When Ms. Cyrus, wearing a black leather biker jacket over a flowing white dress, arrived at the Soho restaurant to celebrate Cosmopolitan’s March issue, even those who were on the list acted the part of fangirl, rushing to grab cellphone pictures of the issue’s cover girl as she sprinted through the crowd and into the waiting arms of new editrix Joanna Coles.

(It was a big week all around for Ms. Coles, as she starred in last Friday’s episode of CBS’s new reality show The Job, on which contestants vied for the “coveted” role of editorial assistant at Cosmo.)

The point of the party, which fell at the tail end of Fashion Week, was to celebrate the first issue that was completely under Ms. Coles’s command, and the night was all about reinvention—both for the 20-year-old pop star and the 127-year-old magazine—even if the event felt more like a hyped-up teenybopper dream than a typical magazine relaunch.

Music blared, the dance floors were lit up, cocktails and pickled radishes were passed, and images from Ms. Cyrus’s photo shoot were projected next to the lower-level dance floor. Expecting a media party, the few reporters who actually made the guest list—invites were in short supply—looked overwhelmed.

“The party stole a lot of thunder from Fashion Week because it was so different,” said Michael Clinton, Hearst’s marketing and publishing director.

Ms. Coles, who took over from former editor in chief Kate White last September, came from Marie Claire, the thinking woman’s lady mag, and she is widely expected to bring a touch of the serious to Cosmo’s breathless coverage of sex positions.

“Joanna has moved very fast,” Mr. Clinton told Off the Record, adding that the publication’s April issue will be another “blockbuster” and will feature a 40-page magazine-within-a-magazine guest edited by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. According to executive editor Joyce Chang, it will be Cosmo’s first-ever career supplement.

“I would ask you to re-engage with the magazine. Over the next year, I’ll be making changes,” Ms. Coles said at a luncheon she hosted back in November. “I’ll be hitting all of you up for ideas, your advice, your tips for younger readers.”

So what better venue for the artist formerly known as Hannah Montana to showcase her new, all-grown-up persona?

“She’s a career woman at the top of her game,” Ms. Chang told OTR. “She’s fun and fearless.”

Ms. Cyrus poses defiantly on the cover, wearing seemingly nothing but long and slightly punkish jewelry beneath a white suit. One coverline proclaims, “It’s Miley, B*tches ... I’ve never faked anything.” Inside, special bonus covers speak to the evolving image of the actress, who rose to fame on the Disney Channel. One alternate cover shows Ms. Cyrus, wearing a black suit-dress (also with nothing underneath) and a snarling expression, with the tagline: “I’m not a girlie girl.” The other shows the former child star playfully bent over, lifting up a gray silk skirt, obviously wearing a bra underneath (her white blouse is see-through) and the pull quote: “I never played the Disney game of smiling and being a princess.”

While we don’t know whether any of the women who were in attendance at Ms. Coles’s luncheon last fall took the bait, it’s clear from the latest issue, not to mention the choice of cover girl, that the magazine is skewing young.

Naturally, the latest issue covers sex—it’s still Cosmo, after all—but the corresponding coverline testifies to a softer side of the bedroom story: “Your Best Sex Ever! 20 Moves From Cuddly to Crazy.” And the moves definitely tend more toward the cuddly.

Other features include “Threesome Confessions: totally awkward!” and “The 3 Words You Must Never Say to a Guy.” (Spoiler: they’re “I look fat.”) There are wardrobes for every budget, but the clothes are generally geared toward the medium to upper end of a Smiler’s allowance rather than the budget of a 20-something assistant with a credit card. And even though Ms. Cyrus isn’t wearing a bra on the cover—which is perhaps the raciest thing about the issue—the magazine looks like something that Miley’s fans wouldn’t have to be embarrassed to read in front of their parents at the breakfast table.

Which, from a marketing standpoint, is probably a good thing, since these Smilers appear to be awfully suggestible.

When the March issue hit newsstands, Ms. Cyrus tweeted at her 11 million followers to take over the newsstands by repositioning Cosmo so that it covered all other titles: “Lets play a game! All my fans go and put my @Cosmopolitan in front of all the magazines at the store!!!!!! Send me pics haha!”

