By Susan Braudy

Thank goodness muggings are pretty much a thing of my past. Some things are getting better—a lot better—in our town. My first mugging took place at dusk on the University of Pennsylvania campus. A man pushed a wad of dollar bills into my coat pocket after showing me the top $100 bill, then invited me back to his hotel room. When I refused, he pushed me down and kicked me toward an open car door.

I felt for the wad of bills in my pocket, pulled off the top bill and shoved the remaining wad up at him. The fat wad was missing its $100 cover, and was all $1 bills. Bewildered, he slowly checked each bill. I picked up my schoolbooks and ran away. In a way I mugged him back.

The second time I was mugged was after a Neil Simon play on Broadway. I stood in the back of the theater (cheap admission charge). After the first act, I always found a single seat down front.

While I walked to the subway on 42nd Street later that evening, a man grabbed my shoulder bag. I swerved into the traffic, dragging him until he let go of my bag. Was I brave or foolhardy?

The third time I was mugged I was talking on a payphone to my boss, the president of Warner Brothers Studios. An impatient man, he’d just reprimanded me for wasting his time with a quick joke. I felt a gentle tugging on my shoulder bag. I whirled around and saw a child with the sweetest brown eyes, his little hand in my pocketbook. My boss was shouting at me for some transgression. I was far more afraid of him than of the brown-eyed child.

“Stop that!” I whispered and smacked the child’s hand. His eyes looked hurt. He ran.

The fourth time I was mugged I was walking with an editor from the New York Times on West 58th Street. He handled arts critics for the paper and was known far and wide for his patience. Two guys in their twenties approached us. I noticed one of them was carrying a creased brown paper bag. He veered purposefully into my friend and we heard the crunch of breaking glass.

The bag holder began to whine.

“Look what you did. You broke three expensive bottles of pills and my mother is really sick. Now she’s going to die. I don’t know what to do. You owe me at least 20 bucks.”

I had one of my scary and unexpected adrenaline surges.

“See here” I said, “I’m going to report you to the police. You’re trying to rob us of—” My friend interrupted me and asked the dastardly duo, soothingly, “Are you sure it’s only $20 worth of medicine? I hope your mother gets better soon. Tell you what, I’ll give you $30 and my apologies.” I was sputtering as he took out his wallet and gave the two guys a $20 and a $10 bill.

The guys looked really embarrassed and slunk off. I guess that’s one of the reasons why my friend is an upper manager and I work alone. My mugging experiences have taught me an important lesson. I am far more afraid of what I will do to a potential mugger than what he or she will do to me.

You don’t know your own adrenaline switch until it’s been turned on several times.
_
Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

By Susan Braudy

Let me tell you why the accelerating—and alarming—trend that has women baring their breasts in public places other than locker rooms may turn out to be bad for us. Up until very recently, most women wore transparent fabric that beguiled, teased and almost showed a woman’s breasts.

I see this as smarter than going topless.

First, for the lascivious, the most current examples of naked breasts: Paris Hilton was recently photographed basking au naturel aboard a yacht. There was also an incident at the august Four Seasons restaurant, whose owner may be getting desperate for customers. He provided a topless caterer for a birthday party.

And of course you remember The Sopranos, where naked immobile silicone-enhanced breasts of pole-dancing girls were background noise for James Gandolfini.

In the 1970s, Rudi Gernreich made fashion history on the runway by outfitting his models in his new line of topless bathing suits. These didn’t become popular except maybe on the French Riviera, where I’m told only the most unsophisticated people stare.

What we have staring us in the face is a complex and historic power issue.

Exposing cleavage versus revealing the entire breast is a cultural issue. As a wise old (male) civil liberties lawyer once told me, “When woman start showing their entire breasts they will give up an enormous amount of power over men.” I wonder if women have slowly stopped caring.

Furthermore, I wonder if women are raising the ante from using their bodies as weapons to attract and daze men to flaunting their bodies as if to say we don’t care what men think.

After all, traditionally, female modesty was mostly in the service of male jealousy. A married woman was thought of as the property of her husband, who would kill other men if they dared to ogle his wife’s secondary—or primary—sexual characteristics.

