For me, Loehmann’s in White Plains wasn’t simply a discount department store. It was a rite of passage. My first serious pilgrimage occurred the summer before I left for Emory University. I was 17.

    Mom and I were on a mission to find every outfit I would need for my first semester at college. We piled into the dressing room, arms stacked with Diane von Furstenberg dresses, A-line skirts, Calvin Klein jeans, and a variety of tees. I think there were even a few Fair Isle sweaters. The magic of sifting through the endless racks, finding something fantastic, and wondering how anyone could pass up the treasure you’d just found was nothing compared to the drama of the dressing room.

    A woman was stationed outside the entryway; you were allowed only 10 items. A bench ran around the entire perimeter of the octagonal mirrored space. There were no cubbies. No privacy. You jockeyed for a post to hang your clothes on and got started. You could see everyone (and everything). And everyone could see you. Underwear in every color. Bodies in every shape and size. And opinions for days.

    “That’s a great color for you.”

    “Sorry, but that doesn’t flatter you from behind.”

    “Do you think this is too tight?”

    “Uh, maybe the next size up?”

    “Oh, that emphasizes your thin waist.”

    “You have to buy that! If you don’t, I will.”

    Even though my mom hated shopping, she knew how to navigate the communal dressing room. And she carried an additional 10 items for me, bringing our total to 20.

    “Hang your clothes on a post in the corner, that way you see more angles. Shop fast so you can go out and try on more!”

    She told me to watch who entered the dressing room, while they still had their clothes on. If they were well dressed (which to her usually meant classic, tasteful, and subtle), I should ask them their opinions. “Who cares if the lady in the hideous outfit loves something on you?”

    One time, she tactfully explained that a leopard-print dress she obviously didn’t care for fit the woman trying it on very well, so, if she liked that sort of style she would enjoy it.

    The truth is, my mom and I have never had much in common when it comes to style. She thought I was flamboyant, I thought she was boring. I doubt she’s ever purchased a fashion magazine, I know she’s never had a manicure, and when I was in high school, I’d beg her, “Could you puh-leeze put on some lipstick?” By the time I’d graduated from college, if she thought something would look good on me, I was sure I’d loathe it.

    At 22, I had landed a job on Madison Avenue — I got paid to weigh in on what models in our ads and TV spots wore. I even got hired by a director to style a commercial. Didn’t she realize at this point that she should be deferring to me? It was the ’80s, I was into huge belts, shoulder pads, neon accents, and, dare I admit, Madonna-inspired lace gloves.

    One day I bumped into my dad, who worked around the corner from me, in an office near Grand Central Station. I was wearing a new Norma Kamali jumpsuit (which I wish I still owned). The call came the next morning: “We’re concerned about your professional image. Shouldn’t you be wearing suits?”

    “Mom, my boss is wearing a blue-jean miniskirt today! You’re so square.” Jeez!

    By the time I was 26, we rarely went shopping together. What was the point? But I remember one last sojourn, maybe I’d just been promoted to full copywriter, perhaps I was home for a holiday? We dashed into the Back Room — the part of Loehmann’s with the real designer steals. My eye went straight for it. The perfect black turtleneck in fabrics that required dry cleaning (another pet peeve of Mom’s). It was silk and cashmere. It cost $100.

    I had never, ever purchased a sweater that expensive. But I was tired of buying disposable clothes. This was classic. Calvin Klein. Deliciously soft. My mother cautioned me about spending too much. I told her it was an investment and you could wear it with anything. And, I still do.

    Loehmann’s is gone. But I not only have my sweater, I have my mom and my memories. And if you ask any of my friends, they’ll tell you, I also still have all those opinions.

    Lynn Blumenfeld is a member of the Ashawagh Hall Writers Workshop and a partner in the Montauk advertising, marketing, and design firm blumenfeld + fleming. She recently completed a young-adult novel, “Finding Grace,” under the name Lynn Blue. The Loehmann’s chain of stores closed for good at the end of February.

    I recently visited the genome exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. A genome is an organism’s total DNA, which includes the genes that provide instructions for the organism’s development and maintenance.

    Twenty-five years ago, the task of finding the total DNA sequences for any organism seemed overwhelming. But large teams of scientists have uncovered nearly complete sequences in many species, including ours. Genome research is indeed impressive, and the Smithsonian exhibit provides a clear and lively introduction to it.

    But I felt a bit frustrated.

    The exhibit’s emphasis is very much on our own species. It tells how genome research might cast light on human diseases, and it provides us with information about our own personal genomes. This human focus is understandable because the original goal of large-scale research was to sequence the human genome.

    But the exhibit gives too little attention to some of the most startling discoveries — the similarities between human and nonhuman genomes.

    The poster that most directly addresses these similarities includes a provocative heading: “I’m Related to What?” It then says, “You may look nothing like a mouse or a jellyfish, but you share thousands of genes with them.”

    I anticipated that this poster would then say more about these similarities. Instead, it returns to the exhibit’s focus on humans, explaining that “scientists study other species to explore how genes influence human disorders.”

    One display does inform us that we share 96 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees (which is actually a low estimate). I wish the exhibit provided additional specific examples of cross-species overlaps, such as the findings that we share about 60 percent of our genes with fruit flies and 80 to 90 percent with mice and rats.

    Why do I consider such cross-species similarities so important?

