New Texture Publishing

Luke Ford writes:

In the summer of 1981, Scr*w magazine Senior Editor Josh Alan Friedman noticed a beautiful blonde out his art director's 11th-floor window in lower Manhattan. He yelled to her for her phone number and she yelled it back just before her roommates at the Markle Evangeline Hall (a dormitory for young Southern women going to school in New York) shut her mouth.

Josh dialed and advised his future wife Peggy Bennett, "Don't ever give out your phone number to strangers in this city."

"Well, just who are y'all?"

"We're Scr*w," he said. "And thank God you gave your number to us. If you'd been across from Time-Life, you would have really fallen in with some perverts."

Son of novelist (A Mother's Kisses) and screenwriter (Stir Crazy) Bruce Jay Friedman, Josh grew up in Glen Cove.

Normally surrounded by movie stars and writers, Josh and his younger brother Drew were the only white kids from 1962-66 at the otherwise all-black South School.

"I had a powerful civil rights conscience," says Bruce in the new documentary about Josh's life -- Blacks and Jews -- named after the title cut of the blues guitarist' s third album. "I kept pretending that there were two-or-three other semi-white kids."