I need your advice and analysis.

I have a close FOFriend who has lost over 45 pounds during the last eight months and looks marvelous.  She decided to change her eating habits because a cardiologist linked her high blood pressure in part to her weight.

BUT…my FOFriend has become OBSESSED with her weight and she doesn’t eat a thing all day long.  Not a thing, except coffee. She tells me she eats dinner, but any time I’ve been with her at dinner, she’s picked at the food. If she’s with a group of women, all enjoying a lunch (a light lunch, I might add, of chicken and poached salmon), she won’t touch a thing.  It’s actually becoming a tad unpleasant to be in the same room with her, trying to enjoy a meal, while she nurses her coffee in the corner.

I love my friend, but think she may have adult anorexia and will become ill.  (I had another friend, 20 years my senior, who had late-onset anorexia. She’d eat two French Fries at lunch and the white of a single sunny side egg. It was quite an experience watching her gingerly cut the white away from the yolk. For dinner, she’d have half a bowl of pasta and lots of wine. By the time she reached 75, she resembled a well-dressed corpse. But she fit into a size four, and that is what counted most to her.)

If I say anything to my friend about her newfound eating habits, she tells me she “eats everything.” She clearly eats nothing.

Here are my questions: Why am I “threatened” by my friend’s dietary habits?  Do I really care if she eats nothing and eventually weighs 92 pounds or do I yearn to weigh 92 pounds myself (fat chance!) Do I try for an intervention or just grin and bear it?

It’s fun to sit around a table and enjoy nice food with nice company and nice conversation. My friend used to like food.  Now she just likes making believe she still likes it.

I drank my first martini when I was in my twenties, appropriately at a business luncheon at tony “21 Club,” where it was the beverage of choice back in the day.

The martini (vodka) became my favored drink throughout the seventies and eighties. I’d drink a couple at lunch many days and somehow managed to work through the afternoons and into the evenings without lapsing into a coma. Thirty somethings have the stamina of bulls.

I switched to wine exclusively  in 1988, starting with twist-off Gallo and working my way up to Silver Oak and Somoma Cutrer once my taste buds recognized the dramatic contrast. Edgar and I could polish off three bottles of wine at dinner. Wine and popcorn also was a delectable snack.

Back to vodka (straight this time) around 2000 since red wine (even expensive red) was giving me  headaches and white was cloying. I was then FOF and also couldn’t tolerate Smirnoff quite as well as I did two decades earlier. One martini too many absolute-ly sent some brain cells packing.

Five years ago, my youngest sister went on a diet, lost weight and looked good. I was not happy with my weight, so I consulted with a doctor and started a diet, too. “Don’t drink a thing (meaning anything alcoholic) for the first two weeks,” the doc advised. Forty pounds and about five months later, I still hadn’t touched a drop of vodka or wine.

I had lost a great deal more than weight. I had completely lost my taste/desire/need/relationship with  alcohol. Once in a while, I’ll have a modest craving to order a drink at dinner, but it dissipates quickly. Unfortunately, I developed a mad desire for sweets to compensate for the sugar I no longer get through vodka. My weight shot back up after scrapping the icing off countless cupcakes but I’m finally getting that under control, too.

I’m thrilled to have miraculously lost my craving for alcohol. I hope it never returns. We had some fun times together over the years but I’m having plenty of fun without it.

No one should have to apologize for being wealthy, unless they stole the money. I don’t resent a soul who inherited his or her wealth, won the lottery or hit a jackpot in Las Vegas.  And I applaud those who earned a fortune by working long and hard.

Bashing rich business people has become our new national pastime. Even TV commentators—many of whom earn a bloody fortune themselves—have the unmitigated gall to criticize someone like Mitt Romney because he made his money by “eliminating jobs.”

Anyone who has even a drop of business sense knows Mitt Romney did not make money by eliminating jobs. He had to take cost cutting measures to save companies from going under or getting them in better shape for future growth. Terminating employees was a means to an end. It happens in business all the time, even when times are good. I was terminated as a reporter for The Daily News in 1981 when the paper was on the verge of folding. The management was just doing its job. The paper survived and so did I.

Mitt, front and center, and former colleagues at Bain clutch money for a photo shoot

Let’s say you employ a gardener to tend to your backyard, a yoga instructor to improve your balance and a dog walker to exercise your beloved Lab.  One day you learn your house needs a new roof, which you’ll never be able to afford unless you cut expenses.  So you terminate the gardener, yoga teacher and dog walker. They were great employees but your priority is having a roof over your head.  You need to get your house in order.  Mitt’s compensation was based on getting businesses in order.

Business people are no different than actors, ball players, comedians, doctors, lawyers, architects, you or I.  Some of them are superb at what they do and some of them stink. A bunch of them even get paid way more than their talent would seem to merit. But if someone in a position to pay them big bucks wants to pay them big bucks, that’s their business.

Criticize Mitt because you don’t like his waffling about national health initiatives, his seeming lack of connection with the electorate, or his attitude about our military.  Criticize him because you don’t think a businessman should be in the White House.  But for heaven’s sake, let’s stop condemning, abusing and censuring him because someone thought he did a good enough job to pay him a lot of money.

By the way, please don’t think I’m endorsing Mitt for president just because I’m defending the way he accumulated his wealth. One has nothing to do with the other.

This is a non-partisan blog.

I took an invigorating 2.5-mile walk with Rigby today, in the bitter cold.  We were both bundled up, so we didn’t feel the frigid temperature.  (Actually, I have no idea whether Rigby felt it, but he didn’t seem to mind, maybe because he’s a dog.)

We were out for over four hours, which gave me  a chance to clear my head before it gets crowded with a gazillion details once the “work week” begins.

We walked most of the way on Madison Avenue so I could window shop, one of my favorite pastimes (at least on Madison Avenue, it is.) I noticed a preponderance of orange on the clothes the mannequins modeled in the windows: Orange with purple, orange with red, orange with green, or orange all alone. Bright, clear orange is my favorite color.  Actually, my youngest sister adopted it as her trademark color long before I did.  Although orange has been showing up all over the fashion industry for a few years now, it seems bigger than ever, maybe because it’s a happy color.  And we all need as much happy as we can get.

A man I overheard talking on the phone, in the shoe department at Bergdorf Goodman, could have used a dose of orange.

“What do I want?” he said to the person on the other end, sounding somewhat agitated.  “What I want is to find out if you’re okay, if you’re alive, if you need anything,” he said, immediately after repeating the question the person on the other end had obviously asked.

“Why can’t you just ask me when I call: ‘How are you doing, dad?’ Why do you always assume I want something?” he said to his child (I couldn’t tell if he was talking to a boy or a girl child, but it really doesn’t matter.  They’re all generally the same when it comes to their complete and utter inability to understand that their parents are people with feelings, that their parents care about them more than anything in the world and really do like to know how they’re doing.)  Our kids don’t care how we’re doing.  We’re irritating them with our calls and that’s that.

A close FOF friend has given up calling her 26-year-old son, a graduate student, because he never answers his phone.  So she’s decided to just text him, his preferred mode of communication. “I swear he wouldn’t know if I was dead as long as someone kept making believe she was his mother and continued texting. “This could go on for years if he didn’t come home for the holidays,” she said.  “Even then he might not notice.”

Orange is a hot trend now.  Kids who hate to talk to their parents on the phone don’t constitute a trend. They’re a fact of life. By the time they’re FOF, most of them start to develop feelings for us.  Hopefully, we’ll all live that long!