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[Bright Shiny Morning on Amazon]

The best way to meet rich men is to cultivate rich friends. Wealth attracts wealth and this is usually done through introductions. If you don't know any wealthy people, however, don't despair. They're easy to meet.

First of all, find out who they are. Check the society column for weddings and engagements. Not only will you get an idea of who's who, but you'll also find out the names of the most fashionable churches. Claudia, 23, makes it a point to go to Mass in the "better" churches and then mingle with the parishioners at coffee hour following the service.

Another special group of men who lead hectic lives and also put up with a lot of frustration are doctors. They often get rid of their nervous tension on the racquetball court. Check out the health clubs nearest the large teaching hospitals...

[T]here are other ways of meeting doctors. . Hospital cafeterias are particularly good after July 1, when a whole new class of interns arrive. For the first few weeks everyone's eyeing one another—it's just like the first few days of school. Hospital cafeterias are open to the public as well as the staff.

Today's selection comes from Chapter Four: Flirting. It concerns the ways in which women can make themselves more attractive to menfolk.

The first and most effective flirtaphernalia a man notices is your hair, which is why it's probably a woman's most personal and creative accessory. It's one of nature's flirtaphernalia and it should be used to accentuate all your different personalities...

For some around-30 women, tousled, disheveled, and shorter curls look great because it's a youthful, alive look that moves easily into evening. Add a few whimsical feathers for a sexy touch. Or get a pair of oversized, dramatic earrings if you want to accentuate a slicked-back look. Earrings are flitty because men love the little tinkly sound that jewelry makes as a woman goes by...

Cutting your hair short can be an exciting way to change your look.... I never thought of my ears as particularly sexy until one man looked at me dreamily and said, "You have the most sensuous lobes. May I nibble one?"

You needn't go to extremes to be flirtatious. Sometimes a little braid at the side of your face can be more intriguing than a whole head of braids. It's certainly more feminine than simply pulling the hair back with a barrette.

Chieftain Grguch watched the darting and swerving pegasus with amusement and grudging respect. It quickly became clear to him that the ogres would not take the flying pair down, as his closest advisor had predicted. He turned to the prescient Hakuun then, his smile wide.

"This is why I keep you beside me," he said, though he doubted that the shaman, deep in the throes of casting a spell he had prepared precisely for that eventuality, even heard him.

The sight of a ridden pegasus over the previous battle with the elves had greatly angered Grguch, for he had thought on that occasion that his ambush had the raiding group fooled. The flyer had precipitated the elves' escape, Grguch believed, and so he had feared it would happen again—and worse, feared that an elf on high might discover the vulnerable Clan Karuck as well.

Hakuun had given him his answer, and that answer played out in full as the shaman lifted his arms skyward and shouted the last few words of his spell. The air below Hakuun's lips shuddered, a wave of shocking energy blaring forth, distorting images like a rolling ball of water or extreme heat rising from hot stone.

Hakuun's spell exploded around the dogding elf and pegasus, the air itself trembling and quaking ins shock waves that buffeted and battered both rider and mount.

This data is culled only from the first chapter but one can fairly extrapolate that similar proportions will be found throughout the 464 pages of the book. In one paragraph on page 8, he mentions: Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Moliere, Aeschylus, Goldoni, Sheridan, Wilde and Maeterlinck.

[Click to enlarge]

Wulfgar shook his head emphatically, silencing her. "I loved you," he said. "I loved you and lost you because I was a fool. It will always be the great regret of my life, the way I treated you before we were to be wed. I accept that we cannot go back, for even if you were able and willing, I know that I am not the same man. My time with Errtu left marks deep in my soul, scars I mean to rease in the winds of the Icewind Dale, running beside my tribe, the Tribe of the Elk. I am content. I am at peace. And I have never been more certain of my road.

Catti-brie shook her head with every word, in helpless and futile denial, and her blue eyes grew wet with tears. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. The five companions of the Hall were together again, and they were supposed to stay that way for all of their days.

"You say that you support me, and so I ask you to now," said Wulfgar. "Trust in my judgment, in that I know what course I must follow. I take with me my love for you and for Drizzt and for Bruenor and for Regis. Taht is ever in the heart of Wulfgar. I will never let the image of you and the others fade from my thoughts, and never let thelessons I have learned from all of you escape me as I walk my road."

"Your road so far away."

Wulfgar nodded. "In the winds of Icewind Dale."

"Karuck?" asked Ung-thol, a shaman of high standing. "Could it be any other?" replied Dnark, chieftain of the tribe of the Wolf Jaw. Both turned to regard the smugly smiling shaman Toogwik Tuk as Dnark remarked, "Your call was heard. And answered."

Toogwik Tuk chuckled.

"Are you so sure that ogre-spawn can be bent to your will?" Dnark added, stealing the smile from Toogwik Tuk's ugly orc face.

His reference to Clan Karuck as ogre-spawn rang as a clear reminder to the shaman that they were not ordinary orcs he had summoned from the lowest bowels of the mountain range. Karuck was famous among the many tribes of the world—or infamous actually—for keeping a full breeding stock of ogres among their ranks. For generations untold, Karuck had interbred, creating larger and larger orc warriors. Shunned by the other tribes, Karuck had delved deeper and deepr into the Underdark. They were little known in recent times, and considered no more than a legend among many orc tribes.

But the Wolf Jaw orcs and their allies of tribe Yellow Fang, Toogwik Tuk's kin, knew better.

"Speak not his name," Drizzt interrupted. "You know nothing of Bruenor, of his exploits and his judgments." "I know that he was no friend of—" "You know nothing," Drizzt said again, more forcefully. "The tale of Shallows!" one of the dwarves roared. "I was there," Drizzt reminded him, silencing the fool. The human spat upon the ground. "Once a hero, now gone soft," he muttered. "On orcs, no less." "Perhaps," Drizzt replied, and in the blink of an astonished eye, he brought his scimitars out in his black-skinned hands. "But I've not gone soft on highwaymen and murderers."