    For one thing, they add support to Darwin’s proposal that we and other living species share common ancestors. Even before the recent genome research, microbiologists had found that all species essentially use the same genetic code and create proteins from the same amino acids. Now genome findings suggest that human beings and other species, which might seem very different, share large segments of the same DNA. It increasingly appears that Darwin was correct when he speculated that all living species descended from common progenitors.

    Our similarity to other species also is important to me as an animal activist. Those of us who try to defend animals constantly run up against the Western cultural view that animals are very different from and inferior to us, and we can therefore treat them any way we wish. How often we hear, “Oh, they’re just animals!” Even most Western philosophers have excluded animals from moral consideration. In the 1990s, when I began my involvement in animal rights, I had difficulty saying precisely why we should include animals in our moral deliberations.

    Since then, I have come to believe there are two strong reasons for including nonhumans in our moral considerations. The first reason has been extensively argued by Peter Singer, who is something of a maverick in modern moral philosophy. Singer emphasizes that other animals, like us, experience pain, and if we believe we have a moral obligation to reduce suffering in the world, we must include nonhuman animals. To ignore their suffering and focus only on our own species is self-serving and prejudicial.

    The second reason for giving moral status to animals comes from the genome findings and the other cross-species commonalities I have noted above. The evidence strongly suggests that we and other living beings are all related. We are all part of the same extended family. And as members of the same family, animals deserve to be included in our moral decision-making.

    Now some might point out that we are also genetically related to plants, albeit more distantly. Do we have moral obligations toward plants, too? If so, how can we fulfill these obligations, for even vegans must eat plants to survive.

    I do believe that our ethics should include plant life, and that we should try to inflict as little harm as possible on it. Paradoxically, people would consume fewer plants if they adopted a vegetarian or vegan diet. This is because animal industries harvest enormous quantities of plants for feed — more than people would need if they adhered to plant-based diets.

    Moral decision-making has never been easy, and extending its scope to nonhuman species won’t make it any easier. But such an extension is vital for all the living beings who experience horrible suffering, as occurs in factory farms and many other settings. Thus far, animals’ suffering has had limited impact on the public or government officials. Perhaps it would make a difference if people knew that those subjected to such misery are their relatives.

    Bill Crain is the president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife. He lives in Montauk. The genome exhibit at the Smithsonian is on view through Labor Day.

    My father, Edwin Courtland Mulford, was born in East Hampton on March 16, 1896. He first saw the light of day in Congress Hall, the Mulford family homestead overlooking the village green, directly across from Home, Sweet Home and what became known later as the Mulford Farm. The land on which Congress Hall stands had been granted to William Mulford in 1650, and had never been out of the family. His parents were David Green Mulford and Elizabeth Osborne Mulford, and he was descended from virtually all of East Hampton’s founding families.

    When he was 21 years old, the United States entered World War I, and he knew immediately that he would be a participant. He joined the Army in December 1917 and was sent to Camp Upton for training. From there he was sent to France, where he participated in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. He survived, and was shipped home early in 1919, returning to the family farm. He married Charlotte Davis, his high school sweetheart, and I was their only child, arriving on the scene in 1931.

    As a boy I knew my father had participated in the war, not because he talked about it, because he never did. It was as though that period of his life had never happened. I became aware of it when I found and subsequently pored over two books. One was titled “History of the 77th Division,” and the other “A History of the 305th Infantry.” These books, plus his Army helmet and uniform, which I discovered in the attic, opened up a whole new chapter in my father’s life that I scarcely knew existed.

    That was only the beginning, however. Much later, some 80 years after my father returned from France, I discovered a packet of letters tied in a faded ribbon. They were letters exchanged between my father and his parents during his time in the Army. As my wife, our two adult children, and I read those letters, tears streamed down our cheeks. For those letters caught the horror and sense of separation experienced by those young men huddled in the trenches of France, as well as glimpses into life in East Hampton nearly 100 years ago.

    The first group of letters and postcards, dated from Dec. 3, 1917, until April 9, 1918, deals with life at Camp Upton. A number of them refer to the trips home over the weekends, provided by Ed Schaefer, owner of a taxi service in East Hampton. On Dec. 18 Dad tells of a trip back to Camp Upton. “We spent 2 hours in Bridgehampton looking for one of the fellows. One of the headlights went out and we got a lantern. We got there at 4:30 a.m.”

    As spring approached, the mood of the letters changed. He writes: “Oh, how I wish I was home beginning the spring work. Never mind, I will be home next spring anyway, don’t worry.”

    Two letters, one dated April 29 and one May 2, indicate that the Atlantic had been safely crossed. From this point on the letters are heavily censored.

    His thoughts went frequently to East Hampton and to the members of his family, as his letter of May 24 indicates: “France is a very pretty country but I think England has it beat a little. Tell Papa I have seen some of the best looking horses that I have ever seen. By the way the paper [The East Hampton Star] looked, I should think the Old Town was pretty lively. Two or three dances a week, what more do they want, but that isn’t doing me any good, is it?”

    His almost casual references to the horrors of the trenches are interspersed with concerns about life at Congress Hall. He worries that the houses might not be rented for the summer, or that his father was working too hard. He asks how many chickens his father had raised that year, and whether the hay was in.

    Since Dad knew his letters were censored, he would often write “I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.” One letter in the packet, written by his friend George Eichorn and somehow sent by George “on the sly,” paints a gruesome picture. George writes, “I am in a place called Fiames . . . and we captured a few towns and two big hills. It cost us a few men but it cost the Germans a good many more. We also captured a lot of prisoners. The gas the Germans send over us is awful. It burns the skin right off any place where you sweat.” George then mentions the names of some of “our boys” who were wounded, and then the name of one who “was blown to pieces as we could not find any trace of him at all after the battle.”

