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Mrs. Black has the advantage of her foreign experience. "In diplomatic circles." says she, "there is a lot of hand kissing." Men are gingerly with her hand, however, since she bought an Iranian ring with two stone-encrusted tigers on it. "I remember a reception in Bucharest in 1972," she relates, "when a Rumanian with a huge red beard bent over to kiss my hand. He was bent over for the longest time and when he finally made it up, there were two long red hairs in my tiger ring."
Viewed with a clinical, alien's eye, kissing can seem a rather odd thing for people to do. The Chinese have even believed that it had associations with cannibalism. Kissing, of course, is not all that bad. But the present excesses have undoubtedly served to debase the currency, sometimes leaving people at a loss for ways to demonstrate degrees of affection, as well as making them unnecessarily nervous about the flu.
Columnist Art Buchwald is in favor of the sport, especially the two-cheek variation he learned in Paris. Says he:
"Women love to be kissed on both cheeks. They know they're getting a French kiss without all the trouble that usually goes with it." Ultimately, the social kiss, however promiscuously inflicted, is unlikely to do any permanent damage to civilization. The threat can at least be kept to a minimum if, as the old sorority house rule dictated, a couple keeps a total of three feet on the floor at all times.