And Here You Sneer At Big Love Like It’s Such A Foreign Concept

Now that a little time has passed*, the Times can finally address the salient fact of that particular story:

She worked at the Red Lobster in Times Square and lived with her husband near Yankee Stadium. Yet one night, returning home from her job, Odine D. discovered that African custom, not American law, held sway over her marriage.

A strange woman was sitting in the living room, and Ms. D.’s husband, a security guard born in Ghana, introduced her as his other wife.

Devastated, Ms. D., a Guinean immigrant who insisted that her last name be withheld, said she protested: “I can’t live with the woman in my house — we have only two bedrooms.” Her husband cited Islamic precepts allowing a man to have up to four wives, and told her to get used to it. And she tried to obey.

Polygamy in America, outlawed in every state but rarely prosecuted, has long been associated with Mormon splinter groups out West, not immigrants in New York. But a fatal fire in a row house in the Bronx on March 7 revealed its presence here, in a world very different from the suburban Utah setting of “Big Love,” the HBO series about polygamists next door.

The city’s mourning for the dead — a woman and nine children in two families from Mali — has been followed by a hushed double take at the domestic arrangements described by relatives: Moussa Magassa, the Mali-born American citizen who owned the house and was the father of five children who perished, had two wives in the home, on different floors. Both survived.

. . .

But the Magassas clearly are not an isolated case. Immigration to New York and other American cities has soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali, where demographic surveys show that 43 percent of women are in polygamous marriages.

And the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with African immigrants, officials and scholars of polygamy is of a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.

*It makes you wonder whether someone at early editorial meetings yelled out “Too soon!” as if it were a tastelessly ill-timed 9/11 joke.

April Fool’s Day Is A Week From This Sunday — And Don’t Think I Didn’t Check That

Now if I could only remember what I did with my library card:

In what would be a first in the United States, the Brooklyn Public Library hopes to team up with Netflix to deliver DVDs and videos to anyone in the borough with a library card, The Post has learned.

The price would be unbeatable — free.

The disclosure was made by John Vitali, the library’s chief fiscal officer, following an announcement at Brooklyn Borough Hall that Dionne Mack-Harvin had been named executive director of the borough’s library system.

. . .

“What we want to do is work with Netflix and really get that inventory together, really use Netflix as the delivery mechanism,” Vitali said.

“We’re getting some good vibrations back. Nothing formal has been settled. What’s really exciting is — it’s my understanding — really the first of its kind, a model for that kind of corporate partnership.”

Netflix has an inventory of 75,000 movies.

Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said he knew nothing about a possible partnership with the library and seemed surprised by the news.

Vitali said that if the partnership works out, the library and the movie-delivery service would develop a separate list. But it would include popular films.

“DVDs are very expensive to buy, and they’re also very expensive to move because they’re delicate,” Vitali said.

“Instead of buying the DVDs, we’d be outsourcing from Netflix to, in effect, create a free inventory of DVDs that would be available to our customers.”

[Emphasis added but let’s skip the details, shall we?]

The Carriage Business In Brooklyn Was Strong — Stronger Than That Of The Upper West Side — In Fact, It Was So Strong That . . .

Many many years from now, this is the sort of detail that historians will repeat over and over in their books about Brooklyn:

Hampton Jitney, which has been driving New Yorkers to the East End of Long Island from the Upper East Side since 1974, announced earlier this week that it will pick up passengers from Park Slope and downtown Brooklyn beginning on Memorial Day. The same fleet of forest green coaches that now services the Upper East Side will be used in Brooklyn, a company spokeswoman said.

This disturbs status-conscious Upper West Siders, who long, long ago became parodies of themselves:

As New Yorkers scramble to nail down the last remaining Hamptons summer shares over the next few weeks, many Upper West Side residents who will soon be escaping to the beach say they feel overlooked by Hampton Jitney, which stops only on the Upper East Side and will expand its service to Brooklyn this summer.

“It’s just really surprising that they’d do a route in Brooklyn first,” a psychoanalyst who works on the Upper West Side and sometimes visits friends at their weekend homes in the Hamptons, Judy Bernes, said.

Jacqueline Jankoff, a bubbly, curly-haired Upper West Side resident, stocks up on groceries at Zabar’s every Friday during the summer before catching the 86th Street crosstown bus to Lexington Avenue, where she boards the Jitney and relaxes in the roomy bus on the way to her Amagansett beach house. After 18 years of this weekend routine, Ms. Jankoff says she could make the crosstown trip with her eyes closed, but that doesn’t lighten her grocery load.

“I come here, and then I have to schlep my shopping bags across town on the bus,” Ms. Jankoff said over a sample of goat cheese at Zabar’s. “I love the Jitney, but I wish it came here.”

Tijuana On The Hudson

Now that Moscow is the most expensive city on the planet, I suppose it makes sense to lure more people to the bargain that is the Big Apple:

New York City has become the first American city to have a tourism office in Moscow.

NYC & Company, which runs New York’s tourism industry, commissioned the Aviareps Group to do advertising and public relations work in Moscow. The office will be staffed by three people currently living in Russia.

Another city tourism office opened Tuesday in Stockholm, to serve Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It is all part of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to increase the city’s visitor numbers to 50 million by 2015. It is estimated that about 44 million tourists visited New York last year, 46,000 from Russia.

The city’s director of public relations for travel and tourism, Christopher Heywood, said Russians “have a propensity for the luxury goods market — they love the furs and diamonds, and they love the luxury hotels.”

Copenhagen is 8 on the list and Oslo is 10 . . .

Don’t Worry, In Time You’ll Find That Your Baby Will Grow Lighter, Like A Good Pair Of Levi’s — Or Even A David Mamet Film

A fertilization specialist claims that race is a condition that diminishes over time:

A Park Avenue fertility clinic’s blunder has left a family devastated — after a black baby was born to a Hispanic woman and her white husband, the couple charges in a lawsuit.

The mistake, made during in-vitro conception, wasn’t discovered until Jessica Andrews was born — and it became clear she didn’t look anything like her mom, Nancy, or dad, Thomas, the suit says.

The baby’s complexion was much darker than that of her mom — a light-skinned native of the Dominican Republic — or dad.

“Jessica doesn’t look like them,” said the couple’s attorney Howard Stern, of Long Island.

When Thomas and Nancy Andrews asked their doctor, Manhattan obstetrician Martin Keltz, what was going on, he allegedly told them that Jessica’s condition was an “abnormality,” and assured them she would “get lighter over time,” according to the couple’s suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.

But they found out the truth when DNA tests proved that Jessica — born in October 2004 — was not conceived with Thomas’ sperm.

“Three DNA test were taken, and each one excluded the father,” Stern said.