Black boys, much more than girls, feel the need to carry on these traditions as part of their identity of being hot and/or cool. When boys hang on to so-called Black English in the classroom and verbal confrontations in the street, they may be hanging tough with their homies, but they are handicapping themselves in the game of life. They can "trash-talk" or "play the dozens" better than anyone on the planet, and that still isn't going to get them a job or into college... no matter how often or how publicly they grab their crotches, crotch-grabbing isn't even going to get them a bus ride downtown.

When politicians come courting the black vote, they like to say, "It takes a village." Black people routinely respond, "Well, yes, okay." But no one seems to ask the questions that should come first: What is a village? What makes a village? Who acts for the village? Who speaks for it? One person? Two people?

On child-rearing:

African Americans sometimes use the term whupping when punishing their kids. This may very well have a connection to the slave experience. That isn't like jumping over a broom at your wedding. It is definitely not a part of the slave experience you wan to reenact.

I made myself a promise that I would not begin this book with the first-person singular pronoun I... and I've already broken that promise four times—five if you count the pronoun myself, which the Oxford American Dictionary defines as "corresponding to I and me." An unpromising sign.

April may be the cruelest month to Eliot, but to me it's the kindest, with the portents of spring, which is crammed with beginnings. Of holidays, I enjoy Memorial Day because it officially begins the pleasant summer season, and dislike Labor Day because it ends it. Thanksgiving is welcome because it begins the Christmas season, of which I confess to being inordinately fond and I'm resistant to the compulsory joy of New Year's Eve, because it ends it.

This affection for beginnings has had a predictable effect on my preferences. Though I should know better than to invite comparison with my betters as I begin my own literary effort, I confess to unbridled admiration for the blunt simplicity of "Call me Ishmael"; the instant dramatic engagement of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"; the authorial certainty of "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way": the ringing challenge of Donne's "Go and catch a falling star/Get with child a mandrake root": the quiet fury of Yeats's "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon can not hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the center cannot hold": the stately opening chords of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings, which greet us not with the C-major tonic but with a submediant A minor chord, as if the boat had left the dock without us, and we had no choice but to jump in and swim after it....

Dear Oprah Winfrey,

I am writing to inform you that I cannot accept your kind offer to name this book as your October, 2007 selection for Oprah's Book Club™. I realize this letter may come as something of a shock, given my reputation for shameless self-promotion, which I hope precedes me. I also realize that authors who cross you tend to wind up with an awful lot of egg on their faces. Fortunately, I walk around most days with a four-cheese omelette hanging from my chin, so no problem there.

The truth is, I don't give a shit how many books you sell. I don't care how much dough you give away, or how many famous people you make cry. At the end of the day, you're a TV star. You show up on a tiny screen and give lonely people a place to park their emotions for an hour. You're the world's leading retailer of inspiration. You're the Wal-Mart of Hope.

Literature, though, isn't supposed to be a convenient shopping experience. It's a solitary imaginative endeavor aimed at arousing the anguish hidden inside us, the bad news of our hearts. There's no celebrity shrink on hand to dispense hankies, no empathic host to buzz manage our tears. There's no assurance that our frail human experiment will end in triumph by the final commercial break. You tell me, Oprah: should the Savior of Publishing be available with your basic cable package?

I can already hear your fans howling for my head. But from where I'm sitting, you're just another zillionaire narcissist for whom fame (the illusion of unconditional love) has become the true goal and your public acts of good merely the means. Whatever noble cause you're pimping this week, in the end you're pimping yourself. Because if you really gave a shit about all us little people, you'd hoist your fluctuating ass out of the luxury self-help suite and express some outrage over the state of this nation: the young Americans snuffed over in Iraq, the poor ones economically sodomized by your pal Dubya, a realpolitik that dependably rewards bigotry over policy.

But outrage isn't your thing, Oprah. To express such a vulgar emotion would violate the dictates of the brand. All we have to do to solve the crisis of empathy in this country is buy your lousy magazine, right? The one with you on the cover every single fucking month. Forget confronting evil. Just keep dreaming and hoping and snuffling with Oprah, keep gulping down the aspirational sugar pills. What a crock.

The answer is no.

If that makes me an asshole, fine, I'm happy to be an asshole on behalf of literature. Someone has to be.

Until we meet again,

Phil Donahue

P.S. - Kidding! My real name is Steve Almond.

Dear Ms. Winfrey,

I'm not sure if you got the last letter I sent. I hope not. I don't want to make excuses, so I'm not going to mention that I suffer from depression, or that my infant daughter was ill, or that I'd just finished a truly disappointing blackened grouper sandwich that left me queasy and out of sorts.

The point is contrition. I'd like to apologize for the things I wrote. I talked this over with some of the folks at my publishing house yesterday - there were twelve in all, I guess - and they felt that I had done both of us a disservice by refusing your gracious (potential) offer to select my book for Oprah's Book Club™. Their contention was that insulting you may have gratified my own righteous indignation, but did little to promote the greater cause we share. That crack about your ass, for instance. I didn't mean that it literally fluctuates.

A lot of this boils down to insecurity. There's a part of me that worries you won't really choose my book for Oprah's Book Club™. The letter was my way of rejecting you before you could reject me. Pretty third-grade on my part.

I have deep respect for the work you do, not just as a media figure, but as a literary philanthropist. You could easily have hitched your wagon to the Freakshow Express, like Springer. Instead, you've spent your cultural capital encouraging people to read writers like Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. That I failed to acknowledge this reflects nothing beyond my own chronic bitterness.

