Woe is me, and I've never even met the gir-url, except in the pages of a book  – Three and a Half Virgins, to be precise. Samantha is that bewitching. She's so bewitching she has me completely, thoroughly, crushingly, undeniably smitten, and she exists only in the imagination of John Blumenthal, the author of Three and a Half Virgins. Am I in trouble, or what? Well, not really, as this constitutes the third of the four extended blurbs I agreed to do for John's new novel in return for a weekend at a Nantucket hotel with the actress who plays Samantha in the movie version of Three and a Half Virgins – when that deal is finally inked. John offered me the role of the book's protagonist, Jimmy Hendricks, who at some point gets to know Samantha with enviable intimacy, but I'm afraid my male ego is a tad too fragile even to pretend to be the man whom Samantha treats the way she treats Jimmy, whom she calls “Larry” when she's demonstrating indifference to him.

But before we get into the verbal humiliations this virginal goddess heaps upon our boy, I should remind those of you who are following this saga as I report my progress reading it in sips each night in bed before lights out, that Virgins is the ingenious tale of a middle aged man whose wife suddenly leaves him for a young stud, and who has decided to track down and apologize to the three women whose virginity he compromised in high school and college and then dumped with callous disregard. His hope is to find forgiveness and, fingers crossed, perhaps something more. Accompanying him reluctantly is his bulky buddy Morris, who provides moral support and the promise of thwarting a possible physical attack by a mayhem-oriented mate one of his dumpees just might sic on him.

Here's our Jimmy back in college trying to hit on Samantha, whom he describes as “a purebred, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Darien, Connecticut, Switzerland, Biaritz, the Italian Riviera and everywhere else the fabulously wealthy park their Bentleys.” The description of her circumstances goes on at length, until we come to “The outstanding thing about Samantha was that she was drop-dead gorgeous: Silky black hair, dark tempestuous eyes, long slender legs, a perfectly straight nose that spent most of its time in a haughty sneering position and a spectacular smile, if you could get her to smile, which was next to impossible. In short, Samantha looked as if she'd popped out of the pages of Vogue and she knew it.”

Sorry, got sidetracked. Here, then, is Jimmy trying to hit on Samantha as the two of them leave a college writing seminar where Jimmy has just praised the living hell out of her mediocre story: “I made sure we exited together so I could collect my reward in the form of her deep, heartfelt gratitude. I was all smiles when she turned to me. 'You didn't really like that horrid piece of shit story of mine, did you, Larry?' she asked coldly. 'You couldn't possibly have, unless you're mentally disturbed. Are you mentally disturbed, Larry?'”

Some questions to consider: What does it take for Samantha to start calling Jimmy “Jimmy?” Also, does Samantha ever actually call him by his given name? If so, why?  You must realize, dear reader, that Samantha must have a warm side and have revealed it, at least to us, else you might ask yourself if I am mentally disturbed to be singing, “Ohh, Sama-antha, ohh, Sama-antha...”