    On Oct. 20, only a few weeks before the end of the war, Dad wrote to his sister: “Well, Sis, I have seen a little fighting but I didn’t mind much. You can tell Dr. Stokes [the former minister of the Presbyterian Church] I had the chance to get eight German scalps for him, but I took pity on them and took them prisoner instead. Tell Mother I have received her letters and, O, how glad I was to have Pop write those few lines.”

    On Nov. 17: “Of course by this time you have heard of the wonderful news. Well, I was right at the front when the last shot was fired. I won’t bother to write much about the war, because I soon expect to be home to tell you all about it. Of course, after everything is over, I had to go to work and have a nice little boil come on the top of my instep caused by a bad shoe.”

    That boil turned out to be more than Dad had bargained for, as it continued to bother him for months and led to his return home on a hospital ship. By March 1919, Dad was back in East Hampton. His parents, about whom he fretted while in France, both lived into their 80s.

    The song “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?” certainly didn’t apply to Dad. During the rest of his long life, he left East Hampton seldom and always reluctantly. He maintained the family property on the corner of Main Street and Buell Lane meticulously until his death, at age 80, in 1976.

    David E. Mulford is a retired Presbyterian minister who continues his fascination with family and East Hampton history. He and his wife live near Princeton, N.J.

    As I make up a lot of beds today, as I smooth the sheets into neat hospital corners, fluff up the down pillows, and erase any suggestion of a crease in the white matelassé bedspreads, I think about my Irish forebears who emigrated to the States and were maids. They made beds just like me. They were Irish just like me. They were all called Brigid, because their employers couldn’t be bothered to remember their real names — Fionnuala, Maeve, Siobhan, and Orla.

    Poetic names oozing with Celtic heritage. You can almost smell the smoke from the earthy peat fires emanating from their names. You can see the Cliffs of Moher jutting into the Atlantic, taste colcannon, a classic Irish dish of mashed potatoes and cabbage, and hear the dum, diddley, dum from the fiddlers playing in the pub, sipping their Guinness.

    The Brigids, with their blond or red hair, blue eyes, freckles, and fair skin, resembled their Viking ancestors, although there were a few who had black hair, blue eyes, and darker skin. They were called “Black Irish,” thought to be descendants of the Spanish sailors who washed up on the west coast of Ireland after the shipwreck of the Spanish Armada of 1588.

    No matter what they looked like, as far as their employers were concerned, all the Brigids were the same, there was no difference between one maid and another, which took away the young women’s identity, sense of self, and uniqueness. The Brigids were happy to have the work, however menial. They were good workers. They cleaned, cooked, and took care of the children. They worked from 6 in the morning until midnight with one day off a month. Later, in the 1900s, they got a half-day off each week.

    But there is a difference between those Brigids and me. Today, I am making beds in anticipation of a 3 o’clock showing of my two houses in Southampton for rent this summer. I’m grateful for the Brigids who preceded me, enabling me to have a good education, a better life, and even own real estate. I am not an Anglo-Irish landlord who condoned the potato famine of 1846 and exploited my tenant farmers. I’m just a property owner trying to make a living to survive in the off-season when the investment bankers retreat to their Park Avenue, Tribeca, and Flatiron condos and private schools and nannies. They are nice people but would prefer to sit in semidarkness rather than insert a new lightbulb. I guess in the city, that’s a job for the superintendent.

    Actually, I have my own Brigid. My favorite day of the week is Tuesday, when my Brigid, Cirlene Alves, a lovely Brazilian woman, comes to clean and makes my bed with freshly ironed sheets. She does laundry, vacuums, and cleans the six-burner stove. Sometimes she prepares pink beans with garlic and a side dish of thinly sliced collard greens she knows I like. Lemon furniture polish tickles my nose as I inhale its clean, acidic scent. Every week my Brigid even washes the covers to the dogs’ beds. They rush to lie down on them as soon as they are put back on. Spoiled dogs.

    I like the poetry of the everyday, the rituals of a domestic life, the rhythm of making order out of chaos — cooking dinner, setting the table, lighting the candles, eating by the fire, even if it’s just my husband and me. The repetition is soothing, like the incantation of Mass being said or the prayers along a blue glass rosary. I like my throw pillows arranged just so with the designer’s chop that my Brigid taught me, a neat indentation just like those that grace the photos in the glossy decorating magazines. I take pride in my house and home, embrace the cocoon, the comfort of the familiar.

    I owe the Brigids. I thank the Brigids — the Fionnualas, Maeves, Siobhans, and Orlas who came before, who I feel a connection to, an affinity with, who worked hard and made a path for later children of Irish immigrants like me.

    Joanne Pateman, a former advertising art director, earned an M.F.A. in writing at Southampton College. She regularly contributes “Guestwords” and fiction to The Star.

    I was a spitfire tomboy and only 13 when I made my first exciting escape, sneaking out at 3 o’clock in the morning, shimmying down the side of the house from my second-floor bedroom window. I was a little shaky at such a height, but I had so much adrenaline before my feet touched the ground that I thought I could fly.

    Less than two miles away, he waited for me, Larry Hermann, the boy with sun-bleached hair and eyes the same color blue as my big sister’s angora sweater. We’d met at a boy-girl party where some of the older kids played spin the bottle and we’d just watched, while stealing sneaky looks at each other.

