Maya’s sinewy hands fan over the strings in the first slow, sad passages of a Soleares. Dieguito, eyes closed, emits a low throaty cry that hushes the room. Byrne’s eyes lock on the singer in either a moment of primal conversion or recognition of the next recording contract bonanza.

After weeks of travel through Spain sampling flamenco music in clubs, outdoor festivals and the ubiquitous private flamenco clubs called peñas, it became clear that Spain’s flamenco music scene was moving toward a flashy rock-style promotion evident in Madrid’s clubs.

For Donn Pohren, an American who’s spent the past 45 years in Spain writing about a flamenco world that has slowly given way to Americanized commercialism, it’s a sign of corruption. He’s the only non-Spaniard ever awarded the title of “flamencologist” by the closed circle of writers and academics who make up the “Catedra de Flamencologia.” And his books, praised by such Spanish artists as guitarist Andrés Segovia and dancer Carmen Amaya, have become underground classics fueling a quiet affair between legions of flamenco aficionados around the world and this uniquely Iberian art form.

We’d arranged to meet at a cafe in a suburb 12 miles from Madrid. The next morning I boarded a train that crawled through the tawny hills outside the city past an abandoned bullfight school, its crumbling walls a reminder of the rustic Spain where flamenco once thrived.

I found my way to the cafe and took a seat near a rack of hoofed hams dangling from the ceiling. With a predictable Spanish tardiness, Pohren appeared at my table briskly ordering a drink in Minnesota-tinged Spanish. Over a five-hour lunch accompanied by several bottles of vino tinto, Pohren told me the story of his flamenco pilgrimage.

“In the beginning I used to say my mother was Spanish, and call myself Daniel Maravilla, which did help in getting accepted,” the 69 year-old author says of his early efforts to gain admittance to the then-closed flamenco world. “Now I couldn’t care less whether I’m accepted or not.”

Pohren has reason to be sure of his reputation these days. A few months ago he joined the pantheon of flamenco heroes memorialized by statues in the public squares of small towns dotting Andalusia. A plaque was erected in Morón de la Frontera, a town near Seville popularized in his writings, which decades before regarded him as foreign provocateur.

When he arrived in Spain, though, flamenco music was still an outsider art — every bit as back-alley to Spain as jazz or blues was in the United States at the turn of the century. It was a music that devotees spoke of in mystical, quasi-religious terms, describing their discovery of it as a “baptism.” Pohren’s exploration of the flamenco cabal became an expedition through the dark umbra of Spain’s alter ego on a river of wine and song.

His flamenco baptism, he says, occurred on a family vacation in Mexico City in 1947. “Wandering downtown one day I heard a guitar, singing, foot-stomping issuing from a bar, and went in. During a break I asked the guitarist what the music was,” Pohren recalls. “He smiled and told me it was flamenco.” Pohren remembered reading about Carmen Amaya’s troupe, whose tours through the U.S. had made headlines. “I mentioned this to the guitarist. He pointed to the woman who had been dancing and singing and told me, ‘That is Carmen Amaya!’”

The chance encounter with Amaya and famed guitarist Sabicas in a Mexican cantina marked the beginning of the 17-year-old’s lifelong sojourn. Six years later Pohren abandoned his orderly Eisenhower-era Minneapolis neighborhood with a one-way ticket on the Queen Mary bound for Spain tucked into his pocket. His quest took him to Seville’s narrow corridors, where Gypsy singers, toreros and their rich benefactors all rubbed elbows in pursuit of the flamenco life.

“I lived for a period in the Barrio Santa Cruz, in Seville,” Pohren says. The compact, mostly Gypsy, neighborhood, with its jumble of narrow streets overflowing with flamenco bars, was then the heart of the flamenco world. “The flamenco scene in Seville was still in full bloom; an all night, round-the-clock affair. The cafes on Alameda de Hercules at about 2 or 3 in the morning were overflowing with flamenco artists waiting to be hired.”

For decades, though, Spain had had an ambivalent relationship with flamenco due mostly to anti-Gypsy prejudice and its association with low culture. “Laws were eventually passed closing the bars at 12:30 a.m.,” Pohren says. Franco’s Guardia Civil, the loyal police troops recognized by their shiny “Mickey Mouse” hats, made certain that the streets were safe from the spontaneous revelry associated with flamenco. “Flamenco was too scandalous for the church and the government was making commercial ties to the states,” Pohren says. “Spain’s inefficiency was embarrassing. Could a country be competent if a goodly share of the working population didn’t make it to work the next day or arrived sloshed?”

