Hostess of 9 East 71st Street

H-E, Nebraska corn fed, Wheaties repleat, down to the beat, and, because we are what we eat, cornie. Or is that corny, or is that coney, or Connie.

H-E with her long, tall satiny legs, and smooth style, played the women’s basketball team. High School. Basketball. Team. Back then, a woman or women’s basketball team was racy, liberatory, resplendent, worthy of introspection, and genuflection.

This was a time in H-E’s life she would forever recall as the time of her life.

It all came so easily to her. The dribble, the pivot, the sweet slant, the slam dunk. H-E believed she had invented the slam dunk. The backboard appropriately shattered. The crowd went wild. H-E’s parents were threatened with “damages”. It was unfair, but the crowds at High School games don’t buy tickets, nor is there, whatchamacallit, “closed circuit”, “closed channel” revenues. When H-E’s dad looked at her, thinking he would need to sell the farm to cover her excesses– and then where would she get her corn?

Good and bad question.

The “men’s” basketball team, meaning the high school boys, the high chair schooled boys, had taken an interest in H-E. You could say they appreciated her high classy, sashay. They even thought H-E merited inclusion in their “men’s” basketball team. They could hardly wait to get H-E into the boy’s, err, men’s lockerroom to exert a full court press. That’d be H-E’s reward, for being as cool and goodlooking as a man.

That never happened, but the sting of being, and knowing, because of eating corn, fresh corn, roasted corn, buttered corn, bottled corn, vibrant and vibrator, emasculator, and thus being, no matter how brilliant, pigeon-holed into “corny”, annoyed H-E. Though it is egoistic, we can all be sympathetic to egotism. We have egos, too. If we, and H-E, with our ego galore, go to NYC, something there will scrape off corniness.

That’s Mannahattas. That’s 9 East 71st Street.