WHIPPED AGAIN.(The Talk of the Town)(Whipped Cream And Other Delights)

Last spring, during the broadcast of the Preakness Stakes, Bob Costas interviewed Jerry Moss, the owner of Giacomo, the horse that had won the Kentucky Derby. He noted that Moss, along with the trumpeter and producer Herb Alpert, had founded A. & M. Records. Near the end of their conversation, Costas held up his old copy of an A. & M. classic, the 1965 Alpert album "Whipped Cream & Other Delights," which, as most American males Costas's age know all too well, featured on its cover a photograph of a young woman clad, rather meagerly, in what appeared to be whipped cream. Costas asked Moss the name of the model. Dolores, he said.

"All hail Dolores!" Costas exclaimed.

Alpert, who happened to be watching on TV, was moved. He decided to send Costas a poster of Dolores, mit Schlag, upon which he wrote, "Dear Bob, can't stop thinking about you. Love, Dolores."

It was a variation on a sentiment that decades ago fogged the minds of many young men, as they gazed at the album cover and attempted to ascribe personalized come-hitherhood to the woman staring back. In the picture, she sits holding the stem of a rose in her left hand, above which the inner portion of a bare breast protrudes from the foam. She is licking cream from the index finger of her right hand, and a dollop of the stuff rests atop her forehead, like a tiara. (This is the only real whipped cream in the shot. The rest is shaving cream.) The image still seems a little raunchy, in a home-movie kind of way, but in the virtually pornless atmosphere of the suburban mid-sixties it was--and we're relying on the testimony of our elders here--the pinnacle of allure. The Whipped Cream Girl, as she came to be known, helped make Alpert and his Tijuana Brass even more famous than his loungy arrangements, smooth trumpet work, and suave song production destined them to be. The album shot to No. 1 and stayed on the charts for more than three years. Alpert would say, when performing live, "Sorry, but I can't play the cover for you."

"When that record broke, Tijuana Brass was catapulted onto another planet," Alpert said the other day. Initially, he had reservations about the cover. "In 1965, to see an image like that I thought was maybe pushing it a little too far," he said. "I thought the censors would be down on it. But in 2006 it looks pretty ...