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            I wish to give fair warning: Silvia de Plathelovich will be a recurring name. Not only did I go to school with Silvia—also known as Sydilvia—but we remained friends during that fruitless period of the late 1980’s when she was lead singer in the garage band The Brass Tacks. I knew her then! Silvia de Plathelovich, songstress, seamstress, seductress. You may watch her on the nightly news, trying to figure out what she’s saying, but remember, some of us wax nostalgic whenever we hear a Sarajevo accent. Long live Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kampuchea, Nagorno-Karabakh and any other historical construct that solves a knotty problem by creating a conundrum. If you can’t beat ‘em, give ‘em a country of their own! Look at Palestine, for God’s sake.

            But I digress.

            Did I ever have sex with that woman?

            Did I ever have sex with that woman!

            Alas, the answer is “no,” Silvia never invited me into her bed. With Silvia broadcasting on network television in New York, I would have to classify current opportunities as non-existent. It’s not for want of trying. Undergraduates at Moosegrave College, I drove up to her house in Scranton, Pennsylvania one Christmas and, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, spent a long afternoon listening to her daddy’s collection of 8-track cassettes on his mammoth, homemade tape deck. We called him “sir” and “Mr. D.” We tended to be respectful to former members of the Yugoslavian Armed Forces. That he escaped with his entire family in a Russian-built An-2 cropduster bi-plane added greatly to his rep. I never heard him speak anything but Serbo-Croatian. He had taken an 8-track deck out of the car, bought the right size transformer, linked them to an amp and speakers and shoehorned the entire contraption into a bulky pine box.

            Even I was impressed.

            That didn’t stop me from wanting to screw his daughter, but Silvia had, as they say, other plans: She romanced her way through a series of television producers, each time improving the quality of the show. Yes, there are tapes of Silvia on the daytime soap “Egalitarian Courtroom, “ where she played heroine Margaret Welch, paralegal to and romantic interest of hero lawyer Max Blair. They lasted three seasons, before they got muscled off the air by the excellent stagecraft and brilliant scripts of Law & Order, which, in addition, aired on prime time. Who could compete with a behemoth like that? A juggernaut.

            Next she appeared on “Yoo hoo, America!” That was the morning show that wasn’t Good Morning, America or The Today Show. A perennial also-ran, they never tried to be anything but the third morning show. To her credit, bringing the concept of the plunging neckline to ever greater depths, Silvia became a revolutionary influence on women in television. Network television is a somewhat timid medium—all those millions of dollars in ad revenue at stake if you goof—but that never stopped Silvia.

            I liked her best as pitchwoman for “Elastishirt,” her wide-eyed, busty profiles, with tons of backlighting, gelled perfectly with the company slogan, the only thing she ever uttered in those ads:

“What? Me busty?!” 

            Yes, dear, you busty.

            That income carried her through the 1990’s. About the time I left the Army, Silvia began to show up in news segments on the local New York stations. After all, we were both journalism majors at Moosegrave. And now, there she is on national TV, the same molto vivace, staccato delivery transforming t’s into d’s, f’s into v’s and v’s into w’s. A sulky voice, a smoldering glance, the medium is the message, but what is she saying???

            Damn if I know.

            To her credit, again, I never watch TV, but I’ll watch Silvia. She’s that good at what she does. Flirtation Television.