Anthropologists say that men dress to show status, single women dress to lure men. The line is blurring, particularly in Manhattan offices and at decadent museum galas. I wear jewelry, for example, for its beauty but also because I think my pieces show costliness and, to be frank, status.

Historians such as James Laver say we wear clothes for two conflicting reasons—modesty and self-aggrandizement. Modesty is defined as the attempt to tamp down sexual allure. Self-aggrandizement includes status and sexual allure.

Was Eve less attractive to Adam when she was naked? Apparently once he and she ate from the tree of knowledge they realized they were naked and made clothing out of fig leaves. Indeed, it is said that at nudist colonies men soon lose any fascination for breasts of nude women.

Here is perhaps the most well-known historic example of women gaining power by baring parts of their breasts. In mid-19th-century France, women hypnotized men by wearing high empire-waisted gowns that revealed most of their breasts. They teased further by rouging their mostly hidden nipples.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against the human body. Some of my best friends have them, although I admit I’m not dying to picture them or even think about them very much.

I guess I prefer to see girls baring their toes, sexually taboo in old China (or their collarbones, a taboo in early Virginia) than their breasts, which are becoming more and more ornamental than functional in our culture.

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Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

By Susan Braudy

I’ll stop cracking my knuckles, gentle reader, to tell you how powerful I feel after reading the inspirational page-turner Fight Back and Win by Gloria Allred, the world-changing women’s rights lawyer from California.

Your diarist is no slouch either; she has corrected history about the notorious and violent Kathy Boudin. I also changed history for six years writing and editing Ms. Magazine.

But I don’t hold a candle to Allred. Reading her memoir made me hear the approaching drumbeat of legal matriarchy. I can’t think of another lawyer or judge who’s made a bigger contribution to women’s rights.

There are those who erroneously blame Allred for taking headline cases.  But headlines fuel cultural change. Her most recent case is in the defense of Debrahlee Lorenzana, who alleges she was fired from her bank job for being too attractive.

Gloria Allred’s a hero who spent 23 years fighting to force the system to acknowledge its wrongdoing to one woman. Gloria won the plaintiff millions of dollars in damages. I’ll never forget reading the chapter in Fight Back and Win about this client, devout 16-year-old Hispanic teenager Rita Miller, who wanted to become a nun.

Back in the early 1970s, her priest raped her. This was before we had a clue about such atrocities. He wasn’t content to exercise his cruel power alone—he recruited six other priests who raped her, sometimes together. When she became pregnant they gave her $350 dollars and shipped her to the Philippines for an abortion. She refused the abortion and almost died of malnutrition.

Rita Miller came to Allred to force the priests to take DNA tests because she wanted to know who her daughter’s father was. Allred believed Rita’s fantastical story and sued the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who repeatedly denounced Allred and her client. One L.A. bishop charged on TV that Rita was “a bad girl with a bad reputation.” In fact she had never had a date or kissed a boy.

Gloria Allred finally won her case for Rita Miller in 2002 after lobbying the state to extend the statute of limitations for childhood abuse by priests.

Then there was Megan Wright, the tragic student at Dominican College near Manhattan, who alleged she was gang-raped on campus. Her mother says the college failed to do what the law required, unwilling to jeopardize its reputation with applicants. Megan felt unsafe returning to college and committed suicide. Allred is suing the college.

On another note, Gloria Allred was angered because she wasn’t allowed to join the all-male celebrity Friar’s Club. She litigated and won. When the Beverly Hills club refused to let her use the steam room, she suggested separate days for men and women. They again refused. Allred became the first to file a claim with the California State Board of Equalization under a new statute that denied tax deductions to members of clubs with over 400 members who practice sexual discrimination.

Finally Gloria was admitted to the steam room. She wore an 1890s bathing suit. The men quickly covered their private parts when Gloria took out a tape recorder and sang, “Is That All There Is?”

The first person in Manhattan to file a complaint of sex discrimination against a private club, she pushed Henny Youngman away when he tried to block her entry to our Friar’s Club.

Read the book. Crack your knuckles.
_

Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

By Susan Braudy

I run down Broadway despite the heat. I left my umbrella in a bus and I am determined to get home before the rain hits. The black cloud overhead is getting blacker. It’s four in the afternoon but it looks like early evening. Birds fly in every direction, as panicked as I am. Water plops on my head and shoulders, seconds before I reach the door of my lobby.

