Brethren, rather than hang this on a text from scripture, I choose to hang this on the words to an old song, not as gospel, more as ambience –

“…And love, love is just a passing word
It’s the thought that you had in a taxi cab that got left on the curb
When he dropped you off and he stated firm
Oh, oh, oh
You’re a native New Yorker
You should know the score by now You’re a native New Yorker…” — Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell

This song was the tune du jour when Studio 54 was the club du jour. There are surely hipster clubs. There are plenty of velvet ropes left in the city, plenty of back rooms filled with ottomans lined up against banquettes in zebra print, with track lighting and artistically cut mirrors. However, before the clubbing hour – never a minute before 11 pm ever, if you’re really hip, and honestly, it would be much hipper to cruise by about 1 am – where are the hipsters hopping?

I found them at #1 Beard Street, in Brooklyn, all of them, around 4 pm. I passed leather-clad Japanese couples arm in arm, a girl with a saffron Obama T-shirt on with Sarah Palin glasses, a pony tail tortoise-shell-clipped to one side of her head, true religion jeans, and a macramé hip-hugging belt. I locked shopping cart wheels with a German runway model with waist-length red hair with her Catherine-Deneuve look-alike mother. I breezed past young men, with that over-gelled hair spiked up, that crazed look in their eyes from too much World of War Craft suddenly unplugged, eating cinnamon buns, making the Jonas Brothers look old and jaded. I brushed against a Rastafarian man with dreds bound up in hemp, I think, wearing a Movado watch, carrying a futon.

True, there was no velvet rope, no sushi bar with aquarium walls, no giant moon with a cocaine spoon hanging from the ceiling – yes, I DID see the original 54 when it was open and I was too young to have legally entered – but there were ottomans in neon colors, track lights galore, artistically cut mirrors enough to quench the thirst of the vainest among us, and one could buy hanging moon mobiles, spoons, but not the two combined. Besides, exclusivity is no longer hip – it’s obscurity, like a Red Hook warehouse is remotely located, that is the bar to the uninitiated.

I was in Ikea, and not the suburban one. Everything is pretty much the same as the Ikea in New Jersey or Long Island, only people wore more black, more Ugg, people were greener, were more blasé. It was the bootylicious Ikea, the street Ikea, the I-just-bought-a-loft-in-Bed-Stuy-and-am-painting-it-chartreuse Ikea. Even in Europe, Ikea is generally planted in the suburbs, but this one was planted in the just-out-of-reach-of-the-uninitiated gentrifying Red Hook, and everyone knows that the new Soho is now in Brooklyn – the debate is only about exactly where.

I bought some lamps for my desk and my bedroom, a set of casters to attach to the bottom of a cabinet, a curtain rod, and a few other accessories from renewable resources. Green, after all, is the new black. Black is still the new black, of course, but green – green is the new black, and mocha is the new green. Clear – in case you haven’t heard – is the new mocha. What the new clear is, I don’t know.

While I was trolling around with my yellow bag between products with names like Glimma and Trikka, they were piping in a sound track that was cooler than most of the lounges I frequented in recent years, much of it from my misspent youth, others of it sounding like the goth side of the Fuse network or MTV2. I paused to pick up a pink table lamp using low-wattage, energy-efficient bulbs only, and I heard a song that used to close out my nights at Le Privilege, the VIP lounge of the Palace night club where I used to dance mid-eighties, drinking flaming drinks from cups that looked, well, a lot like this lamp in my hand, I thought, and air kissing all kinds of girl models (French kissing a boy model or two). Now my club days have been turned into a retail experience – I am apparently one of the targets of this market, as I did buy some knick-knacks that I might have avoided at Costco with no sound track at all and no hip clientele of which to speak. They are doing pretty well, even as the stock market yo-yos.

