Reader TTS

You don’t need much of an excuse to kiss Catherine Wilkinson. She’s always wearing mistletoe over her head, just about wherever she goes. It’s a funny contraption she began marketing a year

ago. She took a red, plastic hairband--the kind that wraps across the top of your head, from ear to ear--and attached a wobbly 10-inch-long spring to the top of it. On the top of the wobbly

spring is a sprig of plastic mistletoe. She calls it “kissletoe” for “guaranteed Christmas kisses,” and she’s selling the contraptions, at $3 apiece, to people who during the holiday season

always want to be near some mistletoe when the right guy/gal comes along. Just walk up to your target, tip your head slightly forward, and the mistletoe is perfectly placed to bring lips

together. Last year she sold 100,000 of them through stores in the United States, Canada and Britain. This year she expects to sell upwards of 250,000, but she figures she has hardly even

dented the world kissing market. Not bad for a 27-year-old who just a couple of years ago was working for the San Diego State University Foundation as a grant writer. She has quit that to

become full-time entrepreneur. Her story goes back five years. “I went to a Christmas party and, to be different, I took a headband, attached some coat hangers to it and put mistletoe on top

of it,” she said. “I made one for myself and another for my sister. It was a real hit.” So she called around and discovered that it would be cheapest to have them manufactured in Taiwan.

She set up a business office in the Gaslamp Quarter and rented a warehouse in Huntington Beach to store the product. She rented a booth at the Los Angeles Gift Show in July, 1985, to show

off her kissletoe, just in time to hit the Christmas market. She did, in a big way. This year she’s not only refilling old orders, but trying to stay on top of new ones. “It’s kind of a

goofy idea, but you ought to see everyone’s reaction when you walk around wearing one of these,” she said. “Nine out of 10 men will come up and kiss you.” She has gotten so tired of being

kissed, she said, that now she hands out Hershey’s chocolate kisses. New Holiday Tradition? San Diego’s poor and hungry will have all the regular places to go for a holiday meal this

Thanksgiving. And they’ll have a not-so-regular place to go for a variation on a theme. The Chicago Brothers’ Pacific Beach restaurant will hand out “turkey pizza” (yep, turkey and

mozzarella, in an creamy Alfredo sauce on a deep-dish crust) from 2 to 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day to anyone asking for a free meal, said company spokesman Judith Wolf. The rest of the menu

is a bit more conventional: salad, pumpkin pie and sparkling apple cider. Talk About Excuses . . . Among the excuses for dismissing parking tickets that maybe you haven’t heard of yet are

these success stories: - “Vehicle belongs to Catholic nuns who are very adamant that the meter still had time on it when they returned.” - “Owner of vehicle was doing an emergency carpet

cleaning.” - “Rain washed all information off ticket.” - “Wife sent death certificate.” Then there’s Channel 8 anchorwoman Allison Ross, who was cited in December for having tinted windows

on the driver’s side of her Mercedes-Benz 280SL with the license plate “URNEWS.” The tinted material is illegal because officers need to be able to look inside a vehicle for their own safety

during a routine traffic stop. The ticket was dismissed after someone noted on it: “Driver unaware of law. Will have tinted material removed.” Maybe so, maybe not. Ross says she wrote

Police Chief Bill Kolender to explain that she ordered the tinted material because a TV personality has to be concerned for her safety in the event that “some idiot” recognizes her face on

the freeway and gets excited. Ross said she has no plans to remove the material and fully expects to be ticketed again for the offense. No Lack of Ideas Finally, in our North County Dept. of

Boosterism, are these two somehow-related items: - Oceanside is getting ready for its centennial on July 3, 1988, by coming up with private fund-raising efforts to pay for the civic bash.

One suggestion being tossed around by the Centennial Foundation is to sell planks of the Oceanside pier. The idea is for people to pay $25 to have their name engraved on one edge of the

1,500 or so planks of the pier. That makes room for 3,000 names altogether, for a quick $75,000 in donations. For your part, you would receive a “certificate of ownership” for a piece of the

pier. - The Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce has given its manager, Al Diederich, permission to try to divert the swallows from Mission San Juan Capistrano to Fallbrook. “We’ll float helium

balloons on the Sunday before St. Joseph’s Day in 1988, giving them directions on how to get to Fallbrook instead,” Diederich said. “There’s a lot of money in swallows and related tourism.”

He said the chamber may even cook up a Birdlegs Barbecue and a Miss Birdlegs Contest. MORE TO READ