In my bedroom the air-conditioner purrs as I pull off my damp T-shirt. Suddenly, I hear scrambling sounds that seem to be coming from under the air-conditioner. I dash out of my apartment to look through the hallway window at the backside of my bedroom’s window unit.

There he was, a black-and-white pigeon looking like a lump of feathers squeezed under the air-conditioner. I grinned. He was one smart bird. He’d found shelter from the rain and heat minutes after I had. We solved a big problem almost simultaneously.

Gentle reader, I confess, I am an avid animal lover. I teared up at the shelter in Spanish Harlem while signing adoption papers for Rocky 2, my schnoodle.

Back inside my bedroom, I say aloud, “Welcome pigeon.” He responds with a pleasant cackling kind of coo. He spent the entire rainy night crouched under the cooling machine. I can’t fault him. My pigeon has common sense.

Most days I write in the bedroom. As soon as I turned the air-conditioner on, the pigeon alighted on my windowsill and squeezed himself under it. I must say he was a handsome young fellow, with a pure white body, symmetrical black lines on his wings and on his head, as well as a wonderful iridescent neck—many colors of the rainbow.

Welcome back pigeon, I’d say. He always responded with that appealing cackling coo.

Weeks passed. I bragged about my pigeon to my friend, who responded with a gasp of horror: get rid of him. He’s a rat with wings; he’s vermin.

I was a little rattled but I’ve heard worse things about some of the male company I’ve kept in the past.

I consulted a handyman in my building who keeps a pigeon as a pet. He told me he’s lived happily with his pigeon for 10 years. The building super happened by. A kind soul, she was frightened for me: “That bird’s dangerous to your health. Viruses will come in from him through your air-conditioner. I’ll send somebody up to install metal spikes there, so he can’t get under your air-conditioner ever again.”

As I said, I’m an animal lover but my hypochondria trumps every other feeling I have. So I acquiesced and ugly, gleaming metal spikes were soon installed under my air conditioner. I hardened my heart the same day when I spotted my pigeon sitting on the outside window sill, turning his head as he stared at the spikes blocking his refuge.

I missed him. I began staring at pigeons on rooftops and in the park. I did see many many pigeons mating—alarming myself. Was I projecting some weird yearning for my pigeon onto them?

But then I calmed down and started using my brain.

First, pigeons aren’t dangerous, otherwise Mayor (no-salt, no-transfat) Bloomberg would have had troops in Central Park with traps and shotguns. I turned to Google: It seems pigeons are much safer, say, than my chatty neighbor down the hall who wore a prison ankle cuff for a month. I also researched pigeon mating habits. These former denizens of European mountains, who’ve adapted to our skyscrapers, have as many as eight broods a year when food is plentiful.

Pigeons are so intelligent that they can find their way home over hundreds of miles and also recognize themselves in mirrors and are able to differentiate human faces in photographs. They also recognize letters of the alphabet.

There is one possible and very unlikely health danger from pigeons. Their fecal matter contains traces of bacteria-causing illness, easily treated with antibiotics. To catch it you must have a weakened immune system and inhale a lot of dried droppings.

I still miss my pigeon. But I know the super won’t remove the metal spikes under the air-conditioner. A few mean and dusty-looking birds have taken to sitting on my window ledge on very hot days. They are no substitute, however, for my handsome friend with his symmetrical black striped wings, his loud cackle-coo, his glorious iridescent ruff and his communicative nature.

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Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

By Susan Braudy

Gentle reader, I’m a late night shopper. The computer’s a magic carpet that flies me to Osaka, Kyoto and other parts of the faraway country of Japan. I can almost hear Joe Weintraub snoring next to me as I journey. He’s thankfully unable to protest my taste in world-class designs, woven on antique silk kimono fabric. The patterned treasures I look at are “un-picked” from the kimonos by Japanese women who love the forest, Shibori and ocean wave patterns as much as I do.

It turns out that most Japanese don’t revere antique or vintage kimonos. So they are sold in the marketplace for small sums. My hardworking sellers painstakingly “unpick” seams and sell the fabric from them piece by piece—earning little for their labor.

