“The press picked up on it, and all hell broke loose,” Pennypacker recalls. “Women said, ‘What’s going on here? We trust our lives to you guys, and you can’t even find a Ping-Pong ball!’” (Actually, the biggest lump was one centimeter.) In 1988, Pennypacker came out with a self-examination breast model and video for home use.

The UPS man delivered my breast this morning. It is of average size and flesh toned, that is to say, Caucasian flesh tone (a “Breast Model of Color” is also available). It weighs about a pound and is squishy in the addictive way of those balls you squeeze in your palm when you’re stressed.

I took out the video and opened the instruction booklet. “Position yourself in front of your television so that you are lying on your back,” it said. I glanced at the sofa, which was occupied by the husband, lying on his back. On the television screen, race cars were circling a track. I explained what I needed to do. “Maybe you could drive to the 101 overpass and watch those cars go by,” I said cheerfully. Ed would have none of it. “Can I watch the video with you?”

The tape began with an attractive woman in a purple dress, explaining the importance of breast self-examinations and early detection. Ed listened thoughtfully. I was touched that he wanted to be involved in my health this way. He took my hand in his and smiled. “Think we’ll see hers?”

After the woman in the purple dress finished, there was an “interlude while you get completely and comfortably prepared.”

“This is where you go get some snacks,” said Ed, but he didn’t, because the interlude is actually when you take off your shirt. “You use that one,” he said, pointing to the Pennypacker breast, “and I’ll practice on these.”

In fact, there used to be a group of nurses in Marin County, Calif., who taught a MammaCare breast examination class for couples. Pennypacker himself supervised a doctoral dissertation on the topic of men examining their wives’ breasts. “The problem is that men wind up confusing palpation with fondling,” he told me. “First thing you know, it turns into foreplay.”

Ed suddenly lost interest in my breast tissue, because it was around this point in the video that “Kate the Trainee” took off her blouse. Kate placed the breast model on her chest, so that it sat in between her own breasts like a third eye. She laid one hand on her forehead, giving her a distraught, Scarlett O’Hara-viewing-the-embers-of-Tara look, and with the other hand began tracing dime-sized circles up and down the length of the breast model.

I was having a hard time finding the Simulated Lumps. They were down at the bottom of the silicone and required a great deal of pressure to get to. This is, according to Pennypacker, the amount of pressure it would take to press your fingers through to the ribcage beneath “a good D-cup breast.”

The alternative, Pennypacker said, would have been to make a “five-gallon breast model.” He mused that his decision may have hurt sales, though not, I would surmise, the sort of sales you want to brag about.

The lumps could be viewed by peeling off a piece of cloth stuck to the back of the model. Viewed from the back, the breast was clear, like a Lucite paperweight, and embedded in it were what appeared to be two pencil erasers, a bite of Slim Jim, a birth control pill and a piece of pimento.

“Oh no, no, no, no,” said Pennypacker when I called him the next day and told him what I thought he’d used. Pennypacker had hired a material sciences engineer who lent him a Durometer, which is a machine that measures the firmness of objects. “We had a person standing outside the operating room and when a lump was on its way from the O.R. to pathology, we took a reading. In there are plastic representatives of all types of lumps coming out of the operating room.” Including Pennypacker’s lump (the pimento variety).

His lump, by the by, turned out to be benign and remains inside his breast. “Sometimes when we train nurses and we have one whose feel is questionable, I get on the table and say, ‘OK, I’ve got one. You find it.’”

Meanwhile, back on the video, it was time to practice on myself. Using Kate’s chest as a model, the video highlighted the area to be examined, which extended in a pointy-topped square from the “bra line” up to the collarbone.

Here again, we caught Ed’s attention.

“Look,” he said. “It’s like home plate.”

I was instructed to move along doing little dime-sized circles, up and back and up and back, in rows, as though my breast were a United Airlines check-in line on the Friday before Labor Day. An A-cup is supposed to take a couple of minutes. It was going on 10. Ed offered to help.

I would have to agree with the conclusions of Pennypacker’s doctoral student as to the effectiveness of husbands doing exams on wives. Let us just say Ed’s Durometer reading went up a few points. I sent him away and finished my self-exam myself. When he came back, Kate the Trainee had returned to the screen and was showing the “nine positions for visual inspection.” When it came time for home viewers to try this, the screen showed butterflies while pretty guitar music played. Ed put the race back on. The announcer said that Andretti was in the sixth position, which is hard to do inside one of those cramped little cars.

So now I am one of the few women who actually knows what they’re feeling for when they examine their breasts. Not, I admit, as special a thing as a man who’s had a mammogram, but neat nonetheless.

