Chic Girls of Lower Manhattan

Chapter Two-Chic Girls of Manhattan

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Cissy looked out of the glass window in Lower Manhattan.

She gazed into the darkness.

The lights were turned on...while she began writing her magazine article on her laptop in the spacious Dining Room table.

"Today's New Yorker woman in 2014 is smart, sassy, confident and won't make bad choices in her life; her life is full of writing, business meetings, and dates with strange men in Restaurants. The social, economic, and political status of African-American women is different from white women. And other interracial mixes...In short, whether a woman in New York is poor, middle-class, or rich, there's always the super rich who live in their Mansions like the Swedish Queen in 'Frozen'; there's always the news that no hunky European Prince is going to sweep New York women up off their glittering toes like a ballet dancer...and give them red roses in vases because it's Valentine's Day...Or other days where romance is in the air...

"The ideas of work, family, children, and managing the structure in a balanced way doesn't work for single, indepedent women in their 20's, 30's, and 40's; the ideas of singledom is not, as many other feminist writers, say, that women can own their womenhood without men...Yet, deep in the recesses of their mind, the old ways of the past is not working in 2014...and into the next decade...

"...In short, women can't use their I-phones in their cars because they'll be arrested by the NYPD; women can't apply lipstick in their cars while they're at the hand signal lights waiting to move from Lower Manhattan to Upper Manhattan; women can't yell at their kids when they take them to their Elementary Schools at 7:30 AM, while they attempt to juggle messages from work; women can't yell at their husbands, or partners, if work is the number one priority...to the detriment of their sex life...or trying to be intimate in other areas of their lives...

"...We're not robots; we're not Stepford women; we're women. That's the point. We cook; we clean; we do everything...and our men drink, smoke, and get drunk while they play poker until 4:00 AM. If we did what men did, we'd be social outcasts...

"We use Skype, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media because it's easy. There's New Yorkers who post selfies of themselves and aren't very bright. Girls will lose their jobs because male bosses spend all of their office times trawling the Internet to see if they misbehave online. And they do misbehave...regularly...

"So, what now for the 2014 New York woman? The answer is to get pass the Carries of 'Sex and the City'; get pass the shopaholics like Becky Bloomwood who use up their credit cards until they're rejected; get pass the mudane behavior of the self...Because the self has a mental illness that is ugly. And that monster is you...

"It's time to go back to when you owned yourself...be yourself...and make yourself into someone who can stand on your own two feet...That's what I am doing...and you, the readers, should do as well".

And she saved her work, then E-mailed it to her Editor Joan Lamet.

Then she put her laptop to sleep...then spent the rest of the night watching a movie on BluRay in her loungeroom...while she ate popcorn...and drank fresh coffee, too.

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