I’ve been mixing and sewing kimono pieces into striking scarves for years. Most amazing of all is that people in the streets and on elevators compliment me on what I’ve created. I’ve even taken to selling them off my neck to strangers. What fun! I’m working up my courage to take them to a museum store.

Recently, I discovered a bizarre wrinkle to my shopping pleasure. Shopping on Ambien makes me a sort of an unconscious late-night shopper.

First, let me assure you, consciousness is an issue for me. Unconsciousness is too close to death. Hence the desire that I’ve had since I was a child to stay up later and later into the night.

But sometimes it’d be fun to be almost unconscious.

I work by day, as a writer who loves word rhythms, a-tonal sentences and pithy phrases beyond reason. Then, late at night, when I’ve no energy left, I avoid the darkness of sleep by switching to my second-favorite solitary activity—shopping. And on rare occasions I take half an Ambien beforehand. Shopping on Ambien turns out to be a trip: last month I was accused of criminal activity via email from Japan.

“Hello, I’m a seller of your bidding auctions… I know you are not bad buyer, but I hear complaining buyers because you bid thousand dollar bids and then you retract bid. Buyers ask are you trying to raise prices illegally with me.”

It seems that in my Ambien stupor I mistakenly made an opening bid of $25,000 for a unique, geometric pre-World War II piece of silk. I meant to start at $25. I realized my mistake (I’ve some recollection of this) and went to great lengths to withdraw the bid. In doing this I accidentally saw the highest bid of my competitor.

I made this mistake three times. Each time I withdrew my bid, these semi-
conscious maneuvers threw sellers and competing buyers into a tizzy. I was accused of cheating.

The air cleared after I made apologies all around.

But mostly the few times I’ve shopped on Ambien have ended up better than Christmas for me.

It adds the element of surprise—surprising myself. For example, 10 days ago I bought several silk pieces, including an antique 1930s navy ocean wave treasure that will make a perfect urban scarf. Because I’d slugged half an Ambien, I had no recollection of which pieces I’d won.

Within the following weeks, oddly-shaped packages arrived, lovingly packed by zealous strangers from Osaka. The most remarkable thing is that opening each package confounded me. Their contents were mysteries.

But, sure enough, they turned out to be wondrous designs on silk—the best gifts imaginable.

They’d been ordered by me and for me: “unpicked” pieces exquisitely tailored to my “picky” taste. 

—
Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

Philip Roth is a street treasure. We see him strolling 57th Street and the Upper West Side. The only place to begin a short rumination about him is with a priceless quote from the greatest American novel of the last century:

“She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. As soon as the last bell had sounded, I would rush off for home, wondering as I ran if I could possibly make it to our apartment before she had succeeded in transforming herself. Invariably she was already in the kitchen by the time I arrived, and setting out my milk and cookies. Instead of causing me to give up my delusions, however, the feat merely intensified my respect for her powers. And then it was always a relief not to have caught her between incarnations anyway—even if I never stopped trying…”

I’ve got a signed and typed page of Portnoy’s Complaint framed on my wall. It’s the best art I have.

I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve eaten food with the master writer five times. I know him a little. When I first dined with him and a mutual friend, he made me laugh so hard my stomach cramped from lack of oxygen. Who knew that laughing was about exhaling, not inhaling? I got lucky and spilled gazpacho on my shirt (never a tidy eater), thus giving me an excuse to rush to the bathroom, lean against a sink and inhale deep gasping breaths. The second time I met him, I was visiting the same mutual friend when Roth popped in. They began playing. Roth assumed the persona of my friend’s whiny Jewish mother while masturbating my friend’s black umbrella. In a kvetchy falsetto, Roth scolded my friend for being a bad son. First of all, he had a woman in his apartment.

I laughed (exhaling) and excused myself to inhale like crazy again in the bathroom.

Our most recent meeting took place at a take-out bagel joint on 57th street. There he was, standing in front of me and ordering the bagel with scallion cream cheese made of soy. I accosted him. I couldn’t help it. “Please join me for lunch,” he responded, bowing self-mockingly toward the narrow counter.

I was a nervous wreck.

“Healthy choice,” I said hoarsely, “the soy cream cheese.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said, adding “but isn’t it too late for me?”

“No” I said, utterly disarmed.