Pohren and other flamenco writers reverently refer to those years before the sanctions as the “epoca dorada” or golden age of the music. Pohren is convinced that modernization has spoiled not only the country, but more importantly its music. He recounts a vacation taken in a small fishing village called Torremolinos 30 years ago. A place now part of the expensive resort hotel studded section of the Costa del Sol. “I hitchhiked south. The traffic was such then that it took us a full week to cover the 400 miles.”

Over the years Pohren married, his daughter was born, and he managed to finish his university studies in Madrid and along the way learn enough flamenco guitar to earn a modest living.

“Our savings were just about gone. I heard of a job opportunity for an accountant at an air base. I went there and applied and they grabbed me as their previous accountant had had a nervous breakdown trying to cope with the work. I stuck that job out three years. The only period of regimented work in my lifetime,” Pohren says proudly.

“During that period from 1960 to 1963, I did a great deal of research for my books and actually wrote the first one, ‘The Art of Flamenco,’ mostly while working as an accountant. The book was first published in 1962 and widely regarded as the “bible” on the music, found a ready audience among growing numbers of flamenco fans in the U.K., Germany and the U.S. The book was quickly followed by “Lives and Legends of Flamenco,” an opinionated and lively history including intimate sketches of the many flamenco performers he had met in his travels.

Finally Pohren left his day job and accepted an offer to open a private flamenco club in a cellar in Madrid’s calle Echegaray. The club, near where Suristan now attracts large crowds to hear flamenco, failed after a year. Pohren packed up and headed back to Andalusia where his adventures began.

A remote two-story ranch house, called a finca, became available and he saw an opportunity to continue his pursuit of the flamenco life. His third book, “A Way Of Life,” is a memoir of life on the ranch which gradually became the nexus for enthusiasts from around the world. Pohren assiduously collected flamenco characters from the surrounding villages who mixed with clients from New York, San Francisco and other points on the globe in an atmosphere that was part old-world flamenco fiesta and part cosmopolitan cocktail party. “We were dedicated to offering pure flamenco. Commercial flamenco is banal and insincere — it’s good business, but not authentic folk art,” Pohren says.

“The scene appealed to professional people, lawyers, doctors, scientists. We had two judges over the years. We had lonely divorcees, writers, poets, music buffs and so forth. The finca brightened Morón de la Frontera’s normally quiet existence.”

Word of the finca along with the popularity of his first book quickly made the country inn a destination for die-hard flamenco fans and the fashion-conscious folk music crowd alike. Pohren had brought the world to a small town outside Seville with mixed results. Ironically, the town that would pay him tribute 30 years later, viewed the sudden popularity of the old finca and the influx of exotic tourists with suspicion. “The town was absolutely sure of one thing, the finca was slated to be a cabaret featuring prostitution and flamenco,” Pohren says.

“There was also the indirect activity caused by the finca being in operation,” Pohren says. “Many aficionados came in search of the flamenco way of life and stayed in town. After a time, it became a hippie stopover in the hash route from Marrakech to Europe.” An affable and prodigious drinker, Pohren is heroically nonconformist about most things except drugs.

Pohren presided over the nonstop flamenco partying, which occasionally spilled over into the otherwise quiet town, like an unflappable scientist watching an experiment go berserk.

“On one occasion a dance teacher from Paris came with her students — 10 girls. The town was still living in the dark ages then, town folk dressed somberly and any act slightly out of the ordinary caused eyebrows to rise,” Pohren says. “The French girls were unconcerned about that and wore miniskirts and halters. Young men followed them around in the streets in silent wonderment.”

For the local guitarists and singers it was free drink and food and cash at the end of the night. The Gypsy performers, who often died penniless despite having made a small fortune in their lifetimes, welcomed collecting their first regular paycheck.

“The flamenco juerga, or jam session is the only vehicle for true flamenco expression,” Pohren says. “We hired artists from out of town such as Manolito de Maria, Monolo Heredia, Juan Talega, El Farruco, all great artists in their own right.”