    He was sitting on his front stoop in the dark when I came up his walkway, and he jumped up to greet me, as if he couldn’t believe I showed up, as if he were really impressed. He surprised me when he linked his hand into mine and he pulled me and we ran together, talking nonsense and laughing, until we got to Bunker Woods, where only wild animals and cool kids dared to go. Neat, I thought. He must like climbing trees too.

    Unexpectedly, under the moon, he wrapped me up in his arms, and lickety-split I realized it was an embrace unlike the ones I got from my parents and aunts and uncles. All my senses seemed to be magnified a hundred kazillion times, including his breathing in my ears, like gusts of wind.

    Roy Orbison was singing “Pretty Woman” on a transistor radio Larry had set down on a log. The high notes went through my body like the bow of a violin. I felt I was floating in the lightness of the moment, confused by his caress, concentrating on all my senses, imagining his at the same time I was studying the mighty oaks around us — what great tree houses and forts could be made in these surroundings.

    As he held me, I thought about something I once read: how bunny rabbits could simply die from lack of touch. I wondered how I’d ever survived up until this point without it. I felt like a wild animal, getting my first jolt when his lips gently grazed mine. I thought of the soft feathers of a baby bird; our lips together and I became a sparrow flying for the first time. I thought, Wow!

    The kiss — it’s monumental, like on the big screen. Every microscopic cell of my being explodes like magic, the stars multiply and twinkle and burst across the sky in applause, and I look at him through kaleidoscope eyes. His skin is tawny and warm. He smells like summer. We blossom as one, and we melt into candle wax too hot to touch and too confusing for me to contemplate.

    My tousled hair fell out of the shiny satin ribbon that held it, and I shuddered, afraid yet not afraid of my very first kiss, the most important one of all, and I was ready for it to tickle me silly, to be the one that I will never forget. And it was perfect because it was among nature with the birch and maples and pines, and small animals as our only witnesses, peeking at us in awe.

    We returned to the empty road, back to my house, and said our goodbyes. We never saw each other again. That was all we needed in our innocence, and it belonged only to us and no one else. Forever!

    I climbed back up to my bedroom window and landed on my mattress with my favorite old stuffed toy. The rabbit’s glass eyes looked frozen, as if he needed a hug more than I did, as if he had once been alive and kept in a cage, untouched, and then stuffed and stitched up with all his feelings stuck inside.

    Unable to sleep, I reached for my water globe on my nightstand, with the plastic boy and girl figurines glued together in a whirlwind of glitter . . . but, this boy, the “real” boy, somewhere not far from my bedroom window, had just shaken up my insides and was unattached to the globe I had within me. I was alone with my thoughts as though it had never happened. Or was I? Would he remember the experience in the same way I would? Would life continue on as before without a kiss review in the local newspaper?

    Mom used to say, “Don’t grow up too fast,” when she brushed my hair late at night. I guess I could have waited a little longer for my first kiss, especially because love is crazy kinda like magic is, and can disappear into the night — like Larry Hermann. Poof!

    Janet Lee Berg is the author of “Glitz of the Hamptons” and “Rembrandt’s Shadow,” a novel. A longtime “Guestwords” contributor, she lives in East Moriches.

    The following is a list of upcoming events that, due to unforeseen circumstances, may or may not happen.

This Week

    A benefit for the families of those lost at sea will be held at the New York Yacht Club on Sunday night. The scheduled after-dinner speaker is the actor Alec Baldwin, who has said that he feels a special connection to the charitable organization, Friends of Jonah, which is sponsoring the event, because his great-great-uncle was a waiter on the Titanic.

    Mr. Baldwin has often spoken of his own brush with a watery grave, telling of how he once got soaking wet in a sudden downpour at a beach party in East Hampton at high tide.

Next Week

    HBO Home Video is set to release Alec Baldwin’s “From Fat to Fit,” in which the actor demonstrates his muscle-strengthening exercises, such as high kicks adapted from the Rockettes’ “March of the Wooden Soldiers.” Mr. Baldwin devised a complete fitness program for himself while watching the dailies of “It’s Complicated.” After losing his court battle to have the film shelved, the actor began making simple changes in his lifestyle. Now, all of his contracts stipulate that he cannot be compelled to play a scene that calls for him to eat osso buco.

    And to ensure that he keeps in shape, he has signed on to play Tony Curtis’s role in a remake of “Trapeze,” which will require him to do a triple summersault without a net. Mr. Baldwin advises his viewers to follow his example and engage in activities that keep them active, such as dancing the mambo.

Next Month

    A panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y titled “Celebrity Worship and the Declaration of Independence” will be moderated by Alec Baldwin. The panel will discuss, among other things, whether “the pursuit of happiness” is a euphemism for the pursuit of celebrities. Mr. Baldwin will recount the problems he has faced as a result of being famous, including being turned down by the co-op board of a building on Central Park West.

Late Next Month

    Kim Jong-un will receive a visit from a second Hollywood celebrity next month, when Alec Baldwin will spend a night in Pyongyang on his way to Japan to star in a Kabuki version of “Death of a Salesman.” The North Korean leader has let it be known that he admires Mr. Baldwin more than any other leading man except Ryan Gosling. As a bread-and-butter gift for his host, the actor plans to bring a DVD of Mr. Kim’s favorite movie, “Working Girl.”

