The time my falsies flew out into the hotel buffet toaster

The story has become an urban legend — a set of rogue teeth flying into the toaster and melting on a bustling Darwin buffet breakfast table

Michelle Fidock’s dentures fell out into a toaster at SkyCity’s Casino. Picture: Ivan Rachman

THE story has become an urban legend — a set of rogue teeth flying into the toaster and melting on a bustling Darwin buffet breakfast table.

For a decade it has been occasionally spoken about and quickly dismissed as an old wives’ tale.

But the nightmarish story is true. It occurred in 2005 at a SkyCity Casino girls’ breakfast brunch, in a restaurant packed to the brim with V8 Supercar drivers.

For long-time Territorian Michelle Fidock, the incident has been a source of humiliation, pain and silence.

It has taken her 11 years to tell the story publicly.

The story dates back to 2005 when Ms Fidock, who has worn dentures since she was 12 following an ice-skating accident, lost her dentures after attempting to blow out a fire in a toaster at the Casino buffet.

What was supposed to be a quiet breakfast with her daughters Bianca and Jessica, turned out to be one of the more entertaining stories she would go on to tell — only close friends — for the next decade.

“We had finished breakfast and I decided I would like a cup of tea and a croissant,” Ms Fidock said.

“So I cut it in half and put it on the wire rack on those toasters that rotate around .. and as soon as it hit the heat it caught on fire.

“So I tried to blow it out - and I went like that (makes blowing expression) and my teeth flew, not just fell, flew out into the toaster and started going around with the croissant that was on fire.

Bianca had the sense to run up and turn the toaster off and get the flames out, but we still needed to get my teeth out and we couldn’t do it with the large tongs there.

So Bianca asked the waiter if it was possible to have any normal tongs as ‘my mum’s teeth are in the toaster and we can’t get them out’.”

Ms Fidock said what ensued after that — as the dentures had slowly melted away — was the hilarity of trying to retrieve them from the bottom tray of the toaster through the grates.

“We actually disassembled the rack but they kept falling down lower,” she said.

“When we eventually got them out I waited for them to cool down, as melted as they were, and tried to put them back in. But they were so hot they burnt the top of my palette.”

Ms Fidock said she had decided to tell the yarn publicly at the encouragement of her Nightcliff dentist Dr Steven Burlinson, who has since provided her with steel plate dentures.

“It’s a belly laugh story now,” Ms Fidock laughs.

“But for a while every time we went away to stay in a hotel, if there was one of those toasters there I would take a photo of it and send it to my daughters and go ‘look who I’m having breakfast with’.”

Ms Fidock said it was as embarrassing as the time her dentures fell out when she got food poisoning as a 17-year-old on a date with her now-husband.