Daily Press from Newport News, Virginia • Page 29

Patllj jfagg S.lur d.y, February 9. 1991 T7 1L TVComics YT fl toe? Who balby as If -TV 1 i P'- jf I i Joseph Pryweller Broadcast news Fox affiliate plans to launch own newscast It's not like we really need it, but another local television station is planning to launch its own newscast. WTVZ, Channel 33, in Norfolk once a small independent station already has become a major player by being the official Fox network affiliate of Hampton Roads. Bart Simpson and the Bundys, as well as the syndicated "Arse-nio Hall Show," have made the station in vogue. Fox asked its affiliates last fall to become more like the other networks.

The news would start at 10 p.m., the time Fox's prime-time shows end. WTVZ plans to start its local newscast sometime between this May and late 1992, said WTVZ Program Director Mark Hudgins. "It depends on the economic forecast for the country," Hudgins said. "In a recession, we can't OK starting a million-dollar news operation. We're not ready for it now, but we will be." When that will be is the big question.

Setting up is expensive and time-consuming. Constructing a news set can cost as much as $100,000. Then there's the cost of hiring about 15 news staffers and of buying cameras, videotape machines, editing equipment and other essentials. And a skilled news director must be hired to train everybody. There's some good news for WTVZ.

Fox executives have said they'll buy cameras and tape editing machines in bulk and sell them to affiliates. As for the content, Hudgins said his station will offer news from "a different angle." But he wasn't certain what that would be. "The only thing I can say is that we've got to be different to compete with other networks," he said. "We'll have an advantage at 10 p.m. for people who want to hear the weather before they go to bed.

Other than the weather, I don't know what we'll do." Most Fox-owned stations, including WTTG in Washington, D.C., have had local newscasts on the air for several years. WTVZ, an affiliate, is privately owned by Virginia Beach businessman Charles McFadden. It won't be easy here. It's tough enough to remember which news anchor works at which station in this highly competitive TV market. Now WTVZ plans to make the picture even more cluttered.

The station has a fighting chance. at 10 p.m. should attract some viewers, and Fox already has proven that a young upstart can enter the network country club. Bombs away: With pipe bombs and bomb threats a hot news topic this week, the three local network stations tried to tread carefully not to incite panic. Generally, all three did well, with restrained reports that avoided assumptions about Iraqi terrorists.

WTKR, Channel 3, was calmest, going so far as to wipe such talk of terrorists almost completely from its reports. The station chose not to interrupt Tuesday morning programs to report live from the scene of a bomb threat at the Downtown Tunnel. "We get bomb scares every week," said WTKR News Director Jay Mitchell. "We send people to investigate, but that doesn't mean we need to report them by cutting in during regular programming. It's usually not news." WAVY, Channel 10, begged to differ.

That station as did WVEC, Channel -13, with lesser frequency repeatedly interrupted morning shows to give updates from the tunnel. "It's news because of the traffic problems it caused and the situation in the Middle East," said WAVY News Director David Overton. "Viewers want to know what's going on." Some aggressive reporting accompanied news of the pipe bombs found Please see News, D2 VIRGINIA H. ROLLINGS. The Portsmouth Public Library contains several resources for family research.

IMD6. MOVIE REVIEW. Steve Martin "LA Story" has something heartfelt and substantial. D2. i tmvmm a 1 LIFESTYLES.

Lingerie does not have to be intimidating. It shouldn't cause snickers and blushes. nia, Irvine, in 1981 and went to work as a hospital orderly while doing graduate study. His boss was popular, capable Crispina Baldovino, a Catholic and the oldest of five children, who emigrated from the Philippines as a nurse in 1979. On their first date, Mark recalls, "We decided on the name Christopher Michael for a baby." But in 1984, two years after their wedding, Cris underwent a hysterectomy because of benign but bleeding, painful and recurrent uterine tumors.

Years of deep depression followed. The Calverts wanted no part of "slow and bureaucratic" adoption except as a last resort. Mark, now an insurance underwriter, says that two years ago, while consulting Ricardo Asch of the Center for Reproductive Health in Orange, they briefly considered traditional surrogacy. That would have left Cris the adoptive mother of another woman's child. But "with Cris' personality," says Mark, "we really wanted a child that had her innocence, her sweet or so the fashion world tells us.

iff 4 ness, her demeanor." The Calverts got in touch with William Handel, head of Beverly Hills' Center for Surrogate Parenting the largest of California's 13 surrogacy arrangers. In 10 years of advertising for surrogates and matching them with anxious couples, Handel has arranged 130 births, 18 through gestational surrogacy. The newer method has grown to embrace half of his practice. Handel examined the Calverts' finances and told them they couldn't afford him. The price was $47,000, with no guarantees; the four local physicians who do these implants report a success rate from 16 percent to 30 percent.