The star at the finca became Diego del Gastor, a princely local Gypsy noted for his simple and emotional style of guitar playing, who would later become a legend and icon to flamenco fans and musicians around the world. “He played mostly private parties. The very essence of this man emerged through his playing. He arrived directly at the soul of flamenco without frills or bullshit,” Pohren says. Diego’s death in 1973, commemorated by a bust in a small park and a street bearing his name, spelled the end for the finca.

I mention the popularity of the flamenco stylings of the Gypsy Kings, and Ottmar Liebert’s diluted new-age noodling as well as the Spanish television shows featuring flamenco, suggesting that it may have helped boost the art in recent years. I tell him of the subtle incursion of flamenco as background music for truck commercials in the states, and the celebrity of Joaquin Cortez, the shirtless Gypsy dancer whose romance with Naomi Campbell made tabloid headlines.

“There are people who will think that Ottmar is the real thing,” Pohren replies, with a hint of disgust. The advent of American-style record deals hatched in Madrid clubs, Pohren believes, is like the infiltration of McDonald’s in the country’s ancient squares: an evil he can’t prevent but one that he won’t accept. “Today’s affluence is deadly to the flamenco way of life,” he says.

Dorien Ross, author of the acclaimed novel “Returning to A,” which recounts her immersion in the flamenco world, credits Pohren with inspiring her first trip to Spain. “He was the first adult I’d met who was really like a big boy,” the New York author recalls about her eventual meeting with Pohren. Ross’ novel recounts the time she spent at the finca and the nearby town learning to play guitar with Diego del Gastor. Her journey at 17, began with a letter to Pohren and ended with her boarding a plane clutching a map he’d drawn on a cocktail napkin.

“I devoured his books,” Ross says, “it was like falling into another world.” She shares Pohren’s conviction that those days marked the end of an epoch. “Being in Morón de la Frontera in the ’60s was one of those gifts life occasionally offers that changes the course of the river.”

I was amazed to discover your involvement with a lot of shows I’d watched over the years including “Saturday Night Live,” but the strangest connection was that you’re the guy who came up with “Hee Haw.” What’s a nice Jewish guy from New York doing with a show like that?

It was my concept. I tried to sell the networks on “The Muppet Show.” They said a puppet wouldn’t work at night and I was furious. So I got really angry, I woke up at 3 o’clock one morning and I said, “OK, I’ll give them what they want.” I broke down the top 10 — it was “Green Acres,” “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Laugh In.” So I said “I’ll do a country ‘Laugh In.’” There was more brains than luck in that.

When you went to Nashville where “Hee Haw” was shot, they put you in the Jewish wing of the Best Western.

Overlooking the railroad. And I was Mr. Brillenstein — that’s how they pronounced my name — it was Brillenstein.

You also mention some problems in having Ray Charles on that show.

Some of the people who were on the show walked out of the studio. In those days that was Nashville and the South and maybe it still is, but Ray Charles — give me a break.

One of the things that struck me in the book was your preoccupation with your weight and appearance over the years.

Are you thin or heavy?

I guess I’m thin.

I was in good shape probably for about five years, from about 30 to 35. My whole family basically had Russian peasant bodies. I was always heavy, my father was always heavy.

I think you look like a pretty distinguished guy.

I’m distinguished now because I’m successful (laughs). You know, it was always a game, a challenge to get ahead — with women and life and in show business. I just wanted to prove, like Camryn Manheim, that this is for all the fat people.

Hollywood’s obsessed with age and looks.

People who are on the business end of this, who are not the stars, no one gives a damn how they look. Who are they trying to look like? Most of them are not very attractive. Most of them want to be the stars they represent or they produce and they are not. So I don’t care. I wear sweatsuits and sweaters, and I know that I am not supposed to do what they do.

But you’ve had your moments. You were having phenomenal success and you let it catch up with you while representing John Belushi.

I did. It was the Blue Brothers moment. I thought I had invented show business. There I was in my Blues Brothers hat, my Blues Brothers scarf, glasses, my Blue Brothers jacket, and my pin — god forbid, no one should know it — and I was 48 years old. I looked in the mirror one day and actually said, “Schmuck.” My ex-wife said, “Stop it already, will you please.” That brought it to a screeching halt and that was the end of it.

There’s a topic that runs through the book in which you acknowledge how older people really helped your career, and you admit you’re now one of the older people. Do you see that sort of mentoring happening in Hollywood now?

