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done before. By the time the serious women of the Times started making common cause to sue the paper for sex discrimination, Dinah had moved on. She’d been offered a job by Simon Snyder, who was writing a must-read society/celebrity gossip column called “New York Eye” for a new downtown tabloid which Dinah liked to call “The Fishwrap.”
    She told me, “I kept running into Simon. He finally said ‘Honey, you’re out here every night at all the same places I am, you might as well be paid to be there.’ ” He said if she worked for him he could go home and get some sleep, but in fact his hiring Dinah was more like his being in two places at once. At the showroom, you could see their column selling papers. When our ladies came in to see a collection, they’d sit in their spindly gilt chairs waiting for the show to start, open their salmon-colored tabloids to page eight, read “New York Eye,” then throw the paper away.
    During my first years with Mme. P, I was mainly a gofer. I’d carry fabric swatches to our button lady and our belt lady with Madame’s instructions. When the fabric salesmen came with their bolts of gorgeous cloths for Madame to choose among, I’d help haul them over to her and back again, carry them to the window to show the color in natural light, or unfold several yards of this weave and that so she could see how they draped. When important clients came in to order the numbers they’d liked at the collection, I’d help to dress the models who showed them the clothes. Once in a while the vendeuse would have me take a client’s measurements while they discussed variations to the dress we would make for her. Our vendeuse was a marvelous creature named Mme. Olitsky, rumored to be a White Russian princess, though in her off-hours she was known to lapse into one hell of a Wisconsin accent. Perhaps there had been a Prince Olitsky. She was tiny with huge red-framed glasses, always impeccably dressed, usually in Philomena, but now and again in skillful Paris knockoffs from Orbach’s. (Society ladies like Mrs. Wanamaker, who wore our clothes everywhere, got discounts, but the staff didn’t.) Mme. O spoke beautiful French, good Italian, and passable German, and took me under her wing after my fichu disaster.
    A week in which we showed a collection was very high pressure. A runway was brought in and set up in the showroom. All week we were juggling the seating, so that the second Mrs. Rockefeller wasn’t at the same showing as the first, and that the buyer from Neiman Marcus wouldn’t run into the buyer from Dayton’s in the hall. We had our own models plus two or three others backstage. I’d be assigned a particular model and had to keep the lists of what dresses to put on her in what order, along with everything that went with each costume: shoes, hose, jewelry, scarves, and hats. It was hot and crowded behind the stage, and not all the models bathed as often as one would wish.
    At the winter show the second year I worked there, Mme. Olitsky was out front greeting the invitees and showing them to their seats while Mme. P checked all the lists and accessories one last time. As often happened, especially at moments of tension, she found something not exactly to her liking. This time, her eyes fell on me. “ Vous, mademoiselle! Arrêtez ça! Take this back to the twelfth floor, maintenant , vite vite !” It sounded as if its imperfection was my fault in the first place. I was to race with this spangley velvet scarf to the rhinestone crimper, have him fix it, and bring it right back. Perhaps she was giving me a chance to shine, as normally only Marjorie, the brilliant Trinidadian who managed all the physical properties, would have been entrusted to leave the atelier at such a moment. But maybe I was just the first person she saw.
    I ran like the wind to the crimper. I presented the fichu and relayed