Candace Bushnell’s Lesson #6: Be Specific About What You Want

HBO’s And Just Like That, now nearing its final episode in series 2 features happy endings for Charlotte, Miranda, and we presume Samantha, and several additional characters. Carrie Bradshaw has moved on from the loss of Mr. Big, happily, and her creator, Candace Bushnell, has moved on too. An author—though not yet a Pulitzer Prize winner—and performer, Bushnell wowed the crowd at Canoe Place Inn in Hampton Bays this week in her one-woman show. Strutting across a stage in baby blue satin with feather trim, she recounts her stellar career as Observer columnist, coming to the big city, modest suitcase in hand, landing on Beekman Place with photographer Gordon Parks, sleeping around. Sex, or rather, “having sex like a man” becomes her material, and like her characters, she is quite explicit. If you are a fan of Sex & the City, you know what I mean.

Miraculously, in her tour de force hour and a half one-woman show—with the exception of a cameo by two dogs, the words “penis” and “vagina” are uttered once each, as Bushnell poses the question, Is There Still Sex in the City? Phone in hand, answering, “Good news only,” she converses with her Samantha, her Miranda, and her Charlotte, composites of her real-life friends and paragons of wisdom, as she navigates her rise as writer, all the while dumped by lovers including her ballet dancer husband. Through all of these experiences, she has learned many lessons, each numbered and epiphany-like. These she shares with her audience. The men she mentions do not fare well—even her supportive father somehow lets her know her flat chest will get her nowhere in love.

Her father should have praised her legs, long and shapely as she’s stretched out on a couch. You can imagine them easily in her thigh high Manolo Blahnik boots. And just like that, her career does in fact have legs whether or not she wins the coveted Pulitzer. She’s now in a smaller space in Sag Harbor, wiggling hula hoops, surrounded by her female posse; she keeps one leg in Manhattan, where this show ran in 2021 at the Daryl Roth Theater. At that time, only one pal was married. Designer Nicole Miller told me her husband dated Bushnell for years, and he complained his wife’s best friend is his ex. They even shared Thanksgiving, and mock-wondered, how come he wasn’t included in the show. Miller attended the Hampton Bays show.

When you are young, says Bushnell, you reinvent. At this age—she’s mid-60’s-- the path to happy endings is to be who you are, and while men come and go, your girlfriends are forever