Seeking more aficionados of this new hipster, urban American Ikea market, I have some suggested product names and designs for the folks at Ikea –

• Bufda – a home gym that folds into the wall, making an inclining bookshelf unit.
• Mutha – a vibrating baby chair with black and red skull-and-crossbones in a mobile above it.
• Stuppa – An ice pack with a straw – fill it with the hair of the dog for the morning after.
• Sherpa – an environmentally sound, ergonomically designed GPS for pedestrians.
• Friki – a black twin Murphy bed with hand-cuff-suitable hooks.
• Prozaka – black-on-black double Venetian blinds.
• Ganja – a highly flammable organic furniture set, woven from fair trade grasses that are more than just decorative at a party.
• Chikka – a hot pink bed on a large lazy Susan in the shape of a pair of lips.
• Sukka-fri – a narrow quadraphonic speaker system with extra base and with spinning rims on the woofers.
• Hipsta – a combination lava lamp/blackberry/loofah sponge/chaise lounge made out of recycled tires and mulch.

In any case, it was nice to see my co-Brooklynites out en masse with Manhattanites willing to go through the Battery Tunnel to buy that which must be had this season among us. It is nice that exclusivity is out, democracy is in, and the New New York is the Old New York over the East River. Red Hook, in case you haven’t heard, is the new little black dress.

I am beautiful — I am not skinny.

I am a wall, and my breasts like towers: then was I in his eyes as one that found favor. — Song of Solomon 8:10

Let’s just say there was this woman. Let’s not say it was me. Let’s not even say it was anyone I know.

This woman lived in Manhattan. She went to an old neighborhood where she had not been in a long time. She laughed when she saw that the dive bar where she had gone before she got saved had become a pretentious hot spot — velvet rope-ringed, bouncer-guarded — when the cops were scared to go there before. She laughed to herself at the way the city changes overnight from one thing to another, ever new.

As the woman rounded a corner, a man her age locked eyes with her, almost sharing the existential joke she was laughing at. He gasped. He saw her, in a way that people rarely see each other in the city, whole, full of mirth, light shining from Heaven down on them to show them radiant. The man couldn’t help himself — it had been so long since he had seen a woman like this — confident, playful, and free. He let out of his throat before he could think about it a hoarse exclamation — “My God! You’re so beautiful!”

Like all men in the city, he was on his way somewhere else. She was on her way home. He phoned his appontment with a friend, canceled, said, “I’ve met a fantastic woman. See you another time.”

She broke the rules of the city, this laughing woman, perhaps out of sentimental feelings for her misspent youth. She agreed to have a cup of coffee with this man, let him talk her into getting to know him.

He was of a certain age. So was she. They both had places to go. They both had responsibilities, regrets, false starts, hopes for better things. They talked until it was dark. He held her hand. She let him hold her hand. Over and over again, he told her she was beautiful. She was beautiful. She had always known it, but sometimes, it felt hidden in this city, where there were people who made their livings at being beautiful — size zero models, whose hanger-bodies flaunted couture, actresses, women who make a living pretending to be something they are not, usually by pretending to be happy and sexy.

But this woman, this woman having coffee in the gentrified neighborhood, she was happy. She was happy to see things starting again, including this man moon-eyed across from her, sure he said over and over again that he must see her henceforth, over and over again. She was sexy, not sexy like the women who sell themselves to the camera, sexy like the Song of Solomon, a yet-unclaimed prize for a righteous groom, sexier and hotter than the sex for sale on the streets, the sex for free in the chat rooms.

The man said he was a Christian. He seemed moved by her talking about charity work. He worked in advertising, a place that sells everything to everyone, and everything is marketed with the cheapness of things that she didn’t even seem conscious of. He told her things he seemed to have never even thought before, but things he knew must be true — secrets about himself, his fears, his ambitions, his masculinity. She squeezed his hand tighter and encouraged him.

“God! You’re so beautiful!” He whispered again.

He got up to pay the check, and when he came back, he squeezed into the booth next to her and took her face in his hands. He kissed her passionately. She responded.

They kissed in the booth for a few minutes. In New York, this surprises no one — sudden passions, sudden trends, sudden gentrifications — this is a day in the city like any other day. No one even glanced at them.

