Our Reader to Reader Question of the Week:

Dear Readers,
, who produces a lively column for the Topeka Capitol Journal, wrote some-thing recently that you might want to share with your readers. Here it is: “What worries Ann Landers con-cerns us, too. One of her corre-spondents, age 19, was contemplating marriage with a French horn player. She was dismayed because her fiance refused to kiss her. He kept insisting that his lips were his only means of livelihood and he had to protect them. Said Ann, opting for the practical, Tell him good-by and find a guy who plays the violin.’ “Other side effects of dating a French horn player are astonishing, if not deleterious, as reported to us by John Beatty, a former press secretary to Sen. Jim Pearson. He told of a cou-ple of Washington girls who were ex-changing confidences on the kissing technique of musicians. “ ‘I believe,’ offered one, “the French horn player is best’ ‘Well, maybe,’ con-cluded the other. ‘But he sine does hold you funny.’” WE LOVE YOU IN TOPEKA DEAR LOVE: Thanks for my laugh for the day. And please say hello to Tom Kiene. He’s one of my oldest friends in the business-or I should say one of my best friends of long standing. No one knows for sure when, how or why kissing started. One theory that sounds reasonable is that the first kisses were between cavemen and cave- women, regardless of sex-licking the cheeks of their relatives and neighbors for the salt. The early Christians were instructed by St. Paul to “greet one another with a holy kiss.” Knights kissed before doing battle, just as boxers touch gloves before a fight. Lovers have kissed from the beginning of recorded history. Promises are sealed with a kiss. Children ask their mommies and daddies to kiss skinned knees, or a bump on the head to “make it well.” The late Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago said on live TV when criti-cized for giving the city’s insurance business to the firm that employed his son, “What’s wrong with a father helping his son? If the critics don’t like it they can kiss my ass.” The custom of kissing varies from country to country. In the Arab lands the men greet each other with a kiss. Italian and French men may sometimes do this also. (Usually its both cheeks in France.) The Orientals consider kissing in public bad manners. The British are not big social kissers. The Russians, Greeks and Slavic people kiss hello and goodbye publicly without the slightest hint of embarrassment In the United States, there is a great deal of kissing of every imaginable kind. Time magazine, February 7, 1977, in an article called “The Great Kiss-ing Epidemic” by Lance Morrow, quoted sociologist Murray Davis of the University of California at San Diego: “Increased kissing is a part of the gen-eral inflation of intimate signals. We kiss people we used to hug, hug people we used to shake hands with, and shake hands with people we used to nod to. Not to kiss or hug means one is not ‘relating.’ Isolated individualism is out. Today separation is not allowed. Everyone is expected to kiss everyone else.” There is no question but that kissing can spread disease. Mononucleosis is in fact called “the kissing disease.” Dr. Leslie Nicholas, president of the American V.D. Association, wrote on April 15, 1977, admonishing me for giving “incomplete and somewhat mis-leading” advice. I had told “Alpena”: “It is indeed possible to get syphilis if you kiss a person who has an open chancre on his lip, tongue or in his mouth -if you have a cracked lip or a cut on your tongue or in your mouth.” According to Dr. Nicholas, “in the act of enthusiastic kissing, enough cells of the superficial layers of the lips or other parts may be so abraded as to permit the germs of syphilis to enter without a cracked lip.” Dr. Nicholas continued: “With the increases of oral sexual activity presently practiced, you should warn your readers to address themselves to these four questions: Whom are you kissing? How are you kissing? What are you kissing? Where are you kissing? credit: Ann Landers. AN OLDIE HE THINKS IS A GOODIE