Not particularly. There are some people who ask my advice. But I think mostly everyone thinks they can do it better on their own. This just happened so I’ve never told anyone this story. Saturday morning I was in a deli called Nate and Al’s here. I was having breakfast with some friends of mine and Lew Wasserman walks in. And he comes over to the table and says, ‘Thank you for being so nice to me in your book.’ It was great!

You weren’t kind to everybody in the book.

No, but I was kind to most people.

Michael Ovitz is not on anybody’s most loved list. You were warned about your dealings with him and eventually you came to some conclusions your self.

Yeah, it took me 10 years cause I’m such a quick study.

What is the real story?

Look, I don’t know any redeeming factors about him. I’m sure there must be some. For 20 years in this town no one said a bad word about him except me and Joe Eszterhas. All of a sudden everyone’s come out of the closet in this town with “Oh, he’s a bad guy.” Where were they when I came out? Where were they when Joe came out? They were petrified. That’s what I really resent.

At least Michael Ovitz has the guts to be Michael Ovitz. All of these people who now say “Oh, what a bad guy he was,” they were like Hitler Youth — marching in order right on to Paris. All of a sudden they found out he wasn’t such a great leader and such a great guy. He was not nice to me or my daughter. When someone takes off to hurt my family — I never forget that. Whatever happens to this guy is not enough. I say in this book, no one controls this town except the talent. The talent runs everyone — the talent is the power.

Hollywood seems like a weird place.

It’s a different world. There’s no such thing as constant anything.

You’ve got a painting in your office called “Nebraska.” What significance does that painting have to you?

David Rensin who co-wrote this book with me, was looking at this picture and asked me why I loved it. There’s a big stop sign in it and he used that as a metaphor for my life. It’s gorgeous and it’s lonely.

You mention a woman named Marilyn Boroy who you were once in love with. She was a nice looking gal. You’ve tried to find her, any success?

You know, I produce the Marty Short show and unbeknownst to me, Marty and the producer went on a search to find her and they couldn’t find her. I just found out yesterday. I did the Marty show and they were going to bring her on.

Like “This is your Life.”

Right, and no one could find her. She was gorgeous — looked like Ava Gardner. I went into the army and she married somebody else.

You talk about the highs and the lows of the business. There are a couple of anecdotes in the book that are telling. One of them is when you were in London trying to reach your client Jim Henson by phone and you couldn’t get through. Everybody’s been through that moment — “Geez, he or she’s not calling me back.”

I’m glad you picked up that story. I still feel the pain of that day because it’s insecurity we all live with. I should never have ever thought that with Jim, but I couldn’t get him. So I thought he’s avoiding me, he’s doing something. When he called and said my phone’s been out of order — my God. I don’t think I’d do that today.

Your business gets pretty complicated.

This is a very obvious business if you’re just a person who understands life. This isn’t atomic energy. Emotionally complicated. It would take me two weeks to teach anyone I know about deal-making.

You talk about people’s perception of what an agent does. It wasn’t just picking up the phone and picking up a check.

I always figured the smart person gets what I do for a living and how I protect [my clients]. I always think I make it look too easy, which makes people think I’m not working hard enough. I also believe you don’t have to hang out with them to do the job. They’re grown-ups and I’m not a hand-holder. I know a lot of people want a hand-holder but that’s not what I do for a living. What I try to say in the book is, look guys, I’m not an overnight success. It took me a long time. My first paycheck, for God’s sake, was $32.45.

I loved that you put that in the book.

I saved it because I always want to remember it. I don’t want to forget things like that. And to me 10 thousand bucks is still a great deal of money.

It sure is to me, Bernie.

To everyone. Lorne Michaels says the greatest thing. Everyone has a choke price, it’s amazing how little it is. It’s the truth. You can get someone killed for $2,000. And someone says, “Oh my god, $10,000 how dare you insult me!” It’s a lot of money — it’s the down payment on a house to lot of people.

The business seems like a real roller coaster.

Of course it is. John Belushi, Jim Henson and Gilda Radner where three of my biggest clients. I get a call — they’re dead. First of all, I loved them. How long does it take to build a star like that? A lifetime is the answer. So not only do you feel the emotional hole, you eventually get down to thinking about the business hole.

