Have you seen our temporary set this week? It's the coffee bar used on our Morning News. It is kidney shaped and small, so we all feel quite cozy. The stools are really high, though, and again, I must sit on three pillows just so you can see me. Even then, I look tiny. My chin is practically on the desk. They have taller anchors in the morning! And look at how G looms over me, when he stands next to me! It's hilarious.

All this talk about President Obama’s health care plan got me thinking about the kind of health care my brother and I got as children. It was iffy, at best. Because we were poor, my parents could not afford to send us to private doctors. I know they did not have health insurance. They could barely afford to pay rent.

One of the scariest memories from my childhood of things medical was dental care. Nothing like the bright and comforting dentist’s office my son went to as a child. For him, video games in the waiting room, a dentist’s chair shaped like a spaceship, a screen on the ceiling to project the video of his choice, a relentlessly cheerful dentist with a degree in child psychology….and best of all, a dab of anesthesia on a Q-tip to numb the spot on his gum BEFORE he got the novocaine injection. Local anesthesia even for a cleaning, if that’s what your little darling wanted.

When I turned 13 my teeth turned against me. The =slightly= crooked teeth I had up until then, were just that. SLIGHTLY crooked. But somewhere along the way, they started becoming WAY crooked. To the point that my poor parents decided I needed braces.

They asked around and were directed to a dentist who was very inexpensive. Not an orthodontist. A dentist. Who was inexpensive, it turned out, for very good reason.

And then there was the day director Sidney Lumet came to the Channel 11 studios. I couldn’t believe he wanted to use Jack Cafferty and me in one of the scenes of his new movie Night Falls on Manhattan. The man is a god. Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, 12 Angry Men, Network.

So I’m standing on the corner of 54th and Fifth. I am often standing on that corner, for reasons too complicated to go into right now. The point being, I could not get a cab. Why? Well, as any self-respecting New Yorker knows, you can’t GET a cab anywhere in Manhattan between 4PM and 5PM. That’s when, apparently, all cabs change shifts. Oh, you’ll see plenty of them cruising by. With their off-duty lights on, mocking you. As a longtime New Yorker, I know this, and yet, for some reason (Mercury in retrograde?) I found myself foolishly waving my arm at oncoming traffic.

A frustrating thing happened on the way to the office.

It has to do with these little monitors they installed in the building elevators a while back. One per elevator. When they first appeared, I was annoyed. I swore I would not waste my few precious moments of calm, reading whatever was flashing on that little screen.

Well, here I go again. I’m thinking about buying a treadmill. Again. I’ve owned 3 of them in my lifetime, along with an exercise bike or two. You guessed it. Every one of those machines turned into clothing racks within weeks. And yet, here I am going onto various websites, checking out yet another treadmill. As if this time it’s going to be different. This time I am really going to use it. For exercise. Not bras and belts. Right.