I didn’t tell him I’d read Claire Bloom’s book about bewildering tricks he played on her. Nor did I mention the man selling signed Philip Roth novels near Zabar’s, whom I badgered into confessing that he was Philip Roth’s brother. We discussed my non-fiction book—coincidentally, the story behind Roth’s masterpiece American Pastoral.

He didn’t make me laugh this time, but I became manic listening to his insights. I ran titles for my book by him. He helped me choose the best one.

“The aristocracy of the left,” he said. “Use the word ‘aristocracy’ in an adjectival way.”

Roth doesn’t tell the whole truth. Our mutual friend told me that sometimes, when he sits down to write, his right arm becomes paralyzed.

“No, no, no,” said the venerable Mr. Roth, with fond nostalgia. “Years ago, I occasionally got mild elbow pain and saw physical therapists. But each time I’d console myself by bringing a different therapist home.”

Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

By Susan Braudy

A poisonous cloud hovers. The literally sickening gap between the very rich and the rest of us in New York City is widening as you read this sentence. I am singularly blessed with a rich, generous brother—who’s been there for me in a medical pinch. Otherwise, my health and life span might have been compromised.

It turns out that many of the best, snootiest New York doctors are refusing to settle for Medicare fees, dangerously widening the healthcare gap. Several of our finest so-called caregivers fired me when I joined Medicare because they said the fees that Medicare pays just weren’t high enough.

Why can’t the government make it illegal for rich doctors to either fire or insist on full fees from Medicare patients? This feels so cold-hearted for patients, such as myself, who’ve been cared for by these doctors for years.

The mess isn’t as sickening as the hordes of doctors opting out of Medicaid, a tragic story that hit the front page of the New York Times, but it’s pretty icky.

Dr. Carlin Vickery was the first doctor to present the bewildering Medicare facts to me in her orchid-decorated upper Fifth Avenue office. She simply charges much more than Medicare would reimburse her. Some of our finest doctors—indeed the finest on earth, such as breast surgeon Alisan Goldfarb—have not opted out of Medicare. But Dr. Goldfarb’s an exception; her Medicare fee is 10 percent of her normal operating fee. Another hero is my world-class cardiologist Dr. Martin Post, who diagnosed a symptom-free David Letterman as having a dangerously weak heart. (“He has a seventh sense,” says my neighbor Mara Gardner. “He senses the heart.”)

I know the sad story backward and forward. For the past decade at least, Medicare has reduced fees to shrinks, for example, by 5 percent a year, refusing to consider advancing inflation and rents. This year, Congress voted to reduce fees by 23 percent, then put the decision on hold. Dr. Ann Dolinsky, a superb psychiatrist, is the only one I know who has not terminated her Medicare patients.

I don’t know whom to blame. But holy smokes, I’m scared.

I think New York magazine’s list of best doctors should note whether they take Medicare. The latest doctor to opt out on me is Dr. Miriam Levy, of Medical Imaging of Manhattan, who I’m told is the best in the business. If I want a bone density scan from her office, which I’ve patronized for two decades, I must pony up $400 (loyalty is not an issue). I must say I’ve noticed a certain parsimony and indifference to patients’ time in the way this office is run. I’ve sat three hours waiting. The reason, I was told, is to insure that machines and technicians are used as much as possible.

Dr. Jesse Rosenthal, psychopharmacologist, announced that he’d fire me when I reached Medicare age. He told another doctor he doesn’t like treating older people. Dr. Andrew Martorella, an endocrinologist, is one doctor I continued to see for a year after he suddenly decided to refuse Medicare insurance.

Why the hell can’t the government’s Medicare insurance match insurance payments from private companies? Another solution: Why can’t Congress at least set up a sliding scale of payment, based perhaps on patient income, allowing patients to reimburse doctors and to at least match fees paid by private insurers, thus compensating doctors a bit better for their vital work? Will the government’s new healthcare plan pay too little for many doctors as well? Help! n

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Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

I recently read that Christopher Hitchens’ upcoming memoir tells of his passionate love affairs with boys in boarding school in England. No big deal for the now-married, smart-as-a-whip pundit and gray eminence.

Have we missed the boat? I think so.