Handel's fee covered medical and psychological screening of surrogate applicants. He says he rejects 19 of 20. The center acts as a buffer between surrogates and couples, with surrogate group-support sessions monthly. The Calverts saw no reason not to bypass a costly broker. One of Mark's Please see Baby, D3 fat lip fad Local physicians doing the "Paris Lip" procedure include Peninsula plastic surgeon Glenn Shepard and Southside dermato-logic surgeon David McDaniel.

Several weeks beforehand, patients have a consultation, followed by skin testing to rule out sensitivity to the collagen. These two physicians charge about $50 for the collagen consult; skin tests range between $50 and $60. For the actual procedure, it may take more than one syringe of collagen injected, depending upon the desired look. McDaniel charges between Shepard's fee is based on how many syringes of collagen are used. He charges about $450 a syringe.

j. LOS ANGELES TIMES photos Mark and Cnspma Calvert experience with a surrogate mother who wanted to keep the child even though the infant had only Mark and Crispina's genetic material is a cautionary primer for infertile couples desperate to have children. Christopher Michael Calvert was the subject of a custody battle between the woman who gave birth to him and the couple who conceived him. Christopher Michael is the Calverts' boy, at least for now By MARTIN KASINDORF Los Angeles Times SANTA ANA, Calif. Except for the clatter of helicopters approaching the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station nearby, the world surrounding tiny Christopher Michael Calvert is a soothing lullaby.

From his crib, the 4-month-old can see a leafy tract neighborhood beyond the backyard swimming pool. Cooed over by Crispina Calvert's family, the baby has almost too many loving relatives to count. Some babies are premature. Black-haired Christopher Michael is prematurely famous. The infant, with his birth certificate blank for one month, was the object of the first courtroom battle anywhere over the literal meaning of the first word most American babies speak: "mama." Last October, registered nurse Cris Calvert defeated a former co-worker to win legal recognition as the boy's only mother in a wrenching trial here.

But that was only Phase One in what promises to be a long dispute over parental rights in this age of state-of-the-art, in-vitro-fertilization, embryo-transfer, ges-tational-surrogate babies. When the 6-pound, 10-ounce boy was born Sept. 19 in Orange, DNA testing established Cris and Mark Calvert as his genetic parents. "It looks like us," Cris purred when she first held the child. Yet the delivery-room nurses, with nothing more official to go on, wrist-tagged him Baby Boy Johnson.

The woman who gave birth was indisputably Anna Louise Johnson, an unmarried ex-Marine of African-American, Irish and Native American ancestry raising a 3-year-old daughter on part-time nursing work and occasional welfare stints. Now she was causing a fuss, renouncing her signed $10,000 preconception promise to give the baby to the Calverts. Under California's 15-year-old version of the national Uniform Parenting Act, which deals mostly with paternity and adoption, Johnson was not without ammunition: As the birth mother, she seemingly could stake a claim to It's far too Taris Lip' is the newest look By GERRI KOBREN The Baltimore Sun Pssst. Hey, lady, how'd you like to have a fat lip? That threat would send most little girls running in the opposite direction. Now, however, some women might be more inclined to grab several hundred dollars and answer, "Yes.

Please." In fact, they might go for two fat lips a matched pair, uppers and lowers, like models and movie stars have. Lately, that plumped-up pout seems to be considered sexier, prettier and much more youthful than the stingy-mouthed stare of our Puritan progenitors. Those who were not born that way can get there with a shot of collagen, a thick fluid comprised of purified protein molecules taken from cowskin and sus- parental status as the presumptive "natural mother." In the end, however, this technologically outmoded legal presumption did her no good with Superior Court Judge Richard N. Parslow Jr. She fared no better in public opinion toward the groundbreaking lawsuit she filed just short of her seventh month of pregnancy.

Parslow scorned Johnson's claims of having "bonded" with the fetus, thanked the woman for her time and denied her the slightest standing under the 1975 parent law. When heredity triumphed, the supermarket weeklies dropped the story; Johnson did not. At the far border of the emotional, ethical and judicial minefield that the Calverts blundered into, Johnson's legal appeals may yet return her to the couple's picture-postcard subdivision and Christopher Michael's life. MARK CALVERT, a quietly, steely white Protestant from Idaho, got a psychology degree from the University of Califor early to kiss off the i 1 i A i 1 k. Women often yearn for fat lips like these, pended in saline solution.

The fat-lip fad seems to have started a year or two ago, boosted by reports that actress Barbara Hershey had her lips puffed for her role in the movie "Beaches," and by the sudden appearance of lip-pier models in magazines. Just how popular it is remains a question, however. Linda Frank, a plastic surgeon with offices in Baltimore and Rockville, reports a rash of patients asking for the bee-stung look after "Beaches," but none since. Please see Lips, D5.