I thought you were honest talking about the balance between business and personal relationships in the book.

Here’s another thing no one thinks about. You do a television show for five years, the money comes in every week like clockwork. You get used to it. One day the show is canceled. One Friday you don’t get a check. I’ve never gotten used to that. It’s scary.

You mention a lot of business that you did on just a hand shake. Is that still your practice?

Yes, to this day. I was really going to call the book “My wink is binding.” They talked me out of it. I would have liked that title because it’s who I am. Why have a contract that they can sue you on? If they want to leave, let them leave.

One guy who took advantage of that style of business was Richard Dreyfuss who you represented.

Richard Dreyfuss hurt me emotionally because I really thought he was my friend. That’s a terrible assumption to make. I was wrong and he was an actor who hired me. I did a good job and then he figured he didn’t need me anymore. That was emotionally hurtful to me. It was like a girlfriend — good luck, goodbye!

You viewed his going as a betrayal obviously.

It was a betrayal. I took him and he hadn’t worked in three-and-half years. I really brought him back to being Richard Dreyfuss and I guess he wanted that moment alone, not with me. In the remaining 10 years he’s had a half a hit.

Now he’s got some kind of nature travel show.

You got it!

You produce Marty Short’s new talk show. He’s a very funny guy, but he’s not as funny as a host as he was in just about everything else he’s done.

OK, you want me to answer that. When you do a show five days a week you can’t write all those comedy sketches. We do more than anyone’s ever done. Marty is a great interviewer. The show’s ratings are going up, believe it or not, and it’s sort of catching on. Will it be picked up? I don’t know. I certainly hope so because I think it’s very good entertainment. I love the show. I wouldn’t go every night if I didn’t love the show.

It is extremely difficult to be a talk show host.

Look at Jay Leno. He’s still not a monologist. We’ve only been on the air eight weeks — I swear I think the show is going to make it.

Well, you haven’t been wrong often so we’ll go with your prediction.

Nicholas Rescher, a University of Pittsburgh philosophy professor, has spent a good part of his career trying to clarify our fuzzy notions of luck, authoring what may be the definitive book on the topic: “Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life.” Rescher points out that a traveler, like the man in the cafe, would have to jump on one flight daily for 4,000 years before the odds of an accident caught up with him.

Rescher’s inquiry into luck led him from an examination of common expressions that invoke luck, to cutting-edge ideas in mathematics and physics. But, just what is luck or chance? Statisticians and actuaries would simply assign a number to the probability that you will be hit by an asteroid or win a hand of blackjack, and be done with it. Carl Jung stretched the imagination with the “meaningful coincidence” he called synchronicity. But, the lady who lost her wedding ring and found it 40 years later inside a potato would probably just call it “dumb luck.”

“Much of what happens to us, where people meet their spouses for example, happens to us by luck,” Rescher explains. “Often it’s a matter that they just happen to attend the same party or wedding. The most concise way of putting it is, when something happens that affects a person for good or for ill, that occurs by chance rather than that person’s design or some other person’s contrivance. Luck is closely allied to the idea of fate, but the question of whether it’s part of the grand plan or is really a matter of chance and happenstance seems to be the critical difference.”

Chaos theory, which posits that tiny occurrences can have far-reaching consequences, also overlaps with Rescher’s ideas about how luck operates in our lives. “The beating of a butterfly wing causes a rainstorm,” Rescher says, by way of example.

Consider: A truck driver in Newark gets a head cold forcing him to miss a day of driving and thus sparing your life in a fateful meeting that would have sent your Oldsmobile skidding into the path of his 18-wheeler had he been on the road, and you get the idea.

“Causes so small that we can’t see them, as it were, can have these big effects,” Rescher says. “And so luck has a kind of secondary sense — that is, even if the processes at work are not chance driven, they can be chance driven as far as the individual is concerned because the individual has no way of finding out about those processes.”

Whatever you call it, Rescher insists, we are all at the mercy of the great invisible combine of luck. “Fat Man,” the second atomic bomb to land on Japan, was originally destined for the city of Kokura. The pilots switched to a secondary target, Nagasaki, because clouds covered Kokura obscuring their original drop zone.