Never heard of the breast cancer-antiperspirant connection before? Well, neither have doctors. Dr. Michael Thun, who heads the American Cancer Society’s research on epidemiology, says “Human imagination has never been short of creative explanations for phenomena that people are frightened of.” He continues, “I think that it is a clever rumor that has some appeal because breast tissue obviously goes into a woman’s armpit and because a lot of people use antiperspirant. It’s like saying, ‘Hats cause baldness.’”

While there is still not a lot known about what causes breast cancer, researchers do know that it is caused by damage to the genes in cells that control growth. Thun says it will be far more beneficial to learn about known risk factors — obesity after menopause, alcohol consumption — and to have regular mammograms than to worry about antiperspirants.

According to Dr. Mervyn Elgart, clinical professor of dermatology at George Washington University, there isn’t a danger of building up toxins if you use antiperspirants. “If you don’t sweat enough, the toxic stuff will basically come out the kidney, meaning you pee it out,” he says. The e-mail’s explanation is, to Elgart, “a bunch of crap.” Elgart, who has studied sweating, says the worst thing that can happen by using antiperspirants is a little irritation of the skin, and perhaps, some damage to clothing.

A related fear is an old one, about the possible link between an active ingredient in many antiperspirants, aluminum chloride, and Alzheimer’s disease. Amy Graves, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health, has done research on the subject and says there’s no proof to this hypothesis, especially when it comes to antiperspirants, since they contain such small amounts of aluminum. She adds, “Aluminum is the third most common element on earth so essentially everybody is exposed to it. It’s not an easy thing to study from an epidemiologist’s perspective because you need to find people who are exposed and not exposed — and nobody is unexposed.” But as far as antiperspirant is concerned, she is not concerned. She herself remains dry by using products with aluminum.

Born in Mytholmroyd, a remote Yorkshire town, Hughes attended Cambridge University, where he met Plath. The two were married in 1956. He published his first collection of poetry, “The Hawk in the Rain,” in 1957. The book won a new-poets competition judged by W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore and was published to wide critical acclaim. Hughes went on to publish more than 35 collections of verse, several plays and works of prose, and two opera librettos. He was also a successful children’s book writer — his most popular children’s book, “The Iron Giant,” was published in the United States in 1968.

Upon word of his death, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called Hughes “a towering figure in 20th-century literature who even in his last years was producing great works.”

The emotional appeal is undeniable. We’ve all lost friends or family to cancer. You can understand the anger of the 150,000 people in Washington, wanting the government to do whatever it takes to overcome the disease. But is pouring billions more dollars into research really our best course of action for preventing cancer deaths?

Our nation’s anti-cancer strategy — devoting almost all federal funding to finding a cure — is fundamentally flawed. While spending billions to seek out a cure for cancer may be politically popular, most of this money would be much better spent on prevention. We could eliminate one-third of all cancer fatalities without spending another dollar on research. Most experts, including the leadership at the National Cancer Institute, believe that one-third of cancer fatalities arise from poor diet — principally a lack of fruits and vegetables combined with too many foods of animal origin. The trouble, then, is that most Americans don’t know how to follow a good-tasting and nutritious diet that will lower their cancer risk. And the government devotes practically no money to teaching people about diet and food.

The government’s main nutrition program is called “5 a Day for Better Health,” which is sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. The program has a catchy logo, but it receives pathetically little federal funding — just $1 million per year for outreach and advertising. That means that for every dollar spent teaching Americans how to reduce cancer risk through diet, the National Cancer Institute spends $2,400 on research. The 5 a Day program isn’t even mentioned in the institute’s 1999 budget proposal — in which it asks for $3.1 billion, most all of it for research. Yet according to the institute’s own publications: “In the vast majority of studies … those with lower consumption [of fruits and vegetables] experience a cancer risk generally at least twice as high as those with higher consumption levels.”

The 5 a Day program isn’t perfect. It’s a bit like recommending people brush their teeth once a day for best dental health. Cancer risk has been shown to drop even further when people eat closer to 10 servings of fruit and vegetables a day. To the institute’s credit, it points out in its literature: “Remember that five is a minimum — the more the better.”

Education is our nation’s best hope for dramatically reducing cancer deaths in the near future. If funded adequately, the 5 a Day program would prevent tens of thousands of deaths year. The tragedy is that the program is all but ignored in an agency dominated by researchers.

The vast majority of the money we spend on cancer, of course, goes to neither research nor education, but to treatment. The National Cancer Institute reports that last year $107 billion was spent on cancer treatment, which is 44 times what we’re now spending on research and education efforts. If we moved a significant share of our $2.4 billion cancer research budget into educational efforts, anti-cancer nutrition advertisements could run on shows ranging from Ally McBeal to the Super Bowl, and in publications from Newsweek to Ebony.