By now it was dark. They walked through a block of brownstones, and again. he grabbed her and kissed her, tenderly leaning her against the wall. They kissed for three hours, four hours. The streets were busy, and people wandered by. But in his embrace, the woman felt alone with him, as if they were in a private corner.

“God, you’re so beautiful!” He repeated between long caresses and kisses.

He caressed her thigh, her collar bone, grabbed her close, the small of her back. He was a gentleman. They had just met. He promised to see her again. He meant it. He seemed afraid that at any moment she might evaporate, and he held tighter and kissed longer. They seemed alone. The air was heavy around them. There were other bodies under the street lamps, the sound of trailing and nearing footsteps, but none of this penetrated their space somehow, even though they were only feet away. Again, he swore he would see her again, this laughing woman, this intelligent beauty, this good, Christian woman, that he wanted to know everything about her. He caressed her thigh again and told her how sexy she was.

Because he was a gentleman, he pulled away. He was too tempted. This was a city street. He caught his breath. He took a full half hour to catch his breath. When he did, he took her hand and hailed a cab. He would see her home.

The next day, he called and text messaged her. She was still beautiful. He was still determined. She responded in kind. She sent him a picture on her cell phone of herself, one she captioned with the words, “Thinking of you.”

He disappeared. He never called again. He never returned voice mail messages. He never texted back. He was gone, back in the crowd of bobbing heads in mid-town, near that advertising agency where he worked. He never saw her again.

The photo she had sent him — it was a photo of that same woman, the one with the laughing eyes, the same body he caressed, that aroused him terribly — but her photo was not like the photos of women selling toothpaste, floor wax, the other photos in the agency. Her photo was not like the photos of the actresses who showed up for photo shoots. Her photo was nothing like the photos of models who sauntered into the perfume commercial auditions. In her photo, she was ample, full-hipped, fully there, a tummy without a tuck, a substantial thigh, a woman with breasts like towers, a towering woman, a woman who was not pretending not to be there, not even in her body, which could not lie.  In her photo, the man could see her, and she would not do. She simply would not do.

The city renewed itself daily. New meat arrived in the meat-packing district, only the old butchers were gone — now there were high-end fashion boutiques, and everyone was starving herself. The city gentrified, and it left the woman out on the street where she would not be noticed as she walked by again.

We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for? If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar. — The Song of Solomon 8:8-9

We live in a sick culture. Let’s not say it was me. Let’s not say it was anyone I knew. Let’s pretend, like skinny actresses, to be someone, something we are not. I am beautiful. Men find me beautiful. I am six feet tall, blonde, and voluptuous. That photo above is mine, the sideways one. I took it in the mirror sideways. However, I am not skinny. I am now who I am now. But we live in a society where some men out of vanity insist that women look a particular way, even while they are aroused by the women who are really in front of them.

Let us pray:

Heavenly Father, who made us exactly as we are on purpose, who despises gluttony and sloth but not womanly curves, not manly substance, we thank you that we have been given the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven with the knowledge that Jesus is the Messiah, your Holy One, and that which we bind in His name is bound also in Heaven, and that which we loose in His name is loosed also in Heaven.

Father, in that spirit, we rebuke the demon that plagues women in this culture, particularly in places like Manhattan. Let us name the spirit, for we have with Adam, the right to name lesser creatures, and the devils are under our feet and authority in Jesus’ name — let us name this spirit the fat demon. It is not that he is necessarily fat, but rather, he is a vain spirit who whispers in the ears of those who will listen that a gaunt femininity is the only beautiful one. Fat demon, we bind you in the name of Jesus. We loose you only away from us in hell. We bind you from speaking to any man or woman in this culture. You can deprive us no longer of even the slightest happiness.

We loose, in the name of Jesus, a Godly body consciousness, one that resembles you, where women have real bodies, men admire those bodies, and men and women both are free to live healthy lives in the bodies you have given them. Thank you, Father for backing us up in Heaven as we pray this prayer. Thank you for giving us through Jesus, more abundant lives. AMEN.