“Once you stop to think about that sort of thing you realize that the word ‘chance’ is a fairly complex concept,” Rescher says. “There are some things that are purely chance phenomena. But if you’re a philosopher you start thinking about fate. The idea of luck: being in the right place at the right time. You start working out the threads and it gives you a kind of rich fabric of ideas that are interesting to think about.”

Rescher differentiates luck from fate (“inexorable destiny”) and suggests that, elusive as it is, “the tiger of luck can be tamed.” One way to make a pussycat out of that tiger is by simply putting yourself at risk. In other words, you have to be in it to win it. “Even an Irish Sweepstakes or one of these Spanish lotteries — somebody’s got to win,” Rescher says. “And that individual is lucky and the others who don’t, to that extent, are unlucky. There is nothing in particular that you can do, but if you don’t buy a ticket you aren’t going to win. You can’t determine whether or not you’re going to win but you can put yourself in a position to be able to win. That’s a way in which people can influence their luck,” Rescher says.

Which may explain why some people, even “bad” people, can come up luckier than others. In the end, luck is a thoroughly democratic force, the professor says. “It rains on the just and the unjust alike. A world that went by desert — where people always got what was coming to them — would be a very different sort of world. It would make for conditions of life that are very different. I think the fact that much of our fate is driven by chance is an important aspect of the human condition. It’s a kind of equalizer between the deserving and the undeserving, and also, more significantly, an equalizer between the talented and the untalented. By getting the breaks, even a person born without the natural resources of superior beauty or intelligence can luck out. In a certain sense it makes life more or less fair.”

Napoleon, a brilliant military tactician and planner, always asked his marshals whether they believed they were lucky or not. Unfortunately for Napoleon, he didn’t have Rescher’s book on hand when de decided to march into Russia all those centuries ago: “Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life” includes a handy, but imposing equation
( (E) + (E) x [ 1 - pr(E) ] = (E) x pr(not-E) )
that he says can measure the variable. It only looks like a calculus equation, Rescher claims. “It’s extremely easy to understand.”

“The improbability of the outcome is one factor,” he says. “You are obviously luckier if you win a 1-in-1,000 shot than if you win a 1-in-2 shot. But the other factor is the extent to which you gain. You’re luckier if you gain a $1,000 than if you gain $2. That’s the idea. One very rough measure of luck is just to multiply the probability by the gain. The luckiest outcome would be to have a very long shot for a very great amount: that is, to win something like an awfully big lottery.”

Like Pasquale Benenati, who’s taken home five California lottery jackpots totaling $5.18 million — a feat of luck that even Rescher calls “phenomenal.” Benenati credited his good luck to “faith in myself.”

Of course, just because you haven’t won five jackpots doesn’t mean you’re jinxed. “We don’t always realize how lucky we are,” Rescher reasons. “If you close your eyes and walk across the street and don’t get hit, you may not realize how many narrow escapes you had. You don’t appreciate the extent of your luck.”

The paradox of luck is that even if you’re unlucky, like that gentleman at the coffee shop, you may be luckier than you think. The National Weather Service reported that on average three people per year are killed by lightning. Marjorie Cox, an Ohio housewife was hit twice in 1996. Unlucky? Sure — who wants to live in Ohio? But on the other hand, Marjorie is still alive, and that’s not a bad bargain.

Rescher dismisses the idea that some people might possess a magnetic quality that attracts good or bad luck. “Low probability events do have to happen. Once good fortune has come your way, it’s easy to think of yourself as having, in some sense, deserved it. I think that’s something that reflects the human tendency to want the world to be rational to an extent that in all likelihood it isn’t.”

The negative campaign only compounded problems already facing the ailing
drugstore chain, whose stock price has plunged from more than $40 a share early this year to a Wednesday close of $8 amid
speculation that the company could be broken up. The Times ad, which reads,
“To help a persistent cough go to aisle 8. To get a persistent cough go to
aisle 14,” won’t bolster shareholder confidence.

The Pharmacy Partnership, the state-funded organization that launched the
campaign, is hoping to promote a nationwide movement among the company’s customers to force the country’s third largest pharmacy chain to discontinue cigarette sales.

“It’s unconscionable and hypocritical that a family store that says it
promotes health should sell tobacco over the counter,” Christine Fenlon,
director of the Pharmacy Partnership, said. “Alongside remedies for
influenza, colds and indigestion, Rite Aid offers its customers a dangerous
and addictive drug that kills, not cures.”

