GUM CHEWING: the ugly side

                                    by James Channing Shaw

            Try this experiment. Walk up Broadway in New York or any big city street. Watch people chewing gum. Do you think they look good? Sexy, manly, feminine, smart, whatever? If so, I probably can't help you. 

NEW YORK CITY

            Now try this: Look down at the sidewalk in New York or any city of five million or more. For miles and miles, each and every concrete slab of sidewalk is polka-dotted with hundreds of splats of stepped-on gum, mostly black, no matter how pink or sparkly or blue they started out. And—talk about disgusting—try stepping on a soft wad that sticks to your heel in a really long string and gets picked up by the wind and wraps around your pants. But I don’t care that much about your pants, or the polka-dot sidewalks. It’s the chewing that gets me. 

PARIS

            My guess is that the majority of people who regularly chew gum do it more for the image than the taste. For those who are about image, I wish you luck. For those who chew gum for the taste, or your breath, there still is hope for you.

            

Here’s the concept: Quietness is a great beautifier.^* Picture the inside of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris at closing time; a grove of giant Sequoias at dusk with rays of sun peeking through; an empty stage with a nine-foot grand piano. Quietness beautifies your face as well. Rippling jaw muscles are off-putting, tense. Blow bubbles and you have just labeled yourself a junior high school punk or a Valley Girl from the eighties. Chew with an open mouth and you become a caricature of a gangster, a pimp, or some other low life form. Yeah, you're tough all right. Just need a few tattoos.

            Let’s face it. Gum chewing and charm are as incongruous as oysters with chocolate sauce, or a Republican with a social conscience. They simply don’t go together.

            I can accept it when it’s a celebrity doing the chewing, especially when it serves a purpose. John Lennon, I admit, looks pretty good chewing gum in the studio recording of “All You Need Is Love”, but he has to keep the saliva flowing. He has a job to do. Or the final scene of Last Tango in Paris in which wounded Marlon Brando slows his jaw, furrows his brow, takes the gum out of his mouth and sticks it to the underside of the balcony railing before he collapses, dead. It is hard to deny that gum chewing carries with it some cachet in the arts. At least for Brando and Lennon.

            But what famous role models have chewed gum over the years? Queen Elizabeth? Winston Churchill? Fred Astaire? Audrey Hepburn? Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? The President of the United States?  Of course not. None of them. In public, at least. The gum-chewers would be the Donald Trumps of the world, televangelists, professional wrestlers, the Charlie Sheens of the world, low-level politicians, maybe ex-governors of Alaska. You get the gist. In what career could it possibly be advantageous to interview for a job with gum in your mouth? Induction into the Mafia, perhaps.

            There is one major exception to all this:  professional baseball players. To their credit, they figured out that the manly wad of tobacco they used to squirrel into the sides of their cheeks caused mouth cancer, so now it's a gooshy wad of pink bubblegum. It looks so juvenile, so demeaning, compared with the tobacco, but they deserve a break. And they have important work to do, as do soldiers, whom I would totally forgive for chewing gum. Maybe, though, the ball players could consider not blowing bubbles during televised games, at least while at bat.

 * quote from Robertson Davies