This is all by way of saying that, on the off chance that you have read my previous letter, I hope you will file it under Unintended Satire, or perhaps Temporary Dementia. Rest assured, I have no plans to pull a Franzen. It would be an honor to appear on your show. And I promise not to jump on your couch! (Unless you'd like me to.)

Also, as I mentioned, I have a new daughter. Despite her recent near-fatal illness, she has fully recovered - something of a miracle, the docs say - as you can see from the photo I've enclosed. Her mother bought her the Oprah 4 Prez T-shirt.

Yours in apology & admiration,

Steve Almond

Dear Oprah,

This is going to seem a little crazy, but I'm enclosing another copy of the letter I sent along earlier this week. I know how much mail you must get. Better safe than sorry.

Great show yesterday, by the way! I have to admit that I had not given a great deal of thought to the challenges of menopause, but I appreciated how you handled the jerk who referred to his wife as Senora Hot Flasha. My wife and I had a long talk after the show and I came away with a whole new perspective. It's like you say, "Menopause isn't a process, people, it's a journey."

Let's talk soon,

Steve

P.S. Yes, another photo of our little angel. That's her peeking out from an official Oprah tote bag. What can I tell you - she's a fan!

Oprah,

One thought I had, in terms of planning - one of the essays in my book is about Condoleeza Rice. Long story short, I slam her pretty hard. I'm thinking it might be cool to do a show that's about "healing" the rift between Condoleeza and myself. She could (for instance) apologize for the lies that got us into the Iraq war, and I could apologize for referring to her as "the President's office wife." Then we might hug. Or do some music together. Or both.

Think about it.

Steve

Oprah!

Just a silly note to tell you that my wife and I rented The Color Purple. Again. What can I tell you? You got jobbed at the Oscars. Your performance made Anjelica Huston's look like dinner theater. Also: my publicist was wondering when I might hear back from you. (I explained about your schedule, but you know how these people get.)

Also also: Would it be too forward for me to refer to you, in future correspondences, as my homegirl?

Oprah in '08!

Steve

Dearest O,

Last night I was looking through The Uncommon Wisdom of Oprah Winfrey: A Portrait in Her Own Words and I came across this quote.

"I don't do anything unless it feels good. I don't move on logic. I move on my gut. And I have a good gut!"

You were talking about your business philosophy. But it got me thinking about your actual gut, and the way the tabloids cover it so obsessively. (Extra! Extra! Oprah Gains Four Pounds!) It's like, in a way, your body has become public property, up there on display for everybody to gawk at and poke and prod. I'm sure this thought has occurred to you a few million times, but here you are, the most influential black woman in human history, and somehow you're still the white man's slave.

That's fucked up.

Steve

WHAT TO WEAR UNDERNEATH YOUR DRESS I once saw one of the most influential women in fashion wearing one of her standard amazing outfits: a great jacket with a great pair of jeans. But when she turned around, I was horrified. Panty lines! Granny panties! Who in the twenty-first century does not own a thong? That day she fell from grace just a little bit (or maybe a lot). You have to check your backside before leaving. No panty lines or thongs showing!

[T]here is nothing like walking through the halls of the Louvre or watching an Italian woman move through the streets of Rome. These are the informal lessons a girl doesn't soon forget. Wherever we went, I would notice how differently women dressed in each country. I would also watch as my mother picked up the styles, buying the necklaces and dresses and bringing them back to Colombia. These women—the women of the world and my mother—showed me how the best sources of inspiration are often found outside of your area code. It doesn't matter where you go; it's what you bring home.

SOUTH AMERICA
There is a strong focus on femininity and standards of personal grooming that the South American woman adheres to every single day. The standards are not only a matter of presentation, but a matter of moral fiber. There is a notion, passed down from generation to generation, that your physical presentation reflects the person you are on the inside. Through everyday pageantry, there is an aura of effortless chic and a display of correctness inside and out that never lets up.

EUROPE
For these women, style is never created; it simply is. And it has meaning. Take the Hermès bag, for example. The French woman carries hers because it is an heirloom, not because it is an "it bag."

ASIA
Throughout Asia, style is laced with ritual and culture. The geisha, for example, with her unremitting attention to luxuriant, theatrical beauty, has cultivated a sense of feminine mystery for centuries.

INDIA
On a daily basis, the women in India are ensconced in extreme color, sparkle, and texture. They wear endlessly ornate, gold-and-enamel jewels quite unabashedly, with silken saris of every hue. The important events of their lives are usually punctuated by a ritualized approach to the kind of beauty that is laden with custom and tradition.

AFRICA
For women in Africa, ornamentation has always been paramount to style, and their perspective is reminiscent of queens and goddesses. Elaborate head wraps, luminous colors, organic textures, and jewels of all kinds characterize the impacting power-beauty of the African woman. For obvious reasons, these women have had to reclaim their style throughout the centuries, forging an even stronger sense of pride and alliance to these roots.

THE UNITED STATES
In America, the promises of possibility and inspirations are limitless. Anything that might catch your eye is worth the trek, but you do not have to travel far. If you cannot get away, go to the ethnic shops in your neighborhood. But wherever you go, be it Tokyo or the local Indian store, this is the time to buy with drama. Bring back something fantastic. Pull out all the stops. Humidity be damned, forget about modesty, leave the trends behind, and have a little fun.

How many times have you read in a fashion magazine that you're supposed to "mix it up," that wearing a Chanel jacket with jeans from the Gap is okay and you can shop at Hermès and Forever 21! Um, probably, like, a million? Nina thought her readers might need to hear that advice again (also in this chapter, she advises throwing things out that don't fit):

Anything that sounds like it won't make sense usually looks amazing. The uptown with the downtown. The soft with the hard. The casual with the elegant. Trust me, it works. Unpredictable is far more interesting than predictable. It is what is going to make you look different and interesting, which is the hallmark of a stylish woman. Mixing it up is not about looking staged. It is supposed to be personal. Keep those items that are uniquely you.