This Summer

    CBS announced that it will air a new late-night talk show hosted by Alec Baldwin, despite the notorious cancellation of the actor’s MSNBC show due to his angry rant at a photographer who was trying to take pictures of him, his wife, his child, and his doorman. Mr. Baldwin reportedly ran down the street after the man, calling him a “j-rk.” To forestall further incidents, the actor has agreed to spend at least two weeks a year undergoing sunbathing therapy at a Malibu treatment center.

Next Fall

    Rockefeller Center executives disclosed yesterday that the centerpiece of next year’s tree lighting ceremony will be Alec Baldwin reading “The Night Before Christmas” in Latin. The actor was quick to say that although he has immersed himself in the language by visiting the Colosseum, he does not yet read, speak, or recognize it. “The text will be written out phonetically,” he explained, “the way Torah prayers are written out in Reformed synagogues on Yom Kippur.” (Last summer Mr. Baldwin was guest rabbi at Temple B’nai Shalom in Great Neck, Long Island.)

    It should be a busy holiday season for Mr. Baldwin, who is scheduled to join the American Ballet Company for several weeks, dancing the part of the Nutcracker Prince in “The Nutcracker.”

Next Year

    Simon and Schuster says that it plans to publish “Samuel Johnson: A Busy Life,” Alec Baldwin’s 1,000-page biography of the 18th century’s towering man of letters. The book reportedly took Mr. Baldwin four weeks to write. The actor revealed that he has been enthralled by the writings of Dr. Johnson ever since, at the age of 6, he found a copy of “Rasselas” in the playground.

To Be Determined

    The attorney representing Alec Baldwin, who was found guilty of stalking one of his fans, says that he intends to appeal the verdict. During the trial, the lawyer showed news footage of the actor attending the premiere of a new movie in Los Angeles on the same night that the fan claims Mr. Baldwin followed her into the lobby of her apartment building in Astoria, Queens, and forced her to accept an autographed picture of himself.

    The attorney argued that his client could not have been in two places at once and contends that the jury was unduly influenced by a recent rumor that Mr. Baldwin is triplets, only one of whom is retiring from public life.

    Bette-Jane Raphael is a journalist, celebrity groupie, and onetime Amagansett resident.

    Background first.

    In the 2000s, we got the fictionalized but authentic “Mad Men” advertising agency: Sterling Cooper. Some say it was meant to mimic Doyle Dane Bernbach — the real, the remarkable originator of the best advertising New York has ever known, from the period “Mad Men” took place, the 1960s. Doyle Dane, as it came to be known, ran an ad in those years for Avis under the very famous “We Try Harder” campaign.

    The ad I refer to ran in magazines like Time and Life. The headline: “The writer of this ad recently rented an Avis car. Here’s what I found.”

    Not what he found, but what I found. The interesting, thrilling shift to first person, which proofreaders at other ad agencies would have chided the writer for, remained intact. DDB — another shorthand version of the shop — often delivered these kinds of sophisticated and clever punches. To entertain the reader. To stand out and be noticed.

    And they certainly were.

    The visual was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and the first two lines of copy read: “I write Avis ads for a living. But that doesn’t make me a paid liar.”

    Daring. Open. Honest. Truth. Exposing the brand for being sloppy, the copy continued. It was Avis’s way of saying that they had to be better, more vigilant, to beat Hertz, the number-one rental car company at the time.

    “We’re number two in rent-a-cars. So why go with us?” read another headline, the very first in the series, with the visual of what is also known as a peace sign, two fingers pointed up in a V, #2. It inaugurated the campaign, and each subsequent ad talked about how the underdog, Avis, was planning on closing the gap between the two. By trying harder.

    I don’t know if they ever did emerge triumphant. But since then, Enterprise (“We’ll pick you up” — do they, really? Even in Sheboygan, Wisc.?) and National (“Pick any car in the aisle and go!”) and Budget and Dollar and Rent-a-Wreck (that one is history) and Zipcar and others joined in the competition. A booming market, it seems, renting cars. A business that, like everything in the universe, has expanded. It’s a bit of a miracle that we still have only Coke and Pepsi in the cola wars.

    But this piece is not about colas or cars. It’s about cough drops. Pine Brothers Softchew cough drops.

    Not Luden’s, but Pine Brothers. Brands I remember for decades. Wasn’t Abraham Lincoln featured somehow on the package of one of those brands? No matter, but I wonder: Was he known for a sore throat?

    I keep digressing. I tend to. It’s not exactly A.D.D. or even A.D.H.D. It’s just that thoughts do occur to me as I write, and I find a certain relevance in including them no matter how wayward or off the point.

    But here’s the real point: Back in October of last year, watching something or other on television — although I know it wasn’t “Downton Abbey,” my favorite TV show, because they don’t have commercials on PBS, just fund-raisers, and often — a commercial came on for Pine Brothers. Martha Stewart walks into a room, sits down in a chair, and says: “Hello. I’m Martha. And I don’t do commercials. But I recently came across a product that I felt I just had to tell you all about. . . .”

    I’m paraphrasing a bit, and you can, if you wish, actually go to Google for the exact phraseology, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that she has done commercials. For American Express a while back, where her pool was mosaicked in shards of ripped-up credit cards. I don’t remember the point of that one. And then, there she was, and often, for Macy’s — a lot of spots with Donald Trump and Justin Bieber and others, during Christmastimes. No doubt she shilled for J.C. Penney when her stuff was sold there.

    So what was she saying? “Those of you who know me [does anyone really know her?] know I don’t do commercials.” The commercial ran again during the Golden Globes recently. “It’s because I believe in this product that I decided to do this one.” She actually sounded like she had a sore throat as she read her script.

