're independent thinkers, scientists label as ``old wives' tales'' what their mothers told them. Mom warned us to beware of mixing with crowds for fear of catching a scad of diseases.

Why, when one child in elementary school got the whooping cough it ran through the whole ranks, a frightening time. The school year was one long sniveling cold. A child's rattling, racking cough struck fear into parents' hearts.

The findings published in The Journal of The American Medical Association sound as if they originated in The National Enquirer.

Those scientists better look out, lest their mothers catch them and wash out their mouths with soap. Octagon.

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