Mixing it up means taking the unexpected and making it yours. I had never been an old-lady-diamond-bracelet kind of girl. I just didn't see the appeal. But at a dinner party one night, this incredibly chic and stylish woman was wearing on of those old lady bracelets. She paired it with her beads from Thailand, her Kabbalah string [Ed: Ewww], and a few other pieces that she never takes off. She made it a part of who she was, and for the first time in my life, I wanted an old lady diamond bracelet... or maybe I was just in awe of the expert mix-and-march situation. I never got the bracelet, but I never forgot the image of that perfectly imperfect mix.

Style is about these imperfect mixes and these unusual juxtapositions, it takes time and trial to perfect the mix. It can't look staged, it has to look effortless.

Go ahead and try:

H&M with Prada

Vintage with a modern trend

Plaid with stripes

Preppy with edgy

Masculine with feminine

Flirty with fierce

Funky with basic

Leather with lace

Sweet with vampy

Uptown with downtown

The precious with the not

[Rafiq] never touched me 'down there.' I kept telling myself I was doing him a favor by stopping his hands at my hips. I told myself the exchange might mean too much for him: fingers + penis + vag = marriage? It wasn't worth the risk. As it was, I concluded we had already moved too fast because he almost didn't let me get on the plane when it was time for me to leave. As I was leaving, he bolted through the security barricade in front of my gate and waved me down. I was supposed to go back to India and I told him I would, but once I gained perspective back in California, I couldn't return. I got emails from Rafiq for years, asking me to come back. He got married a year ago, but the emails haven't stopped. In hindsight, I realize that it might not have been selflessness that led me to act the way I did. It's possible that I was too uptight even for him and I disguised my discomfort by telling myself that it wasn't fair for me to 'corrupt' this 'sweet and innocent' Muslim man.

A year and half and a masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University later, I took off to Thailand for a reporting job in Bangkok. The year that ensued managed to totally screw up any possibility of orgasm and not only because I didn't have any sex. Sexually, I regressed in Bangkok.

Bangkok is crazy. I know there are so many stereotypes and rumors, but, you know what? A lot of it's true. I had a yearlong dry spell, became asexual and learned to pay for human contact. Every girl is so tiny there that even though at a size 4—petite by U.S. standards—in Thailand, I felt like a Snuffleupagus among a herd of My Little Ponies. The proprietors of clothes shops would look at me and say, "We don't have large." Before Thailand, I took femininity for granted, but in that city, I found it was a fragile thing, like a fine layer of perfume that could easily wash off in the shower.

Bangkok was the opposite of India; I was invisible to the men there, and many of the women were so in touch with their sexuality that it was intimidating—Chandra came to visit me and even she was amazed. Let's just say men don't go to Bangkok to score a five-footer from the States; I'd bet my first orgasm on that. It's the place (and I'm being very biased here) where dorky guys that never got girls in their home countries go to exploit the poverty and enjoy the go-go bars. They finally feel like the king of the mountain because they can buy a hot young chick for the same price they used to pay for a McDonald's Happy Meal.

And after a while, I hate to say it, but I kind of understood the trend. I accidentally got my first Thai massage at a whorehouse. There was a big window; behind it were a gaggle of girls, all wearing pants that fit like body paint, playing cards. My warning flag went to half-mast, but I didn't know how it all worked yet, so I didn't want to judge. I picked out the girl with #8 pinned to her shirt and everyone cheered - it'd never been so easy to get applause. In a small musty room, she climbed all over me like I was a jungle gym. It was at the moment when she stood on my thighs, pulled my chest up by lifting my arms and twisted me to the left until my back cracked at least ten times that men's fetish with Thai women started making sense—but it doesn't mean it made it any easier to accept (she was so accommodating that I couldn't get upset; she waited as I dressed just in case I changed my mind and wanted a happy ending).

Towards the end of the year, I finally made two male friends - one was from Wales and the other from Kansas. They both taught school there and gave me a window into the expat male world. They'd often pick up prostitutes after a long night out on the town - after more than a year there they were desensitized and paying was standard. They related stories of getting Chlamydia tests—which always came out positive—the old-fashioned way, with a cotton swab down the head. Afterwards, we'd go out for a beer to help subdue the pain. I went to the go-go bars with them and watched women open bottles with their vulvas (what is the plural of vulva anyway—vulvae?) and shoot ping-pong balls and darts out of them. Sure, I was grossed out. But I couldn't help wondering how things might be different for me if I had the chutzpah to jam one of those up there and had strong enough Kegel muscles to launch it into the air.

I spent an entire year with no one making a pass at me. Okay, there was one time. I went to a male sex show with my gay Thai friend—I was the only girl in the audience. After the show the Thai boys, who make most of their money by prostituting themselves to the gay spectators, excitedly streamed off the stage to greet me—their one chance at scoring a girl. Weirdly enough, by that point, their advances, though they were only for money, felt oddly validating. Anyway, I had to pass on the opportunity—it must have been something about the sodomy I just watched them perform on each other. Instead, my weekly massages had to suffice for my quota of human contact.

Maybe this excerpt from it—it was mailed to us by a helpful publishing sprite (if more sprites like this one would crawl out of the woodwork every day, we'd be having multiple ones of what Mara isn't having)—will help clarify stuff. Or maybe, you know, not.