The guerilla marketing tactic, which looks like a stunt masterminded by Adbusters, worked with a decidedly more commercial audience. The enterprising Smilers even created a hashtag, #BuyMileysCosmo, and tweeted and ’grammed their photos of newsstands across the country plastered with the pink Cosmo cover.

Like companies everywhere, Cosmo has been trying to use the power of social media to promote its content. But this marketing ploy was the work of an even more savvy social media presence: Ms. Cyrus herself.

“We couldn’t have planned it,” said Mr. Clinton, who thanked Ms. Cyrus for the publicity when he saw her at the party. “I told her we have to learn from it.”

Joanna Coles. (Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles fired six staffers in the features department and two in the photo department. That is a significant portion of the features team--there are only one senior editor, one associate editor and two editorial assistants left, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

“New incoming editors in chief often want to form their own teams,"said a Cosmopolitan spokesperson. "We will be announcing more new hires shortly."

Yesterday afternoon, after the staffers were let go, they returned to their desks to pack. 

And, according to the insider, this is probably just the beginning. New creative director Paul Solomons (formerly of British GQ) will start in December, which insiders expect will result in more shakeups at the magazine.

When new deputy editor Sarah Austin, who came over from Self, started on Monday, she wasn't  brought around and introduced, the insider told us. Other staffers have been left out of projects and meetings of late. Although Ms. Coles was friendly and chatty in the beginning, she stopped having editorial meetings and spent the past month interviewing people in her office, according to our source. None of this seemed exactly reassuring.

The changes didn't come as much of surprise to those outside the Hearst tower, either. During her first luncheon on Monday, Ms. Coles announced that the magazine would be changing in the next year. But the shakeups started just two days later.

“I would ask you to re-engage with the magazine; over the next year, I’ll be making changes," Ms. Coles said in her opening remarks at Monday's Cosmo 100 lunch.

Ever since September, when Ms. Coles left Marie Claire for Cosmo, the sexier sister mag at Hearst, there have been questions about how she would keep the lucrative brand's signature style while bringing some of her Marie Claire sensibility.

And we didn't even have to wait a whole year to begin seeing some changes.

“The demand for our product is overwhelming,” Mr. Benzi told The Observer by phone from his home office in New Jersey. As Plastic Logic’s vice president of business development, Mr. Benzi spends only about a week a month in Mountain View, Calif., at Plastic Logic’s U.S. headquarters, using the rest of his time to take meetings in Manhattan, trying to woo publishers to partner with the company.

So far, the Financial Times, USA Today and digital publishers like Zinio—which converts print magazines from Cosmopolitan and InStyle to Mother Jones and The Economist into digital formats—have, among others, partnered with Plastic Logic. “I see a lot of companies who want to be with us tomorrow,” Mr. Benzi said.
Current e-reader products on the market weren’t made with print media in mind—they were made for books. Sure, the “Kindle store” currently offers e-friendly formats for newspapers and magazines, but the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have hokey black-and-white screens that seem to replicate the inside of a book.

Apple’s iPhone has free, handy apps, such as Stanza and eReader, to compete with expensive digital readers, but those palm-size screens don’t provide enough room for the visual experiences magazines will need to appeal to readers and advertisers—those full-page, color pictures, “charticles” and information graphics, not to mention leggy models splayed across two-page spreads.

“We’ve worked closely with our magazine partnerships, our newspaper partnerships, to make sure we’re building something that they would publish to,” Mr. Benzi said. “It doesn’t mean books aren’t important to us, because they are. But we are able to go to magazine and newspaper companies with a different type of reader for them.”

Plastic Logic is developing an e-reader with a display that is about 8.5 inches wide and 10.7 inches long—the same size as most magazines and nearly twice the size of the Kindle screen (and more than four times the size of iPhone and Blackberry interfaces—where many of us skim our New York Times headlines in the morning).

Their prototype is made out of plastic, so it’s lightweight, and thinner than a pad of paper. Mr. Benzi said the company’s “secret sauce” is its flexible screen, which can feel a bit like a magazine and has an added bonus of making the device nearly unbreakable.