With that kind of exposure, it’s reasonable to assume that we could get Americans eating many more servings of fruit and vegetables a day. As many as a third of cancer deaths could be prevented, saving tens of thousands of lives annually and reducing costs of cancer treatment by more than $30 billion each year.

Realistically, a move to favor education over research will not happen any time soon. The cancer research establishment is too entrenched to give up that money without a fight. But if we want certain progress in the war on cancer, a shift of priorities is in order. We shouldn’t devote most of our resources to searching for a magic pill that will eliminate cancer. Federal money should adequately publicize the overwhelming impact of eating right, so that people can take responsibility for their own health.

Things begin promisingly enough: When young New York magazine reporter Ellen Gulden (Renie Zellweger) returns home to Langhorne, a leafy, gracious town somewhere in the Northeastern megalopolis, for her dad’s 55th birthday party in 1987, she seems to be walking into a haute-WASP suburban burlesque. Her mother, Kate (Streep), an appallingly sunny Suzie Homemaker type, actually answers the door dressed as Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” — she has asked guests to come as their favorite literary characters because her husband, George (William Hurt), is an esteemed academic who won the National Book Award for his study of T.S. Eliot. When Ellen and her best friend, Jules (the appealing Lauren Graham), show up in identical black minidresses and tights, Ellen’s brother quips, “Who are you guys? The Sylvia Plath twins?”

These early scenes offer far sharper observations on the nature of family life than anything that happens after the tear-jerker plot line kicks in. Ellen feels the wounded, besotted love of a daughter for the illustrious father whose opinion she takes much too seriously, and she can’t stand her mother or the Minnies, Kate’s Stepfordian group of do-gooder Langhorne housewives. But even Ellen understands that the marriage between the distracted academic and the ditzy nest keeper — who thinks Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott are too anti-feminine — has its own mysterious internal chemistry; like all successful relationships, it functions on a level invisible to even the closest outsiders.

But when Kate is diagnosed with cancer and Ellen is guilt-tripped into moving back home to take care of her, this subtle, comic interplay, suggestive of a much better movie we’ll never get to see, is swept away in a roaring Niagara of overdetermined pathos. At various times, Hurt and Streep, dignified veterans who have survived worse movies than this (and quite a few better ones, thankfully), manage to poke their heads above the torrent. Streep may sometimes be ridiculed as a caricature of the overly serious method actor, but she knows what she’s doing. Anyone who’s ever suffered through the death of a loved one from cancer will find her portrayal of the needy, emaciated and pain-stricken Kate, torn between despair and attempts to be noble, distressingly close to the bone. Hurt is less memorable, but George’s preoccupied, self-involved demeanor, endearing at first, becomes almost sinister as Ellen watches him retreat into booze and womanizing — an eerie if familiar caricature of the glib, sycophantic, immature husband.

Zellweger, who is meant to be the emotional center of this triangle, is instead its catastrophically weak link. Her acting is perfectly acceptable in the early going when the film has some buoyancy and the other two actors can support her, but she’s a mousy, inoffensive presence at best, never evincing the charisma the role demands. Ellen seems less like a hard-bitten big-city journalist than a domineering Girl Scout patrol leader or perhaps a whiny head cheerleader — at any rate, a character significantly less mature than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As her mother grows sicker and her father increasingly disappoints her, she spends much of the movie pouting, stomping her feet and turning various shades of mottled red meant to convey rage, or self-doubt, or perhaps just exasperation.

Evidently the point of this whole exercise (adapted by screenwriter Karen Croner from the novel by former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen) is that the ambitious ’80s career woman needs to integrate the lessons learned and sacrifices made by her stay-at-home mom in order to become a well-adjusted grown-up. Beyond this conception and its relentless downward slope toward Kate’s death, “One True Thing” really has no plot.

This might have worked if the director and lead actress had the kind of intense mutual understanding that, say, Ingmar Bergman had with Liv Ullmann, or John Cassavetes had with Gena Rowlands. But Carl Franklin — who has yet to live up to the potential of his gripping 1992 debut, the marvelous neo-noir film “One False Move” — seems ill-suited to this cast and this material. With Zellweger standing by like a weeping onlooker at a road accident, “One True Thing” deteriorates into a lurid, almost hallucinatory horror show, snatching incoherent fragments from “Cries and Whispers,” “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” as it careens to a close. When the Gulden family reunites for Langhorne’s almost fascistic Christmas-tree ceremony, I felt as if I were watching the dire climax of some dystopian sci-fi epic, rather than a picturesque American catharsis. In this film’s emotional universe, resistance is futile, and Soylent Green is people.