    Turns out, though, her script was not actually written for her. It was written for Liza Minnelli. Which makes sense, because Liza really is a person who doesn’t do commercials. Oh, wait . . . I take that back. She did a funny Snickers commercial with Aretha Franklin in the campaign “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” Betty White and Abe Vigoda started that on a football field during a Super Bowl years ago. Funny spots in a field of mostly mediocrity and worse. (Digression again.)

    But Liza Minnelli is hardly a spokeswoman for anything except, perhaps, rehab.

    Digging deeper into this untruth in advertising, I did find, online, that Liza backed out of the spot — right there! on the spot! — claiming it was way too much pressure. The Pine Brothers people said they turned to Martha Stewart after “our first actress had a nervous breakdown” just before filming. Ms. Minnelli had also sent a list of demands including black Egyptian cotton towels and a $400 coffee service.

    So, amazingly — I assume Ms. Stewart is a very busy lady — she got the call that same morning and presumably said, “Yes! I’m on my way!” The crew was all in place, the Waldorf Towers suite already chosen and paid for as location, and Martha was instantly able to step in.

    For a cool one million dollars.

    Hair and makeup took 10 minutes. The filming itself took all of 30. No quick cuts. No music track. Just Martha in a chair with her/Liza’s spiel.

    Forty minutes total. A 30-second spot. One million bucks.

    The script was not changed — how could it have been? It would have required so much back-and-forth between the agency and the brand manager and the director and who knows who else. The script was in place. Only the performer was changed to keep the star power, the celebrity quotient, intact.

    Astounding that there was not a thousand meetings to discuss this sudden and drastic casting change. Martha is nothing like Liza, though they’re contemporaries — Martha a bit older; one’s hair is platinum blond and the other’s dead black. I doubt that Liza cooks, and Martha certainly doesn’t sing. All they have in common is, perhaps, their diva-ness.

    No, Martha isn’t Liza. Martha seems way too controlled to have a nervous breakdown. Martha is quite professional. And Martha did not request two cartons of cigarettes on the shoot, as Liza did.

    Maybe she needed the cigarettes to make her voice sound even gruffer? Maybe she needed the cigarettes because they would have suppressed the breakdown?

    Cigarettes. Like the butts in the bygone Avis ad.

    Nowadays, cars don’t seem to have ashtrays, although you can still find them on airplane armrests.

    There is no cigarette advertising anymore.

    Avis would have a hard time running that ad that they did in the 1960s. But they still run that tagline from 50 years ago: “We Try Harder.”

    Shouldn’t the advertising industry do the same?

    Hy Abady has worked in advertising for close to 45 years. For 36 years a part-time resident of Amagansett, he will be spending next summer in East Hampton.

    Several of my friends on eastern Long Island have read my new book, “Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds,” and they have asked me to weigh in on your deer wars. So here are a couple of thoughts:

    You are not unique. Fights over what to do, or what not to do, about overabundant or nuisance deer (or geese, coyotes, bears, beavers, you name it), or even whether there are too many, are now going on in literally thousands of communities (but they don’t seem to know it or to learn from one another).

    In researching my book, I attended a lot of local “deer problem” meetings — unfortunately. The shouting usually starts early, and one common refrain is that people have “no right” to kill, cull, destroy, slaughter, or whatever these beautiful and innocent wild creatures into whose habitat we have encroached.

    Some people say bring back “natural predators.” Two big deer predators historically were wolves and cougars. They count on killing deer to eat and would (in my opinion) make lively additions to the eastern Long Island ecosystems.

    Another big deer predator worth mentioning is man. In fact, research suggests that since the end of the last Ice Age man has killed more deer than all other predators combined.

    Now, about 10 million deer hunters annually kill about 6 million deer and, in many places, mainly traditional rural habitats, do an adequate job of managing white-tailed deer populations. But in suburban and exurban sprawl, this hasn’t worked.

    Some history: At the end of the 19th century, the conservation movement put an end to 400 years of the unbridled killing by settlers and commercial hunters of anything wild that they could sell — meat, feathers, fur, and anything for which they could find a market. By 1890, white-tailed deer had been reduced to an estimated 350,000 from a 1492 population believed to number more than 30 million.

    Deer were slowly restocked in newly created refuges. In 1906, for example, 50 Michigan whitetails were transplanted to Pennsylvania, which, like many Eastern states, had no deer at all. Wild birds and animals began a slow climb back to plenty under the so-called North American Model in which wildlife belonged to all the people, with equal access for all willing to obey government management rules. It slowly began to work.

    Then, after World War II, Americans began sprawling out of cities and off farms. By 1970, we had more sprawl dwellers than farmers or city slickers. By the 2000 census an absolute majority of Americans lived not on farms or in cities but in the vast in-between. Where family farms once thrived, we now have sprawl that has filled up with trees and, increasingly, wild animals and birds.

    Deer management in the sprawl hasn’t worked because sprawl man has largely opted out of the predation business. He doesn’t hunt and he doesn’t want others to hunt. In other words, he doesn’t want deer managed. Decades ago, before deer were a problem, he began peppering his landscape with firearms restrictions in the name of safety (sometimes a guise for anti-hunting sentiment). Safety is relative. Hunters kill about 100 or so people annually, usually each other in cases of mistaken identity. Nowadays, deer kill twice that many in vehicle crashes, and send 29,000 people to hospitals.

