Lesser chefs might try to gussy up gnocchi, which can be tricky to prepare in a restaurant.

It's supposed to represent fog from the ocean, but it's really the smoke of desperation, something Broadway directors bring out when they want to gussy up a dull scene.

And if her stage presence indicated she was more showgirl than musician, at least she knew how to gussy up her act for the postfeminist MTV age.

Although he tries to gussy up the familiarity of his material with tongue-in-cheek asides and self-dramatizing scenes, such efforts almost always turn out to be willfully juvenile or embarrassingly cute.

THEIR publicist - and it seems as if everyone in New York's on-line world has one these days - tried to gussy up Nerve's image by claiming that the two worked from their bed, a modern John and Yoko.