A pretty young woman with a Southern accent was sitting next to me and Rigby on a park bench yesterday. When she finished her phone call, she said she thought Rigby was cute. We started to chat and I learned she’s 23 and just moved to New York from Knoxville, TN. An only child, she relocated, despite her parents’ objections, because “there’s no opportunity in Knoxville.” She’s loved New York ever since she first visited. She would have loved to go to college here, she explained, but her folks wouldn’t hear of it, so she stayed in Knoxville.

When she recently decided to move, her parents refused to help her financially, so she asked close relatives if they’d pay the security deposit on her new apartment. They did.

This girl has spunk, I thought. “Where do you live?” I asked. “I’m moving to an apartment in Astoria tomorrow, with a roommate from New Zealand who I met through a mutual friend,” she said. Astoria is in Queens, one of the boroughs, and has been a Greek neighborhood for decades.

Young people who can’t afford to live in Manhattan or Brooklyn are flocking to Astoria, where rentals are a third of the price. My young friend and her roommate are paying $1,600 for a two-bedroom apartment. “You can rent a whole townhouse in Knoxville for that amount,” she laughed.

A French major in college, she is now working as a saleswoman for a French leather accessories retailer, so she has opportunities to speak French. “Maybe I’ll get a job working for them in Paris someday,” where she lived for a time. She’s probably going to apply to graduate school to study French and would like to teach some day at the college level, she told me.

“I admire you for everything you’re doing,” I said. “I understand why your parents didn’t want you to move so far away and to such a big city. But someone like you, with such drive and determination, will do well here.”

When it was time for her to return to work, she rose from the bench, smiled broadly and said: “Please visit me at the store where I work if you’re in the neighborhood.”

I was already thinking who I could fix her up with. What a catch. Pretty, determined, independent, charming, and, most definitely, smart. I hope her folks get over their displeasure with their only child leaving home. Watching her venture out into the world is hard enough. Seeing her venture out in New York must scare them to death. As a born and bred New Yorker, I wish I could reassure them that their daughter will be just fine here.  More than fine. Spectacular.

I fell in love with my apartment the  moment I saw it six years ago. It’s in a pre-war building that fills the entire block between 88th and 89th Streets on Lexington Avenue. I had walked by the building hundreds of times over the years and always thought it would be cool to live in it. The apartment has 9 1/2-foot ceilings, a fireplace in the living room, two spacious bedrooms and a dining room that we also use as a den. The place feels like a home, even though it’s a fraction of the size of a modest house elsewhere.

The woman who now owns the building, the previous owner (who died) and the 1927 building

I love many of my neighbors, too, especially Carol and Chris and their three children, Tucker, Emerson and Sara.

Now many of us are being forced to leave our apartments, because a new owner is converting this rental building into condominiums. She wants us all out so she can reconfigure apartments, jazz up the lobby, build a roof garden and a gym and charge $2 million dollars per apartment.

Families who moved in just a couple of years ago are being booted out, a 70-year-old widow is being booted out, a couple with a new baby are being booted out. David and I are being booted out. We are not happy campers–or should I say renters–especially at the harsh way the owner is handling the situation. As leases come up, tenants get formal letters saying adios. It’s completely legal, but it’s completely infuriating.

Fortunately, 29 tenants who occupy “rent stabilized” apartments, and pay really low rents, can’t be booted out since they’ve lived her for decades and are protected by old rent laws. The owners will undoutedly try to get them out, too, by offering them oodles of money. I hope these tenants don’t budge unless they’re offered a cool million each.

I am all for people making money on their investments, but I detest heartless businesspeople who would run over their own mothers to make an extra buck.

Hugh Hefner falls into the category of men whom I classify as cheesy. Others who belong in the group include Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Qualifications for admission into the Cheesy Club include tacky suits, unattractive hair, white shirt cuffs and collar, cheating, bluster and bombastic behavior. Cheesy men usually think they’re pretty cool, for some inexplicable reason.

In happier times

Hugh’s cheese factor has been expanding for years. It came out, full force, when he lived with “The Girls Next Door,” who were  cheesecakes themselves.

Octogenarian Hugh was recently  fixin’ to marry a new girl, 25-year-old Crystal Harris, but she skipped out on him five days before the big day, and then proceeded to publicly put the bad mouth on his penile ability, according to an article in The New York Post, a cheesy newspaper, but sure fun to read. Hugh, in turn, wasn’t taking Crystal’s statements lightly. He shot back and said she was living in a dream world, that he must have performed pretty well, because she stayed for two more nights. “I’ve never seen Hef naked,” Crystal also said.

Hugh should think seriously about stopping his Playboy charade.  It’s boorish, embarrassing and anything but sexy.

After Douglas and I married in the fall of 1968, we spent many weekends at my parents’ house. The house was small and it wasn’t exactly in an idyllic community. The backyard also was tiny and not especially cheery. We didn’t do anything special with my parents, either. We’d have dinner and go to a movie and then laze around the house.

So why did a newly married couple of 21-year-olds want to spend weekends like this?

I scratch my head trying to come up with a suitable answer and the only one I can think of is that we were babies, not ready to be grown-up married people. We needed the “security” of being home with mommy and daddy, even though they  never gave me much of a feeling of security before I married.

Many FOFs love when their grown children–married or not– come home for a day, a weekend, and, of course, for the holidays. But EVERY WEEKEND? A bit much, I say. I wish I could ask my mom and dad now how they felt about their constant house guests back in the day.