    Bottom line: The historic range of the white-tailed deer is in the eastern third of the United States, where two-thirds of Americans live, most in sprawl. Sprawl man’s prohibitions — laws, regulations, signs, sentiment — mean this: In just the last few decades, for the first time in 11,000 years, huge swaths of the white-tailed deer’s historic range have been put off-limits to its biggest predator.

    Put another way, lethal management of deer by man has a very long history. Nowadays, a rule of thumb says two-thirds of the female deer population must die annually just to stabilize (let alone reduce) the whitetail population. But, suddenly in some locales, we want to opt out.

    So the people who ask “What right do we have?” are asking the wrong question. The real question is: What are our stewardship responsibilities on behalf of the ecosystems we inhabit? As a keystone species capable of managing our landscapes for the good of all their inhabitants — animals, birds, plants, trees, and even people — we are abrogating those responsibilities in these prolonged fights over deer.

    Jim Sterba was a foreign and national correspondent for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for more than four decades. “Nature Wars” was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

    By the summer of 1979, I had lived in New York City for just over a year, toiling away in a lowly position in the public relations office of a dance company. I was 26 years old but still surprisingly starry-eyed for someone that age. I had caught the bug for writing. Not fiction — I can’t make up a story on a dare, has always been my refrain. I saw myself as an opinionator, an essayist, and thought my own name’s resemblance to that of the great E.B. White to be of vague significance.

    My start was humble but true. I was placing Broadway theater reviews in an obscure Village rag, as well the occasional op-ed in out-of-town newspapers.

    That year was pre-AIDS awareness and post-pill, still a heady time of sexual freedom in which a young woman, in possession of a party invitation, could find herself in a passionate relationship by night’s end. The party in question was a bacchanalia on East 79th Street. In true Southern fashion, a homecoming queen and king were crowned and drunkenly carried aloft to I’m not sure where.

    I busied myself exchanging heated looks from across the crowded room with an unusually tall man. As the crowd shifted, we were thrown together. With an Alabaman lilt, he introduced himself as Winston Groom. In a strange coincidence, his name was familiar to me. His first novel, “Better Times Than These,” had been hailed by The Times earlier that week as one of a handful of authentic Vietnam War narratives. I had gone on a fruitless search for the book and told him so. He groaned at what he saw as a line and spirited me off for the weekend.

    That Memorial Day weekend was cold and wet. Winston had rented a ramshackle Victorian place outside Bridgehampton. It still stands on Route 27 today, now a bilious Pepto Bismol pink, though I am pretty sure it was barn red in those days. The house was dark and comfortingly gloomy, bearing no resemblance to the spacious, airy interiors we associate with a Hamptons summer today. It had a Boo Radley aspect. The suspicion that it might be haunted was heightened by the persistent chords of what sounded like a violin emanating out of thin air.

    To our delighted surprise, however, raspberries grew wild by the bucketful at the edge of the property, and the kitchen was so well equipped that it demanded committed forays into domesticity.

    As a newly anointed Southern war novelist, Winston had moved easily into the East End’s extended literary enclave. Though James Jones, the author of “From Here to Eternity,” had died of congestive heart failure the year before, he was still the reigning hero in spirit. His big-hearted widow, Gloria, was the center of this universe. Of Gloria’s many claims to fame, her legs doubled for Marilyn Monroe’s in the subway updraft scene of the movie “The Seven Year Itch.” Gloria, a former actress, was in her 50s by then, but she was attractive enough to make this claim thoroughly believable.

    The Jones house was a hub for much activity. Notably, it was the site of a standing weekly poker game, in which participants wore green visors and burned cigars down to nubs in ubiquitous ashtrays. All made themselves at home even when Gloria couldn’t be found. One afternoon I came across a distinguished man whipping up something in a pan. He explained he was challenging himself to come up with an original dish using the expired ingredients in the refrigerator. I only later learned that it was Craig Claiborne, then the celebrated food critic for The Times.

    That summer was launched with Gloria’s party for the “60 Minutes” anchor Shana Alexander, whose new book, “Anyone’s Daughter,” explored the kidnapping of Patty Hearst — that day’s real-life mystery. That I can’t remember a soul who was there is more a testament to my abject terror than anything it says about the event itself. I was out of my depth and feared that my nascent romance would lead to a summer in which no one would be much interested in talking to me, surrounded as I was by all that literary accomplishment. But Winston’s aura of success rubbed off on me. His friends were unfailingly kind and at least appeared to take my ambitions seriously.

    We spent many hours that summer at Bobby Van’s. Its then-dark interior looked like the set for “The Iceman Cometh” and was the scene of debauchery all would have the good manners not to mention the next day. We met the writer Willie Morris often for lunch. He held court at a front table every day wearing the same polyester tweed pants, as if he couldn’t be bothered to go home to change. Willie was sweetly funny and easy to like. Years before, he had written “North Toward Home” — a revered Southern classic — and was the famously deposed editor of Harper’s magazine.

    At this point in his life, though, he seemed to have run low on energy. I thought of him as old and was shocked to learn that he was only 44. He was completing his friend James Jones’s unfinished novel, “Whistle.” The next year Willie would return to Mississippi, where he married happily and moved on to many more great literary feats.

    That summer I was particularly dazzled by Irwin Shaw, who had come out of the starting gate in 1948 with “The Young Lions,” his World War II epic, but was far more famous for the lurid mini-series, starring Nick Nolte, that had been made from his novel “Rich Man, Poor Man.”

