We're always hearing about how groundbreaking Candace Bushnell's original "Sex & The City" columns in the New York Observer were back in the "Reality Bites" era or whenever they were first published. Conveniently, their appeal is so timeless the Observer re-publishes them once a week for the delight of readers, so this claim is pretty easy to fact-check, we just hadn't done it until now because we reflexively avoid certain combinations of graphical stilettos and ampersands in print. So we read today's clip from the vault, a mind-bogglingly all-over-the-place tale of women who date rich guys who are not attractive but because they are rich that seems to have been the basis for the Charlotte-Harry affair. And um, what? This shit did not happen the year we were listening to Portishead.

Bunny was 40-ish, still beautiful, L.A.-tanned, a sometime TV actress, but before that, she'd been around New York for years. She was the quintessential party girl, a girl so wild no man would consider marrying her, but plenty tried to get in her pants. "I want a table in the back. Where I can smoke and no one will bother us," Bunny said. "Please, darling," Bunny said. "Men like Jingles, and there's a whole group of them in New York, are not the type of guys you marry. The make great friends—attentive, always there when you're in a tight spot. Late at night when you're lonely and desperate as hell, you whisper to yourself, Well, I could always marry a guy like Jingles. At least that way I wouldn't have to worry about paying the rent. "I moved into a friend's apartment," said Bunny, "and about two weeks later I met Dudley at Chester's—that East Side bar for young swells. Within five minutes of meeting him, I was annoyed. He was wearing spectator shoes, a trilby hat and a Ralph Lauren suit."

Okay, so obviously: discuss, with particular focus on bolded terms and phrases. Is it possible having sex in the city has changed more than owning real estate in the city since the nineties?

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