We post-Stonewall generation of Americans seem to believe that a man or woman is either 100 percent homosexual or 100 percent straight. This is despite the fact that a few years ago, Drew Barrymore casually declared herself bisexual, as do some students at all-girl colleges. Recently, Anna Paquin, the New Zealand actress who won an Academy Award for her role in The Piano, the film starring the great Holly Hunter, has declared herself bisexual and in a relationship with a man.

During my years as a Ms. editor and writer (workaholic that I am, I wrote more byline features than anybody), I became intensely puzzled about women’s sexuality. After much reading, I found the most satisfying hypothesis in the writings of researcher Alfred Kinsey, who believed that female sexuality was “plastic,” i.e., malleable. He believed that women were capable of sexual response to a person of either sex. Because of what he saw as our sexual passivity, he decided it just depended on who came on to us.

This satisfied me vis-à-vis the formerly married women I knew who were declaring themselves lesbians—several of whom shamefacedly had abortions after they came out.

But what about men? I assumed they were homosexual or heterosexual.

But for a few years now I’ve been facing the absolutely amazing Scotsman Craig Ferguson, late-night talk-show host extraordinaire and autodidact who writes high-brow, totally honest books and who can respond to anything with a pertinent joke—like Louis Armstrong riffing on a new melody.

Craig is obsessed with sex—and speaks of having had affairs with both sexes. I was beady-eyed for a long time, thinking he was homosexual and trying to hide it. When a female guest touches his knee, he mumbles “do that again, please.” And whenever he mentions Orlando Bloom he makes it clear he’s attracted to him big time. Craig recently married a third wife (much younger and richer). Is Craig lying to us? To his wife?

By way of explanation he says only, “Hey, I’m European.”

Then my brain sprang into action (finally). Craig means that “the English vice”—which is what the French call homosexuality and which is practiced by upper middle class and married Englishmen, as well as boys in English boarding schools, somewhat routinely—is simply that: a sort of vice that is practiced without stigma by otherwise heterosexual men. (Oddly, little is known about Englishwomen and their secrets or vices—the society is, alas, not designed for them; men dress better, have the right to sleep with men on the side and have exclusive men-only private clubs.)

In general, Europeans seem way ahead of us on this matter and other sexual issues. Yawning and in general unperturbed about distinctions regarding his own sexuality, Craig is probably wiser and more sophisticated and less hypocritical than we are—we who kvell and gossip every time a public person is outed as an adulterer, philanderer or homosexual—when in fact there’s probably almost no one who hasn’t practiced one of the three aforementioned sexual behaviors.

I believe bisexuality is our natural state and as we loosen up a bit, it will be become more and more commonplace. 

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Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

By Susan Braudy

Years ago, I took the A train to Harlem to speculate about living in a refurbished brownstone with thick walls. But that night I dreamed about losing my long view up Central Park and awoke homesick.

In Harlem, I strolled into the Studio Museum on 125th Street, one of the first to give artists workspaces. I love the hard-edged, locally-made African designs on bark cloth in the museum shop. This street pulsates like no other. Strangers laugh together. Six women teased me into buying a hat with a wire brim that the vendor twisted into every style (honestly). Back home, I couldn’t work the hat’s magic. It sulkily awaits a prince’s kiss to revive its mojo.

On the bus ride home from Harlem, on Riverside Drive at 79th Street, I glanced out the window and took off my sunglasses. But there was no denying it: the washed out, beige faces looked almost sickly. They (and I) don’t possess the hundreds of glorious gold skin tones my eyes had adjusted to in Harlem streets.

Golden people.

Someday, I mused, maybe people of all races in this country will marry each other and we’ll all be golden.

When Barack Obama started his campaign for the presidency, Hillary Clinton’s experience and gender made her my candidate.

“But can she win?” asked my friend Michael Wolff.

“Oh, Obama will win,” I blurted.

I loved talking to Michael because sometimes I said things I didn’t know I knew.

“But what about his, umm, skin color problem?” he asked.

Again, I blurted: “He’s the glamorous color.”

Not only was he a big-deal idealist/
intellectual (president of Harvard Law Review), but he was so confident and beautiful in his black suit and white shirt that he seemed a glorious apparition. Although, despite his golden young beauty, he’s never struck me as sexy, as Bill Clinton had from the get-go.

For decades, many liberals ludicrously shied away from even mentioning that a friend was a person of color, pretending to be color-blind. We cannot be afraid to talk about race.

