DATE: Saturday, October 11, 1997            TAG: 9710110469

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell 

                                            LENGTH:   55 lines

WHY BUY CUP HOLDER WHEN ROLL OF DUCT TAPE WILL DO ?

One of the several editors who, as they put it, ``look out for Friddell'' as if he is an errant comet on a collision course with Earth, has pointed out still another change in the automobile.

He is impressed by the marked increase in cup holders, particularly among those bus-like vans. A neighbor, he noted, has just purchased a van with 17 cup holders.

``Is he kin to the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe?'' I asked. ``Is he the young man who lives in a van?''

The editor chose to ignore the questions as the sort of persiflage one would expect from a columnist.

A van with 17 cup bearers raises a spectre of a riotous party, a movable feast as the van cruises the landscape. If in a spirit of bonhomie, they all begin tossing empty cups out the windows, it will become a moving litter bug.

My editor was driving a truck, a fairly recent model. At his side was a plastic cup nestled in the center of what seemed to be a holder but which, on a closer look, proved to be a heavy roll of duct tape.

``This here duct-tape-cup-holder is a technological breakthrough!'' I marveled.

It came about, he said, because his previous truck, a vintage number, had to be held together with baling wire and duct tape. One day, driving along merrily, humming, he chanced to place a cup of coffee in the center of the roll of duct tape resting on the gear console and - voila! - a new use for an old duct.

Don't tell me that American ingenuity is dead. Can-do still does it. We are all Daniel Boones. Bring on the millennium!

That afternoon I dropped by the neighborhood hardware store and asked Phil Smith for duct tape.

``For what?'' he asked, suspicious. He is one of those who look out for Friddell out of compassion rather than dread.

``Because I need a cup holder,'' I said.

``Are you sure you don't want to buy a cup holder for duct tape?'' he asked, stalling, trying to get his feet on the ground.

``My car, although it is only 17 years old, does not have a cup holder,'' I told him. ``A duct tape roll will do the trick.''

He has been skittish about what he sells me ever since the afternoon I asked for a sledgehammer with which to open one of those child-proof plastic bottles of aspirin.

``If you intend to try to open this bottle with a sledge,'' he said back then, ``I am going to throw in several rolls of bandages with which to wrap your foot.''

He cares, you see.

But, finally, he released the heavy roll of duct tape. At my next stop at a Doumars drive-in for a cup of limeade, the duct-cup holder was just the dictum. It fit. I'll drink to that! ILLUSTRATION: Color staff illustration by Janet Shaughnessy

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