You're like out!

If you read the 1956 novel "The Last Angry Man, " by Gerald Green, you may recall a passage in which Woody Thrasher, the main character, tells a young man about how he, Woody, came from South Dakota to the big city and tried to fit in...but his cover was blown by a tailor.

In an effort to blend in with the Right People, Woody went to the tailor favorited by the upper crust, got a couple of suits, and thought he had the right clothes - until a co-worker saw his suit jacket and told him he was a "wide-stitch phony."

The co-worker was kind enough to let Woody in on a secret - if the purchaser of a suit was in with the right crowd, the tailor sewed the label onto his inner breast pocket with a nice tight stitch...but for auslanders like Thrasher, they used a wide, loose stitch, to tell one and all of his diminished status.

I thought about old Woody when I read this story about Livvy Dunne. I wouldn't know Livvy from Thin Lizzy, were she not the girlfriend of Pirate pitcher Paul Skenes. She is apparently a big deal among followers of college gymnastics (she competed for Louisiana State) and is now busy being an "influencer," meaning that people look at her posts and videos and decide that what she wears, says, eats, drives, thinks, smells like, and I don't know what-all else is the cool way to go.

It turns out, Livvy is not the last word in who says what. She tried to buy Babe Ruth's old apartment in New York, offering $1.6 million in American money, and the co-op board, the people who decide who gets to live in these high-time NY apartments, said nuh-uh.

Dunne said she was all set to close on 345 W. 88th St., Apartment 7B, when she found out she wasn't set after all.

So she told her 8 million TikTok devotees, "Guys, I'm so upset. So a few months ago, I decided I was going to make my first real estate purchase, which is so exciting. And I was going to get an apartment in New York City. But the gag was, it was Babe Ruth's apartment."

She and Skenes were so excited to buy the place, she even hired an interior decorator so she wouldn't have to use her old college furniture because, "That would be, like, criminal."

"Then the week that I'm supposed to get my keys to my brand new apartment, I get a call: The co-op board denied me, " she said. "So pretty much the people in the building voted to not have me live there, which is fine. Like, honestly, it wasn't financial. "

But she was philosophical about the rejection, probably the first of her life: "It could have been, for all I know, they could have been Alabama fans and I went to LSU. Like, I have no clue. Maybe they didn't want a public figure living there."

It's a long way from Louisiana to Manhattan. But I'm sure she'll find a nice apartment somewhere, maybe near Central Perk?