my 26 best friends

YUL,I'M NOT.

Yul Brenner was really the first to make total baldness sexy. Terry Savalas popularized the hairless head, but he didn't conquer hearts the way Yul did. My wife Yolanda has been in love with Yul Brenner ever since she first saw him on Broadway dancing with his children's Nanny in Rogers & Hammerstein's "Anna and the King of Siam." Bald men were few and far between 50 years ago. Bald men were ridiculed and laughed at back then. Bald men all wore toupees, fooling nobody. Fifty years ago, bald was out. Today, bald is in.

I spent my first 77 years on this Planet with a full head of hair. The cancer cops gave me my first chemo therapy treatment a month ago. Now I'm almost bald. One more treatment (starting this Thursday) and I'll be as bald as an eagle...as a billiard ball....as an egg....as a baby.

On those few occasions when I look at myself in the mirror, I see a wizened old man with a thin face and a bald head -- like a prisoner in a concentration camp. I liked me with hair. Any hopes that bald would make me handsome were dashed when Yolanda looked at me for the longest time and said, "Yul, you're not."

Besides being ungramatical, it was the unkindest cut of all.

Still, the first chemo treatment was a kind-of success The lesion in my throat - which has gathered all those malignant cancer cells - is a little smaller than it was before the poison was drip-drip-drip-dripped into my vein. Even better, there are fewer cancer cells than before. Chemo therapy is not perfect. It almost killed me the first time: vomiting violently, feeling nauseus all the time, bouts of diahrrea and constipation, one right after another. And those never-ending, body-shaking hiccups. Mine weren't just annoying. They hurt. I was so ill, they had to put me in a hospital for four days. If I was a Catholic, they would have sent a priest to my room.

But I got through it. That'll help with the one coming up. I know what to expect.

The best news: they've reduced my dosage by 33%. The next treatment will be 33% less strong.....33% less apt to send me to the hospital. For sure, the next poison potion won't kill me. And it might make a serious dent in the cancer cell population. Not only that, but the chemo lab nurses will all want to rub my beautiful bald head. And I'll let them.