An estimated 98 percent of chain drugstores across the nation continue to
sell cigarettes, according to the Pharmacy Partnership. According to a
survey conducted by the nonprofit group, 78 percent of independent pharmacy owners in California do not sell tobacco products.

So far, the Pennsylvania-based pharmacy chain, which nets an estimated 5 percent of its revenue from cigarette sales, has not issued a response to
the California group’s challenge. However, in a letter from Rite Aid sent
to a member of the Pharmacy Partnership, executive vice president William A. Titelman called the campaign “grossly unfair.”

In the letter, Titelman accused the California group of “singling out” Rite
Aid and suggested that members of the group had selected the failing company to play the “bad guy” in order to aid the publicity campaign.

Titleman defended his company’s policy of selling cigarettes by reciting
its strict adherence to state age restrictions and willingness to post
signs with the surgeon general’s health warning in stores.

A Pharmacy Partnership spokesperson said that in meetings with the pharmacy chain’s management prior to launching the campaign, the company steadfastly refused to consider stopping the sales of cigarettes.

California, which has led the fight to prevent smoking in public, including
in bars and restaurants, may be setting a new trend in the increasingly
aggressive move to choke the supply of tobacco products in the state.
California voters already approved a stiff 50-cent cigarette tax with a
ballot initiative backed by Hollywood notables Rob Reiner and Charlton
Heston last year.

The latest move against the tobacco industry’s distribution network comes
at a time when the industry is already reeling from a spate of multibillion-dollar judgments in successive legal battles in more than 40 states.

Industry analysts predict that cigarette-makers will respond by ultimately
passing along the costs of the mounting number of unfavorable and costly
legal decisions by imposing up to a 40-cent increase on each packet of
cigarettes. That — along with a pending Supreme Court decision that could
grant regulatory control of tobacco products to the Food and Drug
Administration, effectively making cigarettes a drug, could severely limit tobacco use in the Golden State.

Enoch Ludlow, a spokesman for FORCES, a San Francisco nonprofit
organization dedicated to fighting what it calls irrational smoking bans, says he believes
that efforts to eliminate smoking entirely in the country are doomed to
fail.

“They would like cigarettes to be sold through government-approved outlets,” Ludlow says of the effort to eliminate retail outlets like Rite Aid.

According to Ludlow, pressuring retailers like Rite Aid to stop selling
cigarettes could have the unwanted effect of stimulating an already nascent
black market by forcing consumers to seek out cheaper out-of-state cigarettes
being smuggled into the state.

“My original idea was to supply educational materials, pencils, paper,
books, to children in developing countries,” Breen says. “Then I found out
that hunger was a major factor in preventing students from being able to
learn, so I shifted the focus of the site.”

With nearly 24,000 people dying every day from hunger, Breen decided that his
strategy should focus on feeding the world’s most impoverished people. What
resulted was a site backed by corporate donations that allows visitors to
painlessly participate in the largesse by simply clicking on a “Donate Free
Food” button.

“You have just donated two cups of rice, wheat, maize or other staple food to
a hungry person, adding to over 100 tons weekly,” reads a message that
greets the charitable browser along with a list of the corporate sponsors
who paid for the donation. Each click is equivalent to a half-cent
contribution from the corporate sponsors.

Breen’s idea has caught on with the explosiveness of the latest Internet
novelty — rocketing from around 170,000 donations or clicks in June to nearly
5 million last month. “The Hunger Site has grown to take up every minute of
my time — and then I have a family,” the father of two says.

The site provides convenient tables that tally the number of donations and their equivalent in food, as well as a ranking of gifts by country of origin — perhaps a vestige of the founder’s training in economics.

Donations received by the Hunger Site are then delivered to the 80 nations
and estimated 75 million people served by the United Nations World Food
Program — the largest such food-aid program in the world.

A spokesperson for the WFP called the Hungers Site’s contributions “an
extraordinary testimony to the power of the Internet.”

Still, while the convenience of giving over the Internet may help ease
people’s conscience while providing an added financial jolt to well-meaning
organizations like the WFP, is this one-click giving a faddish mirage which appeals primarily to xenophobes and the socially inept? Will people accustomed to effortless and cost-free online charities become less willing to participate in the dirtier job of actually dealing with the needy face to face? Or is the Hunger Site a new model — that may be applicable to an array of relief efforts — for solving one of humanity’s most pressing problems?