Plastic Logic plans to release a product on the market by 2010. Once they perfect the actual product’s look, Plastic Logic would include some kind of “content store” similar to what is available on the Kindle. Users could subscribe to publications, and new issues would update automatically—and they could download their own Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PDFs onto the device, too. Currently, the reader incorporates black-and-white display technology from Cambridge-based company E Ink, just like the Kindle.

But color screens are “on our road map,” Mr. Benzi told The Observer. “We’ll either get there with E Ink or another way. The one thing we have noticed with publishers, even though they know it’s on our road map, is they say as soon as I get there [with color screens], they’ll come with me.”

The success of the product may also depend on a larger market shift. Amazon, which is notoriously tight-lipped, hasn’t released official sales numbers for the Kindle, but Citi analyst Mark Mahaney guesses that Amazon is selling anywhere from 190,000 to 500,000 devices, in their first-year rate. Kindle’s numbers aren’t exactly on fire—yet.

About 376,000 iPods were sold during their first year on the market, 2001. In his 2005 book, The Cult of iPod, Leander Kahney described how the iPod became an icon—not only by redefining Apple as a leader in product design, but also by creating a culture around digital music that no other device maker could compete with. “More than a computer, a car, or a fancy pair of shoes, it’s part of your makeup, your personality," he wrote. "What’s on it—the music—tells who you are. Music is deep in your heart and soul.”

Perhaps magazines and newspapers can cling to their cultural and personal relevance with an e-reader. How many of us still keep old issues of the magazines that defined our teenagehood—like Sassy, the precursor to Jane, or Spy magazine—not only for their content, but for the advertisements, which are a pop-culture time capsule of their own? The Web is a great platform for specific articles displayed on a page, and some Web whizzes are working on better visual experiences to mimic browsing an entire, themed issue of a magazine or newspaper. That's key for branding and advertisers. On a digital reader in the right size, readers will experience the same colorful, image-heavy design experience that they see in the print editions—without the added pains of lugging around a laptop.

So could the next digital reader be the "iPod of magazine publishing?" Will a tech toy save the media business?

“I think [publishers] are kind of pissing in the wind,” Mr. Kahney told The Observer. He said Apple “already has a device and it’s called the iPhone.”

But perhaps Apple’s e-reader will come in a different form. A rumor in Mac-obsessed circles is that Mr. Jobs is working on his answer to the netbook, the slimmed-down version of laptops with smaller screens and reduced processors. Apple’s version would “be like the Kindle but with a multi-touch screen, like a 9-inch iPod touch,” Mr. Kahney said. That would mean a magazine-size, touch-sensitive, full-color tablet that would also have basic Internet, iChat, and Skype videoconferencing capabilities—the perfect environment for digital magazines and newspapers.

Maybe a toy alone won’t save print media. But certainly publishers must evolve those inky materials into digital products that work not only on the Web—but on the next Kindle killer, too. Mr. Jobs, we’re waiting.

greagan@observer.com

Of course, Today Now! only exists in the distorted world of The Onion News Network and as far as we know, Cosmo doesn't have a "Moan Zone" department, but the video is still worth checking out.

Warning: Some language may not be safe for work.

Seriously overweight girls are socially unacceptable. And so, I'm told, are even marginally overweight girls. What a world, eh? Fat slobs who are men are O.K., but let a woman enjoy an extra slice of pizza or two and it's over. But Mr. LaBute, whose plays are notorious for tackling unpleasant themes often involving vile chauvinistic men, reveals a gentler, kinder touch here. He's grown horribly sentimental.

Helen and Tom are both left crying on the beach at the end. They're at an office beach party, of all things, and Tom is hiding Helen in her bathing costume from his friends, who are all extremely thin. Eventually, Tom tells the stricken Helen, "I think you are an amazing woman, I honestly do. I really love what we have here," but he cravenly caves into peer pressure and ends the relationship. At the close, he's in tears for his own shallowness, and poor, sweet, overweight Helen is in tears because, well, wouldn't you be?