He spoke Urdu; his English was heavily accented. He was the opposite of almost every guy I met there. He was like the earnest backcountry boy from the Ozarks trying to find work in the big city - naïve and innocent. On a $150 monthly salary, he was desperately trying to save enough money to pay the dowries for his four sisters before getting a wife for himself. He'd never had a girlfriend before.

It was Ramadan and he decided to take me home with him to meet his parents - at the time I had no idea what that meant. I thought he just wanted to give the American tourist a new view of his subcontinent. On our way to Mysore, Rafiq told me that his father was an imam. Being aware of the Palestinian\Israeli conflict, but not much else about Muslim-Jewish relations, I thought his father was going to shoot me as soon as I reached his foyer.

We arrived early in the morning. Rafiq's mother and sisters practiced Purdah, meaning they wear a burka when outside or stay hidden when male strangers come into the home. They didn't speak English, but conveyed soon enough that they wanted to check out my legs. They laughed, smiled, pointed and pretty much squinted at the white glare emanating from my calves. They asked what caste I was from, which translates to: Which religion do you practice? As I told them I was Jewish, I cringed, expecting the worst, but they just knocked their heads back and forth, laughed and then motioned for me roll up my pant cuffs again. It was the first of many assumptions I held that India was soon to override.

After a long day of checking out the town, Rafiq and I returned to his home for dinner. His family dressed me in a burka and told me I looked beautiful. I didn't know how to take that exactly - I was one big black blob. Even my eyes were covered. (Incidentally, Rafiq's favorite outfit of mine was a huge unshapely yellow raincoat I wore during monsoon season).

Everyone got ready for bed; that meant rolling up the mat we just ate dinner on and substituting another mat where everyone would lie crammed together like crayons in a box, to go to sleep. Meanwhile, Rafiq and I climbed up to the roof. We looked at the neighboring buildings as the call to prayer began. As it did, I kissed him. I didn't know that was his first kiss at the time.

When we got back to Bangalore, I had some housing issues. I ended up staying with him in his little hovel, just outside the city. He had no furniture, only newspaper scattered here and there. The only decorations were two Sees' Candies boxes stapled to the wall, which my brother had sent over from California, with 'Sweet Memories' inscribed - by Rafiq - in permanent marker across the top. We slept on the tile, just a thin blanket beneath us. It was so hard I got bruises on my hips from tossing and turning. The bathroom was outside and we took showers with a bucket, heating the water with a plug-in warming wand. Our pastime was kicking cockroaches into the corners.

Rafiq was taught never to touch himself. He was a devout Muslim and he said masturbation was against his religion. Whether he knew what masturbation was or not remains a mystery to me; he was too shy to give much detail. He said he didn't know that sex even existed until he was in his late teens; from behind the kitchen curtain, he overheard his mother giving one of his sisters her wedding night instructions. So here I was, a bit of a prude myself, to say the least, meeting a man less sexually realized than me. In what I had been trying to achieve for years, he achieved in seconds (it is, indeed, so much easier for guys). Except he couldn't even appreciate the feeling; he got confused and thought he had to go to the bathroom. "I felt like I had to pee," he said, bobbing his head after his first hand job. So that wasn't exactly a turn on, if you know what I mean.

Confidence is captivating, it is powerful, and it does not fade—and that is endlessly more interesting than beauty. The first and most important step to developing style is to project this kind of confidence. The kind of confidence that tells others that you respect yourself, love yourself, and dress up for yourself and nobody else. You are your own muse. Style comes from knowing who you are and who you want to be in the world; it does not come from wanting to be somebody else, or wanting to be thinner, shorter, taller, prettier. Many of the most stylish women in the world have not been great beauties, but they have all drawn from an enormous amount of self-confidence. They made us think they were beautiful simply by believing it themselves. They did not let anyone else define them; they defined themselves.

I truly admire women who love themselves, even if they are not the standard beauty norm. I am fascinated by the "imperfect icons," the girls who are by far not the most beautiful girls in the room, but they are confident and think they're beautiful, so others think they are. I marvel at a six-foot-tall woman in stilettos, a big-bottomed woman in a curve-hugging skirt, a flat-chested woman in a tight, low cut T-shirt. When a woman embraces her "imperfections," they can become her greatest strengths, definers of her character and spirit. When she plays up her weaknesses and draws you to her flaws, she makes them special, attractive, and even enviable.

When I was fifteen, my parents sent me to an all-girls boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I strutted onto campus in a short skirt, high heels, and rabbit fur. There I stood, surrounded by khakis, jeans, pastel cable-knit sweaters, ribbon belts. "Look at the Colombian princess," the American girls must have been thinking. "We're gonna eat this one for lunch." I looked around this little bubble of preppiness. The girls all played lacrosse and they all dressed the same, more like boys than girls. I remember thinking, "Where the hell am I?" Before this moment, I considered myself really American and I thought I had seen everything. I had been to New York, Paris, Rome, but I had never seen this thing they called 'preppy.' But there I was, in maybe the preppiest town in America, nearly hyperventilating from my first experience with culture shock. My mother took me into the Wellesley town center to see if we could find something that would help me blend in a bit. The only item I found somewhat appealing was a pink angora cardigan with pearl buttons (I know). I regretted the purchase immediately and the cardigan was soon stuffed into the far depths of my closet, never to be worn again. I decided to hold my own—I was not going to be intimidated, especially by girls who wore L.L. Bean duck boots.

Nothing can prepare a Colombian girl for the sight of one hundred American girls trudging across campus in duck boots. I'm sure I thought myself quite superior, but now I admire a lot of those very American things. I think that blue jeans and a white shirt can be the most fabulous outfit. It's all about how you wear it. And I love a Chanel bag, but I also see the perfection in an L.L. Bean canvas tote. Functional, chic, simple. It's about how you carry it. So I am proud to say that I owe a lot of my style to a strong, colorful Colombian woman, who taught me that how you present yourself to the world is important. And I owe a lot to a man in white linen who shunned mathematics and instead pushed me to see the world. And I also owe quite a bit to a group of American prep school girls, who gave me my first culture shock, who gave me the opportunity to hold my own, and who understood simplicity long before I did (though I'm still not sure about those boots).

