TAB SCARE.(The Talk of the Town)(soft drink)

As if the mainstream media were not beleaguered enough, now comes word that the Coca-Cola Company is about to release a new drink called Tab Energy. The plan is to capitalize on the popularity of the Red Bull genre while trading on the retro cachet of Tab, with those iconic pink cans--a plan that could threaten the sanctity of one of journalism's secret, and most self-conscious, power cliques: the cult of Tab lovers, who have persisted in drinking the pioneering diet soda, despite its virtual disappearance from the market.

"This is a lonely but inspired society," David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic Monthly and National Journal, said recently, before news of the brand's reengineering had spread. "You can't imagine the purchasing and trucking and warehousing issues we address in getting Tab into Washington."

The original Tab, which appeared in 1963, is still produced, though in dwindling quantities. You'd be unlikely to find it at Gristedes, however, because Coke stopped promoting the drink in the mid-eighties, after the cancer scare involving saccharin, an artificial sweetener used in Tab. Present-day Tab enthusiasts must seek out wholesalers (New York Beverage, in the Bronx, is a local favorite) or rely on a kind of sixth soda sense--"the ability to spot the pink," David Edelstein, the film critic for New York, calls it--in obtaining their daily fixes.

Here in the city, drinkers include Steven Brill and Danny Goldberg, the C.E.O. of the radio network Air America, each of whom has an office fridge stocked with Tab. "I have unadulterated enthusiasm for it," Goldberg said, adding that he has long since delegated the task of finding the stuff to an assistant.

The fact that Tab comes in a pink can and was conceived as a drink for women seems only to have bolstered the appeal--it's a "boy named Sue thing," according to a financier, who picked up the habit from Bradley. (Brill, just to be sure, tends to crush his Tab cans as he drains them.) Then, there is the peculiar flavor ("It tastes like metal") and the reputation for unhealthiness, a ...