Mr. LaBute has written his first soap opera. What surprised me most about the play, however, is that absolutely nothing about it surprised me. I must in fairness add that my colleagues have mostly raved about the short, 80-minute Fat Pig and that Jo Bonney's excellent production has been extended at the Lucille Lortel Theatre downtown. If you can't get in, you can always try Hairspray.

Hairspray is Fat Pig with a happy end. In the Broadway musical, the fat girl becomes the prom queen, of course, and she gets the boy because when all's said and done and eaten, Beauty Is Within. The adorable, original star of Hairspray, the extremely large and short Marissa Jaret Winokur, who won a Tony, went on to star in a TV special I thoroughly enjoyed about an adorable, extremely large and short woman who becomes a beauty queen and gets the boy because Beauty Is Within.

In his way, Mr. LaBute is sending us exactly the same hackneyed message. But he's dressed his play up in pseudo-hipness. The restaurant where Tom meets Helen is trendy; the music between the short scenes is hot; Tom and his office co-workers are cool executives types, though what they do isn't stated. (They put things in files and bicker a lot about fat versus thin). But the play itself could easily be a TV drama of the week.

It already is. In Rescue Me on FX, the fireman falls in love with a fat girl-coincidentally played by Ashlie Atkinson, who also plays the fat girl in Fat Pig-only to be teased mercilessly by the guys whose jibes disturb him. We'll have to wait to find out whether he stands by his chubby love. Don't bet on it.

I'd almost forgotten about the masterpiece Shallow Hal, in which Gwyneth Paltrow wore a fat suit. But Jack Black was put under some kind of spell which enabled him to see her as thin. Under the layers of fat, he could see the inner Gwyneth Paltrow.

On balance, I don't think Mr. LaBute is onto anything new with Fat Pig. A serious flaw in the play for me was that I didn't see his reviled heroine as fat, but delightful. As played with such utter naturalness and nuance by the gifted Ms. Atkinson, Helen isn't "overweight," but human. I honestly couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

For example, before the play begins, we see Helen munching on a pizza in a crowded restaurant. She's a librarian and she's eating lunch at a counter. It isn't easy to eat in front of an audience. Actors always act eating too much. But Ms. Atkinson doesn't. Anyway, there she is-and so what? The indulgent pre-play scene goes on for about 10 minutes, which is an awfully long time to watch anyone eat. But we're obviously meant to see the girl who's quietly enjoying her pizza and salad as some kind of freak or specimen of nature, as if studying a strange, unsettling species held up to the light. She looked like a pretty average girl enjoying lunch to me.

There you are! Beauty Is In The Eye of the Beholder. But hasn't someone or other said that before? The central problem with Mr. LaBute's Fat Pig is that its message and dilemma could have been timely issues in Cosmopolitan magazine 20 or 30 years ago. The vernacular would have been different, that's all.

Dear Cosmo,

I am a plus-size girl who has just met a great guy but I can't be sure if he's really serious. He says he's in love with me, but you know what men are like. I'm about 230 or 240 pounds. But it shouldn't make any difference. I have confidence in myself. Well, sort of. I look terrific in the dark. You see? I have a sense of humor! If I were thin, I'd still be jolly! But I can't prove it. It's just my nature, I guess. I have like total faith in this guy. I'm floating on a cloud. This could be so great. I know it could. What do you advise?

Yours ever so sincerely,

Helen

Dear Helen,

Have you thought of going on a diet? Just kidding! If he loves you as much as he says, being fat shouldn't be a problem, at least to begin with. Don't rush things.

Dear Cosmo,

I have recently fallen in love with a girl who looks like Mama Cass. I mean, like, you know. Whatever. I'm not embarrassed about it. I dunno. Maybe I am. I mean, WOW. I've never felt this way before about anyone, ever. Except for Mom, of course. Let's not go there! This girl seems like a really interesting person. She likes old war movies. She has a great laugh. We've really clicked. She's fat, though. But I don't think it should make any difference, you know?

Yours faithfully,

Tom

Dear Tom,

How old are you? Are you 12?