Less than a month after her CBS debut, she attended a cancer fund-raiser in Manhattan where she was introduced to a tall, good-looking young man by the name of Brooks Perlin. Unlike the self-made types Katie had been attracted to in the past - Jay Monahan, Tom Werner, and Chris Botti - Perlin came from a family of privilege. And at thirty-three years of age, he was, biologically speaking, young enough to be forty-nine-year-old Katie's son.

Perlin grew up in the tony suburban community of Darien, Connecticut. After graduating from Hotchkiss (the same elite boarding school attended by Tom Werner), he went to Williams College. There he was known as a jock who liked to parade around - a la John F. Kennedy Jr. - without his shirt on.

Though Katie found herself drawn to the young and energetic Perlin, their nearly seventeen-year age difference gave her pause. But when Perline called for a date, Katie couldn't resist saying yes.

"They seem comfortable with each other," said one of her friends. "She's a very young fifty. She's playful. She's cute. She's down-to-earth. And he's mature. They seem happy."

"It's a great match," said another friend of Katie's. "They both are honest and upfront. They make each other really happy."

Somehow, they managed to elude the paparazzi and keep their love affair secret for several months. They skied in Sun Valley and sunbathed on the beaches of Mexico. And when they were in New York, they often spent the nights at each other's apartment.

"Her behavior was a puzzle," said someone who was familiar with Katie's relationship with Perlin. "An anchor is supposed to be synonymous with wisdom. Going out with a man who is seventeen years your junior may be a sexual turn-on, but it's not the height of wisdom. Keep in mind that she is grist for the tabloid mill, and that she'd inevitably be caught. Seen that way, her behavior can only be described as self destructive. And you can be sure that if Les Moonves knew about it, he'd have thrown a conniption fit.

"It's my guess that Katie didn't really understand why she was flaunting this relationship with a younger man, and how, in an unconscious way, this might have been connected to her discomfort in the role of a serious news anchor," this person continued. "She would have told you that she had fallen in love. That she and Perlin were so compatible. A Demi Moore-Ashton Kutcher kind of thing.* But it sure looked like she was acting out in a very serious way."

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—
*The age difference between Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher is fifteen years.

Hamilton sighted deeply, as if deciding whether she was worth talking to at all, then said, "You are allowing your jealousy and insecurity to get in the way of my happiness, which is the epitome of "lower consciousness" behavior. You need to reread pages 57-59 in [his therapist] Penelope's book. In fact, you should probably reread the whole book because you seem to be backsliding quite severely. The only way for you to be happy is for me to be happy, and the only way for me to be happy is to be allowed to follow my bliss. And right now my bliss is Sapphire Rose."

"Your bliss is Sapphire Rose?" Kate demanded in disbelief. "Do you hear how that sounds?"

"Do you hear how you sound, Katie? Whiny and insecure." He got up, grabbed his jackedt from the back of the chair, and headed towards the door.

"Hamilton, wait," said Kate, still kneeling on the floor, having a hard time processing what she was hearing and standing up at the same time. "You know I love you."

"Yes, Katie, I know you love me." He headed towards the door, pausing one last time to turn and add, "But that's not really the point, is it?"

(As our scene opens, heroine Kate Keyes-Morgan is being counseled by her husband/manager Hamilton, who for all intents and purposes has "evil" written on his forehead in Sharpie pen.)

"What can I get you, my little princess? Tea? Decaf coffee? Wait a minute—your scene is done, isn't it? You could even have a piece of toast if you want. Shall we celebrate with a little sugar-free fruit spread? Yummy!"

Still trying to figure out how she had gone from the brink of divorce to being offered carbohydrates (well, carbohydrate-like foodstuff), Kate stepped gingerly into the minefield of communication with her husband. "Thank you, honey, that would be great. Although, we didn't actually get to my scene yesterday ... Yesterday was pretty much a waste of a day."

"Really?" Handing her a cup of tea and leading her back to the table (apparently the toast offer was completed-scene-dependent), Hamilton was the picture of chilvalry and husbandly concern. "Well, isn't that too bad? Why don't you sit right here and tell daddy what happened?"

"Well," said Kate, relaxing into his attentive mood, "It was just another high-drama day in the life of Sapphire Rose. Apparently, her new diet isn't working—again—so her skirt didn't fit—so we lost a whole day. Can you believe that?" Kate shook her head and grinned, ready to share a laugh with her husband at the absurdity of Sapphire's behavior. Instead, her grin was met with a very serious expression and a compassionate sigh.

"Poor Sapphire," said Hammilton, as if they had been discussing a dear friend who had lost a parent to cancer. "It must be so difficult for her."

Honey roasted peanuts: sweet, salty and creamy all in one miraculous package. She found herself standing frozen, transfixed before the holy grail of caloric density. What harm could one or two peanuts do? In fact, she told herself, her metabolism was probably slowing down, starved as she was for fat and sugar calories. Two or three peanuts could be just what her body needed to kick it into calorie-burning overdrive. Feeling almost righteous, she reached for the jar and twisted off the lid, the pop and hiss of the vacuum seal releasing the familiar heavenly scent. She inhaled deeply and shook out three peanuts, closed the jar, and took her tiny bounty back to her spot on the couch in front of the television. She ate the nuts painstakingly slowly, enjoying each one as if it were the richest, most extraordinary peice of Godiva chocolate. See? she thought as she finished the last one. No harm done.

