Don't believe what you've heard: the life of a hand model is not so
 glamorous.

Consider a recent day on the set with top hand model Leland Schwantes, in
 town for a shoot for Perkins restaurants, a national chain that has
 mercifully spared four of our five boroughs.

After hours of cooling his nails in his dressing room while food stylists
 prepared a picture-perfect plate of Perkins pancakes, Schwantes was
 finally summoned for the "money shot": pouring a ladle of apple compote
 onto the naked pancakes.

It sounds easy, but those precious four seconds of film time took an hour
 to capture. Take one: Schwantes creamy hand accidentally bumps into the
 camera. Take two: Schwantes's ladling is a little sluggish. Take three:
 Schwantes's ladling is better, but another guy (who is not a
 professional hand model -- and it shows!) drops some blueberries in the
 wrong place. Take four: Again, Schwantes is on target, but a rogue
 blueberry ruins the shot. Takes five, six, seven and eight: It looks
 good, but director Bruce Nadel is dissatisfied and orders re-shoots.
 Take nine: Perfect! Print it!

Whew. After the shot was in the can, Schwantes retired to his dressing
 room (OK, it's really just a closet with a lighted mirror) to reflect on
 the business of hand-modeling.

If Schwantes's name sounds familiar, it's probably because you remember
 his fine work as "Principal Dancer #7" in the 1979 film, "All That
 Jazz." That breakthrough role earned Schwantes lots of attention -- and
 not just from film critics. Check out this positive review of
 Schwantes's work on a website devoted to fans of hairy chests: "Just
 after the `Take Off With Us' number, we get a close up of [Schwantes]
 lying on the floor, his bare, sweaty, hairy chest heaving. Beautiful."

But dancers -- even sensuously hairy ones -- get chewed up and spit out
 faster than you can say, "But, Mr. Fosse, I thought we had something..."
 The Fates led Schwantes to hand-modeling and he earns a good living,
 even if it doesn't always satisfy the actor in him.

"Funny thing is, 90 percent of the time, you never even see my hand in
 the shot," he said. "In commercials, the food is the star."

It wasn't always that way. Years ago, Schwantes's hands would
 affectionately lay a piece of cheese on a burger or suggestively knead
 raw pizza dough, but now, in these disease-conscious days, he's lucky if
 the tip of his fingernail is allowed to be seen on a spatula.

"They hire me for my hand skills," Schwantes said. "Sure, my pretty thumb
 gets me in the door, but if I didn't have the skills, I wouldn't last.
 Ten years from now, when my hands are no longer beautiful, I'll still
 have a career."

Nadel could use untrained hands in his commercials, but he's come to rely
 on Schwantes's professionalism and ladling savvy.

"This guy is the best in the business," said Nadel, whose award-winning
 commercials -- with their jumping berries, flying fish sticks and
 cascading salt crystals -- are more exhilarating, and offer better
 storytelling, than half the shows on TV.

A few days later, Schwantes was back in Nadel's studio, this time for a
 commercial for Popeye's new line of spicy chicken nuggets.

It's such an important spot that Popeye's flew in its top food stylist,
 Patti Matheney, from Atlanta. While Schwantes rehearsed, Matheney used a
 pair of surgical forceps to apply pieces of red candy to individual
 nuggets (actual red pepper flakes are too dark to be picked up on film).

The shot called for Schwantes's hand to lovingly dip a luscious nugget
 into a bowl of Popeye's sweet-and-sour sauce. In rehearsals, Schwantes
 was perfect: His lascivious dipping caused the sauce to swell
 orgasmically in the bowl and drip invitingly from the tip of the
 withdrawn nugget -- a chicken fetishist's dream. Hand-modeling doesn't
 get much better than this.

But Schwantes may have been too saucy for his own good. After a quick
 huddle, Popeye's executives deemed the shot too powerful, too shocking,
 too hedonistic for American audiences. It would be replaced with a more
 generic shot of a pre-dipped nugget.

Again, Schwantes's best work -- that thumb! -- would be left on the
 cutting-room floor while a sauce-dampened chicken nugget would be the
 star.

It's a lousy business, this hand-modeling, lousy.

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email: gershny@yahoo.com