Dear Cosmo,

Cool! I'm nearly 30 years old. You were joking, right? I'm really in love with this fat girl. Well, as much as anyone can say they're in love. I mean, when it comes right down to it, what's love? The trouble is, everyone at the office thinks I'm weird. My friend Carter keeps making jokes about sumo wrestlers. What a shithead! And my ex-girlfriend, Jeannie, who works in accounts, can't believe it either. She's gorgeous and thin and you should see her in a bikini! What am I to do? I guess it's all getting to me.

Yours faithfully,

Tom

Dear Tom,

Your fellow workers are victims of societal pressures to conform to conventional standards of beauty propagated by an image-obsessed culture. True love is what counts. Remember that Beauty Is Within and it ain't over till the fat lady sings.

Dear Cosmo,

Things haven't been working out as great as they might with the weight issue. But here's hopin'! The problem is my boyfriend won't introduce me to any of his friends at the office. I don't think he's ashamed of me, but the other night we went out for sushi and he hid me under a blanket. I kept losing my chopsticks. It's something to work on, right? I know he means well. What should I do?

Yours ever so sincerely,

Helen

Dear Helen,

Leave him immediately.

Dear Cosmo,

I am the dude referred to as a shithead in the recent correspondence and I would just like you all to know that as a Neil LaBute male stereotype, I'm entitled to be a total asshole whenever I want.

Yours,

Carter

Dear Cosmo,

I am the incredibly gorgeous ex-girlfriend referred to in your recent correspondence with fatso and I don't need this, I really don't need this. In the first place, I resent being a Neil LaBute female stereotype who represents spoilt, brainless beauty. As for my ex, I hope he's happy with Elephant Girl, I really do. I mean, fuck him! You know? Excuse my language. Fuck him!

All best,

Jeannie

Dear Cosmo,

I know I should have taken your advice, but I thought there was a chance, I really did. I went to a beach party with Tom and he finished with me in the sweetest, spineless sort of way and we both cried our eyes out and the audience loved it.

Yours ever so sincerely,

Helen

Dear Cosmo,

I have been following the recent correspondence and I found it all riveting.

Keep up the good work!

Neil LaBute

Having sold 1.4 million copies of The Nanny Diaries, you'd think Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus wouldn't need to resort to the infantilizing gimmick of using the word "girl" in the title of their second novel. ( Girls' Poker Night, Dirty Girls Social Club, Gossip Girl, Metro Girl …. Gag me with a girl.)

But Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus had a surprisingly rocky time with Citizen Girl: The manuscript was rejected outright by the original publisher, Random House-a rare humiliation. It was subsequently picked up by Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, and Atria's marketing department obviously decided not to take any chances with brand recognition. They needn't have worried: Citizen Girl doesn't stray far enough from the Nanny Diaries template to risk alienating the authors' core constituency.

As a social satire, The Nanny Diaries had excellent timing, appearing just at the moment when the hyper-parenting trend (time outs, Baby Einstein, etc.) collided with the high-end consumerism of the early 2000's. It featured a wealthy Manhattan mother, Mrs. X, who only allows her 4-year-old son Grayer to eat cookies if they're unsweetened, and to drink milk if it's soy. Mrs. X is so busy trying to get Grayer into Collegiate (unsuccessfully) that she doesn't notice that her husband is having an affair at the office. Nanny, an N.Y.U. senior majoring in child development, goes to work for the Xes and gets chewed up worse than the plastic caps on Courtney Love's medicine bottles. The detail was deliciously spot-on-music lessons at Diller Quaile, lavender linen water from Gracious Home-a felicity that more than made up for the canned dialogue and the unnecessary boy-meets-nanny subplot. Mrs. X and her ilk were fine fodder-fish in a barrel, well shot. Nanny Diaries wasn't subtle, but it was satisfying.

Citizen Girl takes the same basic formula-young female gets abused by her employers until she finally tells them to shove it-but instead of overbearing Upper East Side parents, the oppressors are chauvinist male bosses, a far less culturally specific target. This time around, our gal heroine is a recent graduate of the women's-studies department at Wesleyan, even though the book is set in the era of the dot-com bust, a full 10 years or so after most liberal-arts colleges stopped churning out old-fashioned Movement types. The fact that this supposedly orthodox adult feminist lacks a proper name and is called "Girl" throughout (just as the nanny was called "Nan") is one of several of the book's misguided ironies. (About as clever as if, instead of Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth had named his alter ego "Jew Boy.")