Clearly there is more at stake here than another notch on either fighter’s win-loss record — especially for Chow. On Chow’s narrow shoulders rests the future of all dealings between men and women in bedrooms, offices and cocktail lounges across the land.

Unlike Chow, I know something about the reptilian confusion that can cloud a male fighter’s mind when stepping into the ring with a woman. I have strapped on the gloves and gone toe to toe with a female. It all goes back a few months, when I decided to try one of those “combat” aerobics classes that have sprung up at local fitness clubs around the land.

I’d done a little boxing as a kid back in Nebraska and had always been a fight fan, so one night I got off the sofa, put on my game face and hauled my paunch down to the club. Little did I know that my decision would put me on a collision course with psychic prohibitions deep inside my monkey brain. The instructor, a solidly chiseled former Angeleno with 12 amateur bouts under his belt, was running the class, in a deft bit of verisimilitude, like a typical inner-city boxing gym. “If you show up late again, don’t even bother coming in the door,” he barked at an unsuspecting newcomer who looked like he’d just left a corner office somewhere downtown. Things looked promising.

The pace and tenor were set. The whir and snap of 20 jump-ropes filled the room as the warm-up started. I forgot that I was in a plush, modern “fitness center” that cost several hundred dollars to join, and that most of the people around me were attorneys, dentists and brokers. I scanned the room. More than half were women. The class went through some punching drills, jumping jacks and push-ups in rapid succession. I was getting a workout — then things got complicated.

“Partner up,” the instructor shouted. The regulars paired up quickly, leaving me with the only available partner — a stocky redheaded woman who stood a head taller than me. “Get your gloves on,” echoed over the public address system. I noticed the woman’s intense expression as she pulled her gloves on over hands tightly wound in the wraps used by real fighters. I remembered an expression an L.A. cop once used to describe the hard stares gang members and prison inmates exchange to psyche each other out: “mad-dogging.” This woman was “mad-dogging” me. She figured me for a punk.

As I pulled on my gloves, I felt a creeping uneasiness. I heard my mother’s voice echoing inside my head: “Never hit a girl!” I pictured my sister’s face on the face of the woman who was at that moment squaring off with me in classic fighter’s stance. I admired her form. Her left was up, the gloves forming a tight pyramid under her chin. Her thick right arm was cocked and on the end of it the great mound of leather was hoisted like a battering ram.

“I want to create an environment so that people feel the intensity,” the instructor told me a few minutes before the class had filed into the gym. I looked around the room and spotted a husky guy who looked suspiciously like an accountant with a fading greenish-black eye standing opposite a pert Asian woman. They were smiling at each other. There was a twisted psychosexual menace in their gazes.

I was jerked from the mad rush of my thoughts by the start of a two-minute sparring session. My opponent, in black spandex trunks and red ponytail, began throwing darting jabs, most of which were landing on my forehead.

It was obvious to me that she had more on her mind than an aerobic workout. What I saw in her eyes was the naked aggression that could only have been fueled by bitter memories of ex-lovers and bad bosses. I bobbed and weaved, still hearing my mom’s admonition inside my head. My opponents’ jabs were landing with surgical precision, but I couldn’t throw a glove.

A faint grin hoisted itself onto her still-lipsticked mouth. It was like an episode from a Mickey Spillane novel, and I was playing the part of the cheap blond who gets slapped around. The seconds ticked by like hours. “I’m getting smacked around by a girl,” I muttered to myself in disbelief. The thought danced around my brain like the derisive laughter from a gang of mocking schoolchildren.

I forced myself to throw a punch, a low strike targeted to avoid any intimate part of her female anatomy. She came back stronger, with glancing jabs that rocketed toward my face and gut.

I worked upstairs, hesitantly at first, thrusting jabs toward her perfectly arched brows. And then something in me clicked. I realized that this was war — that my opponent, unfettered by any imposed social programming, was simply seizing my weakness. I threw a steady succession of blows as the final seconds ticked by, each thrust rocking her back on her heels.

The smile vanished from her face, replaced now by a grimace of concentration. We parried and danced, her face flushed with exertion as the final seconds drained away our remaining energy.

“Nice job,” she said, swatting my backside with her glove.

My money’s still on McGregor.