She was right, too. There had been no harm done by the first tiny handful of peanuts. But who had ever beena ble to stop at three honey roasted peanuts. Just three more can't hurt, she told herself as she made her way back to the pantry, repeating the ritual of opening the jar, carefully shaking out three peanuts, and padding back to the couch.

And so the evening went, nut by nut, until Kate was shocked to find herself shaking out a handful of salt, sugar, and peanut dust. Hyperventilating from shame and the fear of being discovered, Kate hid the empty jar in the bottom of the recycling bin and went upstairs to brush the incriminating scent off her teeth and hide her disloyal body under Hamilton's bazillion thread-count duvet.

I

In her much larger trailer, exactly 100 yards closer to the soundstage, Sapphire Rose was having her own wardrobe trauma. Sapphire's problem, however, was not her belly, but the stupid waistband on the stupid skirt that the impossibly stupid wardrobe girl had hung in her closet.

"Goddamnit!" Sapphire screamed, kicking the door of her closet, the base of her couch, and finally the front door until it swung open with a booming crash. "Where the fuck is the fucking wardrobe girl?" she yelled to the world at large, secure int he knowledge that someone would bring her the wardrobe girl (whose name was Karen, but Sapphire had stopped bothering to learn names long ago, preferring to use her memory for new diets and emergency contact numbers for her facialist and emergency contact numbers for her facialist and plastic surgeon).

"Is there a problem?" asked Sam [a P.A.], appearing at the foot of her trailer steps, Starbucks tray in hand, calm as always in the face of one of Sapphire's many storms.

"Yes, there is a fucking problem. It is the same fucking problem I have every fucking day. The fucking wardrobe idiot put the wrong fucking skirtin my fucking room and it doesn't fucking fit!"

"Wow," said Sam. "That is fucked."

"Kate stood frozen in her bathroom doorway, bracing herself for the inevitable, the unavoidable, the potentially painful moment dreaded by women everywhere: the morning weigh-in."

Was it just her imagination or did the scale actually seem mean this morning, like the mechanical version of a popular yet cruel sixth-grade girl? Maybe it was the ungodly hour of the morning (4:30) or the fact that she hadn't had her coffee yet (or the resultant weight-reducing "release"), but she could swear that the scale seemed friendlier yesterday.

"For the love of God," she whispered to herself. "Calm down. It is only a scale, only a silly number." Unfortunately, she had "only a lingerie scene" to shoot today and whatever the scale said would soon be reflected on the camera, and then on television screens across America for all of re-run eternity. Taking a deep breath and holding it in (in the faint hope of creating an "airier" self), Kate stepped on to the scale and watched as the small digital screen computed her weight, body fat, hydration level and probably her credit score.

Oh shit.
Oh shit, shit.

Here's our second-favorite passage:

I was jealous in life. I admit it. I would admit it to her. But it was because of my connection to her. I would explain that. When we held each other, I had no past at all, no present but her body, no future but to lie there and not let her go. I was an egg hatched beneath her crouching body, I entered as a chick into her wet sky of a body, and all that I wished was to sit on her shoulder and fluff my feathers and lay my head against her cheek, my neck exposed to her hand.

And then the cracker [as the parrot has dubbed the lover, who is also described as having "a thick Georgia truck-stop accent" ] comes around the corner. He wears only his rattlesnake boots. I take one look at his miserable, featherless body and shake my head. We keep our sexual parts hidden, we parrots, and this man is a pitiful sight. "Peanut," I say.

There's this:

For years Victoria has worried that she has lived her life as a fake, a fraud waiting to be found out. A woman who intrigues not because she is obviously talented, but because she seems troubled. A woman famous for being famous. So it is a supreme irony that she has truly found what she really, really wants in a place where the false is real and where the look ist he life. As a style icon and a fashionista she is thriving, and, with her edgier European sensibility, she will shine in Hollywood, which, for all its glamour, has rarely set the fashion pace. She has found her true metier as a fashion plate where the fake, the fabulous, and the freaky hang out.

For all the criticism and mockery, millions admire and ape the Beckham lifestyle, their continuing success based on the simple equation that these days celebrity sells. There are more than just a name, they are a brand, an advertiser's dream. In a world saturated with celebrity, no one sell it like David and Victoria Beckham. As commentator Jason Cowley points out, "Global capitalism has, at present, no greater ambassador than David Beckham. His life is dedicated to conspicuous consumption and ostentatious display. In this he represents all that is worst and most excessive about our winner-takes-all society."

...[T]hanks to his taste in extravagant clothes and jewelry, penchant for rap music and his flash lifestyle, the blond footballer should be considered an honorary black man.

Best use of "in fact" ever!

For example, the Beckham family was celebrated as gods for a major exhibition of Indian-influenced art fo the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in June 2002. While David was depicted on a throne in a crown and robes as the Hindu deity Shiva, Victoria was the goddess Parvati and Brooklyn was the elephant god Ganesh.

Except, no matter how hard we tried, we could not find anything even a little bit interesting in this book. There's not even anything about the size of her head! Seriously, this is as good as it gets:

Like a moth to a flame, she was drawn to the spotlight. At the star-studded Fashion Rocks event in Monaco in October 2005, for example, she guaranteed attention by wearing a Cavalli dress slashed to her navel.

It's hard to tell from the outside of the Milan-based headquarters that Prada is one of the world's most successful luxury brands... You enter Prada through an anonymous portal-like oak door—there is no name, no plaque, nothing—and are greeted by a security guard dressed in gray. Everything is gray: the security office, the cobblestone courtyard, the various factory-like buildings surrounding it, and many of the cars parked in it. The only thing that gives the place away is the guard's uniform: it is not the typical formless security garb but tailored Prada with its stark—some would say neofascist—lines....

