Anyone who mixes orange with pink cannot very well sit in judgment on peach and gray. : In 35 Words or Less

The day I was summoned to SuSu Levy’s condo to sit in judgment on what she considers an abomination of color outside her kitchen window, I was wearing one brown boot and one black boot.

SuSu didn’t notice because she requires everyone to remove their shoes, or their boots, before entering her home in the event a visitor might have stepped in dog do-do, so I was in my stocking feet when I entered.

I knew I was wearing mismatched boots the moment I left for work that morning, but I said to hell with it. The way I dress, I have been told, wearing multicolored footwear is a minor crime against good taste in comparison to the rest of my apparel.

I have no sense of what “goes together,” as they say. Sometimes my wife stares at me open-mouthed as I go out the door, too stunned by my orange shirt, pink-striped tie and blue slacks to utter a sound.

If she recovers in time, she marches me back to the closet, orders me to undress (“Not unless you kiss me,” I say, and she says, “Take it off, Buster”) and selects a new wardrobe for me. When I reach the office, someone always says admiringly: “I see your wife dressed you today.”

I mention all this only to point out that I was probably the wrong person for SuSu to complain to about the colors of a new condo being constructed across the street.

“Look at that!” she said angrily, pointing toward the side of the building from her kitchen window in Encino. “It’s so ugly, even the graffiti people won’t touch it!”

The builders, using exterior walls, stairwells and three short pipes, have created a geometric pattern of colors that blend peach, blue, red, white and gray. It looked OK to me, but I didn’t tell SuSu that because she is an excitable person and I was on her turf.

“Well,” I said, and “My, my” and “I hear what you’re saying.”

The colors went on the new structure a month ago and SuSu called the architect to complain.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He said the colors would please and delight the neighborhood, then thanked me for not hollering at him.”

SuSu, needless to say, was not pleased and delighted.

“You don’t just wreck a neighborhood that way,” she said, tendrils of smoke rising from her frizzy blonde hair. “Not this neighborhood anyhow!”

SuSu is not likely to give up. Some months ago, she organized Citizens Resisting Animal Poop (CRAP) and got the city to put up anti do-do signs in nearby Balboa Park after a campaign that registered 6.1 on the Richter scale. There were no injuries, thank God, and a minimum amount of property damage.

It was that campaign that started her asking visitors to remove their shoes before entering as a symbolic gesture against animal fecal matter.

In addition to being a neighborhood activist, SuSu is also a psychic, a healer, a poet, a writer of singles’ ads and the creator of something called Optimal Self-Therapy to alter the inner you. A typical Los Angeles housewife. Her husband, Alan Bockal, is a salesman and amateur stand-up comic. They were married last December.

“He did 3 minutes at our wedding,” SuSu says, “and it was the best wedding I’ve ever been to.”

It was, by the way, the third wedding she’s been to in which she was the bride. Her first husband she calls “the Ayatollah Levy” and the second “a Charminghungarian, one word.” The reason she uses it as one word, SuSu explained, is that all Hungarians seem to be charming.

Her newest husband, she said, “is warm, compassionate, caring and funny. He has everything but money.”

SuSu has been writing singles’ ads since 1981 and claims to limit everything she says to 35 words or less. I didn’t notice that during our conversation and I have a hunch the architect of the building outside her kitchen window didn’t notice it either. Perhaps her effort only applies to the written word.

Those ads, by the way, can make a short, awkward man seem cuddly and fun, so if you’re single and not especially attractive, you might want to look up SuSu.

As for the multicolored wall across the street, she isn’t sure what she’s going to do about it. A call to City Councilman Marvin Braude brought the response that you can’t legislate taste.

I am her last resort, I think, but anyone who mixes orange with pink cannot very well sit in judgment on peach and gray.

SuSu’s best shot would be to gather up her psychic powers and put a curse on the building in 35 words or less so that its colors would fade overnight.

I think she did that in her last campaign against do-do because I noticed as I left her condo that the neighborhood was strangely devoid of dogs and, consequently, of their do-do.

When I got home that night, my wife, who had gone to work early that day, leaving me on my own to dress, looked at my boots and then studied the rest of me.

“You’ve got on one black boot and one brown boot,” she said, “but you know something? It really doesn’t matter somehow.”

That pretty much says it all.