Girl (the character) enters the working world as a research associate for a nonprofit and discovers-surprise!-that entry level sucks. Then she gets fired, and discovers that unemployment sucks worse. So when she senses opportunity at a women's Web portal called My Company (think IVillage), she puts aside her scruples about using breast cancer to sell mascara and jumps at the job.

Citizen Girl is strongest when milking such postfeminist incongruities. As the book's promotional materials tell us, Girl "isn't afraid to ask some tough questions. Mainly: Have any of us come a long way, baby?" And indeed, in the age of Girls Gone Wild, much can-and should-be said about the current notion that turning the female body into a sex object is an act of "empowerment," so long as it's the woman herself doing the objectifying. I remember going to a fiction reading a few years ago and being asked to make a donation to an organization that purported to help prostitutes-not by getting them off the street and into better jobs, but by trying to improve their working conditions. (Health insurance for hookers-there must be worthier causes!) Further convoluting the original feminist message, young women now ape bad-boy behavior by going to strip clubs and having sex parties, a trend New York magazine identified a few years ago as the advent of the Female Chauvinist Pig. Yes, there have been backlashes before-just ask Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf-but never quite as disheartening as seeing the Playboy Mansion made cool by the presence of Gwyneth Paltrow, or Meredith Vieira taking pole-dancing lessons on The View.

Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus grind this legitimate ax quite noisily. I will allow them the improbability of My Company being run by a bunch of male yobbos, even though a ball-busting caricature of Candice Carpenter, the real founder of IVillage, would have worked better. Girl (the character) fights the good fight for as long as she can, but eventually becomes a pawn in the commercial scheme of the Man. She conceives of a bang-up proposal for how to sell My Company users more stuff by "reconfiguring and relabeling what some would call sexist content under a feminist banner, thus encouraging them to embrace the term." Not that she doesn't feel horribly conflicted: "I continue nauseously on and on, uninterrupted. On and on and on, through a list of ideas, which, upon hearing out loud, should revoke my NOW card." Are there any 22-year-old members of N.O.W. these days? You certainly don't need to be one to know that the mass media is still sending out mixed messages to women, and that Cake parties ("female-focused events that provide women with the opportunity to experience sexual culture as entertainment") are retarded.

Unfortunately, the authors have once again larded a perfectly fine send-up with an inane romance. This one begins when Girl meets a guy named Buster at a job fair. "We take each other in, smiling, the creases around his lovely eyes bringing a tingle." It goes downhill from there, with a very strange detour into an ambiguous date-rape scenario, from which Buster somehow emerges as a viable long-term prospect. Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus should stick to satire, and leave the relationship stuff to Helen Fielding and Anna Maxted. After all, as a real dyed-in-the-Donna-Karan-pantsuit feminist would say, a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Not that any of today's girls could tell you whose line that is.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg is a freelance journalist in New York and a former deputy editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.

While my friend never wanted me to visit Billy's when she was dancing there, she'd understandably piqued my interest. I was apprehensive on my first visit, half-expecting to get beaten up for wearing a Shetland sweater, or to get swept up in some police dragnet and see my picture on the cover of the Daily News the next morning. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Billy's was filled with guys in Shetland sweaters, and ponytails, and business suits. Further flying in the face of convention, many of the girls' boobs are 100 percent natural-as opposed to places like Scores, where the strippers have a higher saline content than Long Island Sound.

"Billy's Topless is like a pub, it's Cheers with tits," observed Jessie, a redheaded dancer I met on my latest visit, who was none too happy with Hizzoner. As a matter of fact, Jessie argued that if the girls are forced to wear bikinis, which Billy's management thinks is the worst-case scenario should the Mayor's crackdown on X-rated businesses hold up in the courts, they'll have to go a lot further than winking at patrons while massaging their breasts, as they do now, to support their life styles.

"It's not as sexy, it doesn't do anything for the figure," Jessie groused, referring to beachwear. "To get a dollar out of some guy, you'll have to be sleazier. I don't want to be sleazy."