I think we’ve always been envious of Afro-American physiognomy. Don’t forget that Southern men forced beautiful black women slaves to make babies, and envied the genitals of black men. Today, we flock to poisonous tanning salons to make us look temporarily golden. Check out Angelina Jolie’s face—pillowy lips and big brown eyes for starters. Actresses are also injecting fat into their butts for similar reasons.

Additionally, we’re proud exporters of rock ‘n’ roll to Europe and Asia. All hail Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley—and don’t forget Beyonce.

At college, I was friends with a very bright French major, an exchange student from Virginia. When he stamped his foot, pummeled his guitar strings and sang, “And they call the wind Mariah,” I soared to a place between happiness and tears. He was the first golden-skinned person I knew.

A direct male descendent of an early governor of Virginia, his ancestors were one-quarter black. I still wonder why we consider him black when he’s more Caucasian. These days you’re the race you choose—according to Joe Weintraub, a U.S. Census supervisor.

I celebrate my old friend’s physical beauty and long to be able to describe the bronze or gold or (less and less common) ebony tones of other bodies and faces. I say, let’s pat ourselves on the back: We’re stepping up—despite Goldman Sachs, Sarah Palin and crazed weather, most likely due to global warming.

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Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

Well, I’m dying to nominate the totally hypnotic movie Who Do You Love for an Academy Award. Alas, I can’t. Every story doesn’t get a happy ending.

And I wish I could review a couple movie reviewers (they run in packs like wolves, producing almost identical reviews), including the New York Times’ Stephen Holden. He nit-picked to near-death this superb fictionalized biography of the Chess brothers, who launched rock ‘n’ roll in Chicago in the 1940s. He keeps comparing it unfavorably to Cadillac Records, a star-studded movie on the same subject released a year ago. Critics instigate tragedy. It’s blood sport.

Yes, I’m way too vengeful. But when I read Holden’s review of Who Do You Love, I almost hoped Rubert Murdoch would buy the Times to turn it into a tabloid just to punish Holden. He’d fit right in with his off-the-wall movie taste.

Holden quibbles with the film’s timeline because Etta James’ sultry hit “At Last” came out in 1961, after the movie ends. But the main female character isn’t Etta James. She’s a fictional character, sexy and doomed, named Ivy Mills, who can’t sing unless she’s high on heroin. Ivy seduces the married Leonard Chess (played by the super-intense, utterly believable Alessandro Nivola), separating him from his wife. Chess tries to get Ivy Mills off heroin and when he goes to her hotel room to end their relationship, he finds her dead.

Who Do You Love is an example of Hollywood money people poking fat, greedy fingers into movie pies. Our best movies are either never made or are unceremoniously dumped by dumb producers or distributors.

The mile-a-minute Who Do You Love uses music like it’s Meryl Streep. The moment I sat down, I was pulled out of my own body into the world of the Jewish Chess brothers, who boldly traded an inherited junkyard for a musical empire. They created a loving, almost curatorial business relationship with such greats as Delta blues genius Muddy Waters (played with a swagger by the charismatic David Oyelowo) and Bo Diddley (played by Robert Randolph).

Chi McBride gently steals every scene (remember him? He played a mayor on Monk). Here he plays Willie Dixon, bass player and songwriter who guides Leonard Chess through his mesmerizing voyage of discovery of Chicago’s culture of black music originals. McBride can make us feel nearly anything with his reaction shots—from irony to pain—and he never ever overplays it.

The woman sitting next to me at the East Village theater clapped at the end of the film and said she got a lump in her throat when, after a disagreement, McBride tells Leonard Chess that he gets it, their relationship is not friendship, just business. This movie should be McBride’s break-out hit.

By the time you read this, hideous random circumstances will have pulled Who Do You Love from theaters. I can only urge you to barrage Netflix and Video Room and watch it at home.

This movie is the finest I’ve seen in a long time made by Americans. It wasn’t released well. Indeed, it was dumped almost anonymously. It should’ve opened at Sundance. But I’m proud that this film is better than the best BBC work—a high standard, indeed.

Shit happens, particularly in our movie business, where self-promotion and brazen belief in oneself, alas, trump good taste and great entertainment.

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Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.