Ideal Marriage - Hardcover

Peter Friedman is a Fulbright scholar, a formerly-practicing attorney and counsel to New York City Mayor Robert Wagner at the New York State Constitutional Convention, and the author of numerous pieces of fiction, non-fiction, and humor. His writing has appeared in Harpers, Cosmopolitan, Saturday Review, East Europe, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, and many other publications.

Friedman graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College in 1958, received his J.D. in 1961 from Harvard Law School, and earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Law from Columbia in 1971 with a thesis on East German law. During his professional career, he has taught writing workshops at The New School in Fiction and Non fiction, written speeches for New York City Mayor Robert Wagner at the New York State Constitutional Convention, and done consulting work on economic development with Hortense Gabel.

It was September 1957. I was sixteen, a junior in high school, and contemplating becoming a gigolo, just for a summer or two in Rome. Unlike the gigolos I had seen there in movies, I would be kind to the middle-aged women who kept me. I would be grateful to them, not only for the money I was earning, but for whatever I learned from them that I might later apply with my own wife. And I wouldn't ask for outlan-dish payment: merely enough to cover my trips, provide a little spending money for college, and above all, add to my savings account for my eventual marriage.