soapsuds

“On one given day the Soap Bubble Room is out of soapsuds,” a journalist from The Post wrote after a visit in 1994, the year Ms. Lewin-Benham stepped down.

She had been wearing a swimsuit in the tub, she said, and “the soapsuds were up to my neck.”

And bubbles are everywhere, on every scale, once you start looking: high-tech drug-delivery mechanisms, emulsified salad dressings, soapsuds, black holes and beyond.

“As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself: ‘What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff?

When you pick potato bugs or Japanese beetles off your plants, drown them in a jar of water, not soapsuds, kerosene or anything you wouldn’t want in your soil.