A waitress asked Jessie if she wanted a drink-at my expense, of course-but, as if to make her point, the stripper shooed her away. "This is not a sleazy place," she insisted, not that she needed to convince me. "There are two large motherfuckers at either end," she meant of the stage where, at that moment, three ingenues in various states of undress were coaxing paper currency from the beer-sipping connoisseurs who sat at the counter that rimmed the stage. "If you pass that line over there"-I couldn't see the line she was talking about, but I took her word for it-"if you touch me, if I really complain about it, the two doors open outward with your face."

I don't know how we got there, but in the next breath Jessie was criticizing Andrew Giuliani's behavior at his dad's first inaugural. Perhaps she thought she was hitting the Mayor where it hurt.

Jessie portrayed Mr. Giuliani's quality-of-life initiatives as a blatant attempt to deprive working people of their livelihood while pandering to his political base. "A lot of the housewives who aren't getting fucked are mad because women are making money off this," Jessie claimed, offering the sort of pungent analysis one rarely hears from George Will on This Week With Sam and Cokie .

A guy in a business suit at the bar named George seemed to confirm Jessie's worst fears. I asked him whether Billy's would lose its sense of enchantment were the girls required to cover up. "You've got to ask intelligent questions," he chided me. "Of course it would."

George said he visits a couple of times a week and spends between $12 and $18 an hour feeding money to the dancers. George also won't be volunteering for the Mayor's next campaign. "This place is no hassle," he explained. "The girls don't hit you up for drinks. After a tough day, there's no screaming in your ear, 'Can I help you?' Giuliani is throwing out the baby with the bath water. So he's objecting to tits? If he wants to come out of the closet, he should come out."

Indeed, the only thing George could find wrong with Billy's was the night manager, who had tossed him out on several occasions. But even those weren't for typical topless bar infractions such as groping the dancers, shooting drugs, driving one's Harley through the front window or breaking a beer bottle over somebody's head. On one occasion, George said he was thrown out for laughing. The manager, a gentleman of apparently tender ego, thought George was laughing at him, even though George says he wasn't. Another time, he stood up for a fellow patron's civil rights. According to George, the management had let in a homeless man but ejected him after he'd paid for his drink. "I said, 'That guy begged for that money,'" George remembered. "'If you're going to serve him, then let him sit and enjoy his drink like any other customer.'"

I sidled up to a bohemian-looking guy named Marco at the other end of the bar. He was actually sitting with his back to the action, sketching in a little notebook. "I'm an art director," he explained. "I'm sketching a set for a wedding outside, on a bluff north of Los Angeles."

"Whose?" I asked.

"Mine," he answered.

Marco said his fiancée doesn't mind that he hangs out at Billy's. "It's not, like, really sleazy," he asserted, echoing the comments of others.

Jessie stopped by on her way out the door. She didn't believe I was a writer. I suggested she look at an article about Billy's that I'd written for Penthouse , which the management had ceremoniously framed and hung on the wall at the end of the bar, right below a newspaper clip documenting Kelsey Grammer's 1994 visit to Billy's. Jessie still didn't believe me. She said that a few nights earlier another customer had said the same thing. "He told me he wrote it-'Yeah, I wrote the Penthouse article.'"

"Giuliani sucks," the bouncer standing by the door volunteered, joining the conversation. "I didn't vote for him."

"Who did you vote for?" I asked.

"I didn't vote."

A long-legged dancer named Charlie, fresh off the stage, had a solution to the crisis. She thought Billy's ought to be designated a landmark, sort of like Mount Vernon. "Major motion pictures have used us as a set," she noted. "In a way, I consider us to be historical. I think that New York, and Billy's in particular, has cultural values you can't find other places. Covering us up would make us just like Jersey."

As soon as Charlie walked away, the man sitting next to me gave me a nudge. "I want to marry that woman you were talking to," he explained. "She's got a beauty that reminds me of Georgia O'Keeffe in the Stieglitz plates. There's something about the face. It's not that sculptural look of chiseled severity that we use as a criteria for beauty. There's that dynamic flow of intelligence and emotion."

He paused for a second. "And her tits are great."