    Irwin was neither young nor handsome, but he radiated a sexual energy that would have been apparent to a woman of any age. His wife, Marian, kept a gimlet eye on his every move. According to Winston, Irwin wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” — his short story about a husband with a wandering eye — in a New York hotel. When Marian found and read the draft, she threw it out the window in a rage. Irwin watched his pages fluttering out of the hotel window on his way back from a walk. “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” was part of his collection “Five Decades,” which came out that year. I still have a copy he inscribed, “To Ellen, who I hope will send me her book after 50 years.”

    Much of what I learned that summer stays with me today, but it was Joseph Heller’s words that truly amazed me. At a dinner party, he told me that his work always depended on the first sentence that he wrote. Sometimes that sentence would lead to a “Catch-22,” but it would more often dead-end into chapters that were abandoned in drawers all over his house.

    Though it doesn’t make it any more excusable, I was more than a little tipsy when I threw myself down in Joe Heller’s lap at a lawn party in Southampton. It led to an epic argument with Winston, but we had no shortage of those. This seemed fitting to me, all part of what becoming a true writer was all about in my mind. Sometimes I would leave for New York in high dudgeon, only to find myself headed back to Bridgehampton the next week.

    I don’t know if it’s the rose-colored glasses, or whether the South Fork wasn’t quite the snarl of traffic that it is today. The vast potato fields, still around then, were sometimes covered in white flowers and a revelation to me. Even the prosaic potato seemed to strive toward a kind of poetry. As I made my way to Bridgehampton on Fridays, the mist hovering on Route 27 at twilight filled me with affectionate awe. I began to see the East End as a place where I might like to live someday, though the thought was a distant reality.

    Alas, my romance with Winston wouldn’t even survive the fall — though, over the years there were spur-of-the-moment rendezvous in attempts to rekindle the romance. The attraction had legs but the relationship wasn’t destined for permanence. He would join the pantheon of well-known writers with his novel “Forrest Gump” and several Civil War histories. He returned to Point Clear, Ala., to live and start a family.

    Life continued on in New York for me. While I thought of the Hamptons often, I would not return for more than 20 years. When I did, it was to a house I bought with my husband in Springs. In a marathon three months, I finally finished a manuscript for a first book I had imagined many years before.

    By then, of course, Willie Morris, Irwin Shaw, Gloria Jones, and Joe Heller were gone. But the memory of the summer of 1979 was and will always be an important part of the landscape that attracts and inspires me.

    Ellen T. White is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” from the Running Press, a humorous compendium of tips from the romantic women of history. She lives in Springs.

    I was a peculiar young man. People thought there was something wrong with me, and a lot of parents from our local school didn’t appreciate it when I hung out with their kids. I really didn’t like the same things as other kids.

    I wasn’t the first outsider who dreamt of being a writer. However, I didn’t want to be the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald. I had no fantasies about being great and showing all those parents and kids who wanted to spurn me back then that they were wrong. Not me.

    I dreamt of being one of the people who wrote the summaries of novels and plays that we bought at exam time. I idealized the writers of Monarch Notes. If there were CliffsNotes, I wanted to have my name attached to the synopsis of a classic.

    On lonely Saturday afternoons when the other boys in our neighborhood were playing touch football, I dreamt of writing the summary of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Hamlet muses about whether it is better to exist or not. Dying, sleeping, and dreaming are all offered as alternatives. But no conclusion is reached during the soliloquy.

    Richard III was another Shakespearean character I was intrigued by. Richard asks if a horse is available and subsequently offers up his worldly possessions in payment for the animal was my succinct précis of the famed “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” speech.

    Everyone is dealt a different hand. You get what you get, as the expression goes, and as it turned out I never got to be one of the authors of a work like the Monarch “Henry IV, Part 1.” Part of becoming an adult involves accommodating reality and learning to go after the possible. You might have been in love with Marilyn Monroe, but you were more likely to end up with Emily Monroe.

    Actually, Emily happened to be captain of the girls field hockey team in college, and while I thought I was lowering the bar in going after her, she had a different perception of her position on the food chain and roundly rejected my advances. This was my first experience of lowering my sights and then having them lowered again.

    Anyway, it’s a long story, but being unhappily married and divorced, I just lived with someone for many years. Recently she told me she couldn’t take it anymore. She informed me she was leaving me for someone else. I tried to explain to her the statistics that most divorced people end up marrying the same person again. But her only response was that it was a good thing we never got married.

    But getting back to my childhood dreams. After being turned down by the companies that produce Cliff, Spark, and Monarch Notes, I tried to raise money from my family and friends to start my own venture. I even opened a Kickstarter account, but the idea of a publishing firm devoted to producing synopses of classic works didn’t seem to fire anyone’s imagination — at least not with me at the helm. So I lowered my sights again and decided to sell the whole concept to Hollywood.

    What about Kenneth Branagh in the Monarch “Richard III”? I would go to the publisher and buy the dramatic rights to the summary of the Shakespearean action. I was sure no one had ever done this before, and I figured I’d finally come up with a realistic plan by which I could attain success in life. Maybe I wouldn’t be the writer of a great Shakespearean summary, but at least I would have the vicarious thrill of shepherding one to the screen.

    As of this writing all the major studios have passed on this project, but there are many blockbuster films that are taken up by independents after the major studios turn them down. And speaking of realism and lowering the bar, I think this is a realistic outcome for my project. I may not end up satisfying my childhood dreams, but I’ll be rich.

    Francis Levy, a Wainscott resident, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.” He blogs at TheScreamingPope.com and on The Huffington Post.