NEWTOWN -- A man and a woman, each about 19, inhaled the gas from 92 cans of whipped cream at the Acme store in the 3500 block of West Chester Pike and left without paying at midnight last Friday. A video surveillance tape captured them inhaling for 50 minutes, police said.

The longing for alteration of consciousness is a virtual universal in human life, especially during eras of spiritual emptiness. Give those pathetic, scrounging teens tobacco and beer, for pity's sake! Nicotine and alcohol, in moderation, are proven aids to creativity and thought. How enriching can a relatively superior suburban education be these days when hunching over the dairy case in the grocery's neon glare is the most alluring way to spend a Friday night? Inhaling nitrous oxide and toxic fumes from glue, paint and household cleaners (the rampant fad of "huffing") is scarcely a prescription for the long-term brain health of the rising generation. Who will defend this nation or advance its culture?

As I've argued in prior columns, American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap. The curriculum needs to be reduced to the basics in history, art and science and then restructured to allow free choice in vocational training. Many readers agreed that the current college prep program is often boring and mediocre and is alienating tens of thousands of students for whom it was never intended. Young people need better integration into the adult world, as was provided, for example, by the medieval guilds where a boy could learn his trade as an apprentice. Some form of the master-apprentice system should be revived.

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Outstanding pop moment of the past several weeks for me was American Movie Classics' rebroadcast of "The Egyptian" (1954), directed by Michael Curtiz, which I have avidly followed for three decades as it emerged from schlocky obscurity on late-night TV to attain its present incarnation in gloriously restored, letter-box format. Alfred Newman's spectacular score, to which Bernard Herrmann contributed, is one of Hollywood's most haunting. Edmund Purdom's starring performance as a brooding physician at Akhenaten's court is a rare example of high intellect -- that is, willed mental process -- visually transferring to the screen. And of course I adore the charismatic Babylonian harlot who gets her pestilent comeuppance at the hands of mother nature.

Candice Bergen was a delicious treat in last weekend's broadcast by the Love Stories Channel of "Starting Over" (1979), directed by Alan J. Pakula, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. Not only does Bergen look sensational (would a hirsute hunk like Burt Reynolds really be tempted away by the galumphing, self-pitying neurotic portrayed by Jill Clayburgh?), but she plays her beauty for laughs as a self-absorbed, emoting, Denise Rich-type sugar-pop songwriter. Anticipating her tour de force as a pulp-romance diva in George Cukor's "Rich and Famous" (1981), Bergen gets more humor out of slamming a coffee can into a grocery basket in this film than that twinkly, wet dishrag, Renée Zellweger, could get out of an entire script.

It's time to turn Anne Robinson, the nunlike, cassock-clad harridan host of the British hit quiz show, "Weakest Link," on Bridget Jones, Ally McBeal and all the rest of the spineless, tittering ingénues who superpopulate the sexual landscape at the moment. Feminism is clearly in meltdown if this is really where contemporary women in their late 20s and 30s feel they are -- drifting, aimless and needy. Bring back Eve Arden and Tallulah Bankhead!

POSTSCRIPT: On May 5, I will be lecturing on educational reform at Santa Clara University in California. On May 15, I will participate in a panel on media stereotyping and defamation of Italians at a conference sponsored by the National Italian-American Foundation in New York.

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