I was taken to a room I had read about often. It is officially Miuccia Prada's office, and it is as stark and contrived as her designs: poured concrete, a slew of orange and yellow molded plastic Eames chairs; and, sticking up in the center of the floor, a metal tube slide—by artist Carsten Holler—that runs three floors down to the parking lot and is titled The Slide No. 5. Prada has whizzed down it when asked to by reporters.

Prada entered the room as if it were her salon and she had been ushered in by her trusted butler rather than her communications director. This was a woman who had been raised in haute bourgeois society, with servants and grandeur and politesse. Unlike her competitor Donatella Versace, who so obviously came from nothing, Prada's airs are not airs at all: her snobbery is in her bones.

[...]

Her grandfather Mario Prada came from a family of civil servants. "They must have had money, because they traveled," she said, and Mario soaked in the luxury lifestyles of Europe's upper classes. In 1913 he opened a shop called Fratelli Prada with his brother Martino.... Miuccia Prada told me that, contrary to the oft-recounted tale, Fratelli Prada was not a luggage shop or a "travel company," like Louis Vuitton, but a boutique that specialized in "luxury objects...."

Miuccia said she didn't know how the shop weathered World War I, but it did, and sometime afterward Martino got out of the business. Mario opened a second shop on the nearby Via Manzoni, not far from La Scala. The company survived World War II, too, though Mario did close the Via Manzoni store then for good. After that, Miuccia became vague about family details. She claimed it was because she's not interested in the past, which may be somewhat true: the only thing historically referential in her designs is the little enamel triangle label, which is based on her grandfather's trunk labels. Her reticence could stem in part from her traditional upbringing. But I felt that there was a bit of mystery, something the family—or at least Miuccia—was hiding. When I pressed her on it, she bristled and answered hesitantly, if at all. What she wouldn't tell me, I discovered from sources close to Prada.

Mario married a woman named Fernanda—Miuccia wouldn't tell me her name, and they had two daughters, one being Luisia, Miuccia's mother. (Miuccia wouldn't tell me her aunt's name either.) Sometime in the 1940s, Luisa married a man named Bianchi, "from a wealthy, eccentric family," Miuccia said. She wouldn't tell me anything further about him—if he worked, if he supported the family, if he underwrote the company—except to repeat that he was "eccentric." She wouldn't even tell me his first name. "My mother would be very upset. She would think I've already said too much," Miuccia explained. His name, I later learned, was Luigi, and everyone called him Gino.

The Bianchis had three children, Alberto, Marina, and Maria—who later became known as Miuccia—and they lived in a four-story, late-nineteenth century palazzo on the Corso Porta Romana, where Miuccia, as well as other family members, still resides today. When I asked then why she was Miuccia Bianchi Prada, and not Miuccia Bianchi, she said, "My name is Miuccia Bianchi Prada. Some women keep their names. It's done in Italy." In fact, according to sources at Prada, Miuccia Prada was officially named Maria Bianchi until the late 1980s, when she had her elderly unwed maternal aunt adopt her, thereby officially changing her name to Miuccia Prada.

Purse-party ladies are the drug dealers of the counterfeit trade: they buy from the wholesalers and sell to suburban users, folks with a craving for the goods but not enough dough for the real thing. Like teenagers gathering at a friend's upper-middle-class home to buy a couple of joints with their allowance or babysitting money, suburban women converge in well appointed rooms for wine, hors d'oeuvres, gossip, and fake Vuitton or Gucci handbags. The women hosting these fetes will make a killing—they double their investment—and never declare it to the IRS. Take Virginia Topper, the wife of a lawyer in Long Island, New York. When she was busted in 2003, she had $60,000 in cash stashed in her underwear drawer and a Jaguar in the driveway. She was found guilty and sentenced to community service. "She was the ultimate Amway lady," [New York security expert Andrew] Oberfeldt laughed.

Most purse party ladies don't see buying or selling fake handbags as a real crime.... In a survey by the Anti-Counterfeiting Group, one-third of those questioned said they would knowingly buy counterfeit goods if the price and quality were right, and 29 percent said they saw no harm in the selling of fake goods unless the purchaser was at risk. "We'll go on raids in Chinatown wholesalers and we'll find five or six suburban women standing there—customers," Oberfeldt tells me. "We'll say to these women, 'The dealers take you down dark corridors, through locked doors. The police say, "Open up!" The lights are turned out, and everyone is told to be quiet. At what point did you realize something was amiss here?'"

[...]

Like the drug business, counterfeiting has become a professional racket run by organized crime. In New York in the 1980s until the mid-1990s, gangs—like a group of Asian American kids called the Born to Kill Gang—were in charge. "If we showed up to do a raid, women would take counterfeit watches, shove them up their shirts, and say, 'I'm pregnant, don't touch me!'" remembers Oberfeldt. "Once I saw a three-month-old baby in a milk crate that sat on top of a case of M-80 explosives. The gangs came after us with bats, they'd slash our tires, throw knives and significant explosives. It was terrorism. They tried to intimidate us. We videotaped them and locked them up and we got a lot of street cred when we manned up from ten to forty men and kept going."

Today Canal Street is run by grown-up gangs from China, like the Fukienese gang, as they are known in New York, whose members come from Fujian... They speak a Fujian dialect among themselves and run the north side of Canal Street, west of Broadway. And they freely let the police seize goods rather than get arrested for fighting back. The network is tight.... [T]hey all have direct-connect Nextel radio: if a police car turns the corner, the message is relayed down six blocks instantly and everything is shut down. They use homeless people as lookouts, giving them walkie-talkies. Random killings don't happen. "It's bad for business," notes Oberfeldt.