Candace Bushnell brings her one-woman show to Long Island

Candace Bushell brings her one-woman show "Is There Still Sex in the City?" to Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday, comedically chronicling the author's life from Connecticut kid to the sage of Sag Harbor — with a long stretch in-between as the maven of Manhattan mating.

"It's a bit of my life story," says Bushnell, 63, speaking by phone from her Long Island home. "How I came to New York, how I created 'Sex and the City,' why I invented Carrie Bradshaw [Bushnell's alter ego in the column and later the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker] and what happened to me after." "Sex and the City" began as a column in The New York Observer and was then collected into a 1996 book that spawned the HBO series (1998-2004), two movies (2008, 2010), a prequel series ("The Carrie Diaries," 2013-14) and a sequel series ("And Just Like That ... ," 2021-).

She adds, with tagline flair, "It's about being your own Mr. Big, as opposed to looking for Mr. Big" — the character, played by Chris Noth in the screen franchise, epitomizing the rich movers-and-shakers a certain sort seeks for husbands and lovers. For Bushnell, that was Ron Galotti, then a Condé Nast executive who broke up with her on the eve of the "Sex and the City" book publication. She went on to marry New York City Ballet dancer Charles Askegard in 2002, divorcing after a decade.

Her stage show began life last year with a monthlong workshop version at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. "I probably had about three hours of material, which was just overwhelming," Bushnell says, "and I cut that down to about two hours with intermission." It clocked in at about 90 minutes with no intermission at the Daryl Roth Theatre, an Off-Broadway venue near Manhattan's Union Square where it started in previews Nov. 13 and opened Dec. 7 for a planned two-month run — cut short on Dec. 19 when Bushnell contracted the coronavirus. Then this May, a limited run at The Carlyle hotel in Manhattan ran roughly 75 minutes, she says. "So that's exactly what it's supposed to be and that's what it will be at Westhampton Beach."