Doodles spokesgal Kate McFadden tells Nothing Personal that she recently spied the ousted House speaker getting his head massaged by "quite an attractive woman" at Capitol Hill's Bubbles salon. (The Newtster, it turns out, gets his snowy scalp rubbed down at Bubbles every month -- and follows it up with an Ice Cap conditioner that hairdresser Hannah Hailu has said "gives his hair that minty feeling.") Not wanting to disturb the ex-pol's extended moment of bliss, McFadden slipped some Doodles info to him via her hairdresser and slid out. When she called his office the next day to inquire about the cool-scalped speechmaker's willingness to donate a doodle, however, she was told he couldn't possibly lift a pen for her noble cause, as he would be in New York all week. (Nice to know Newt's logic is as sound as ever.)

Dr. Joyce Brothers, whose artistic handiwork will be available for purchase, recently offered these deep doodle thoughts in the Whitman-Walker activity fund newsletter: "The studies are sketchy about what can be read into these pieces, if we are to look to scientific research for our clues. Researchers have made one interesting note in their findings. There seems to be a correlation between the size of the doodle and a person's self-esteem. If a person fills up the page, he or she probably feels pretty good about him or herself."

"What about the size of their head and the absence of a doodle?" quips McFadden. Easy, Kate, Newt may be a pinhead, but at least his scalp is always minty-fresh!

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Flower power: Redefined

Amy Reiter Amy Reiter's column appears daily on the People site, Monday through Friday. + Biography + Archives Got a hot tip? Tell Amy!

"I have had to sell my story to a newspaper. It's awful it has come to this. But they have offered me lots of money. It's to buy a water-sprinkling system for my house in Ibiza. The flowers are dying in the heat. They desperately need help. It's been worrying me all this week."

-- Lady Aitken, mother of Britain's discredited and just-imprisoned (for perjury) former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, on why concern for her garden has uprooted her maternal loyalty and induced her to tell all to a British newspaper

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Break out the insecticide: The jigglin' Wiggles writhe again!

The Wiggles controversy rages down under! Cockroaches fans are crawling out of the woodwork! And it's all because of an innocent little juicy bit sent in by an NP reader gently suggesting that the colorful Australian kiddy entertainers might have been a kind of creepy-crawly when they called themselves the Cockroaches.

"I had to laugh at whoever had classified the Wiggles previous incarnation, the Cockroaches, as 'thrash-grunge,'" wrote one roached-out reader. "The Cockroaches produced some of the lightest and most saccharine pop around in the mid-80s -- by no stretch of the imagination could it ever be classified as even verging on rock/thrash/grunge. They did, however, have the reputation for being good Catholic boys -- and most of them were related to one another."

"'Thrash-grunge' for the Cockroaches my foot," fumed another. "While three of the now Wiggles were putting themselves through early childhood studies, they were a classic early 80s Sydney pub/pop band. The other played bagpipes with the Australian Army."

And this Wiggle word came from a reader named Alison P: "Another way the Wiggles out-do Barney is that the 'Blue Wiggle' won a recent nation-wide magazine competition for Australia's most eligible bachelor. Apparently one of the reasons for their popularity is that mothers don't mind repeated attendance at concerts as they can check out the band's butts while the kids sing along to the 'Mashed Potato.'"

Guess there's more than one way to mash a potato (or a Cockroach), eh, Alison? As the Wiggles themselves like to say, "Yummy, yummy."

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