Would You Kiss This Man?

If this were today, we’d have a YouTube video to confirm:

Edith Shain, long thought to be the woman in the famous V-J day photograph of a nurse and a sailor kissing to celebrate the end of World War II, reasserted Tuesday that it was in fact her in the picture.

Monday, Glenn McDuffie, an 80-year-old Houston retiree, cast doubts on the true identity of the woman, telling amNewYork, “I know the woman I kissed, and she ain’t it.”

Nonsense, she insisted. “This latest man, no way. I ask all of the men who claim it was them what was going on around us, what they said to me, and this one didn’t know.”

. . .

Reached Tuesday at her home in Santa Monica, Shain said she doubted McDuffie’s claim that he’s the sailor.

“There is no way of knowing who it actually was,” she said. “A lot of men over the years have claimed to be the sailor and there is now way to negate them — I bet they all kissed a lot of women that day.”

Whoever locked lips that day was no matter to the estimated 300 people who showed up at Times Square yesterday to re-enact the iconic photograph. Veterans from World War II and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were on hand along with couples from around the country for the annual Times Square Kiss-In.

“I was here when it happened,” said Abner Greenberg, 83, of Manhattan, who remembered kissing more girls that day 62 years ago than he ever had in his life. “People were hugging each other, men, women, it didn’t matter. I’d never seen anything like it.”

An estimated 2 million people, said to be the largest crowd ever assembled in human history, rushed to the square to celebrate the end of the war.

No wonder Shain denies it — the sailor sounds like a cad:

McDuffie, 80, of Houston, was identified last week by a forensic artist as the man in the famous Life Magazine photo — taken 62 years ago Tuesday — of a soldier and a nurse smooching in Times Square to celebrate victory over Japan in World War II.

McDuffie says he wants nothing to do with the annual “Kiss-In” celebration Tuesday or with Edith Shain, 87, who has long been believed to be the woman in the photo, until she submits to the battery of polygraph tests that he has undergone over the years to prove his identity.

. . .

In fact, McDuffie said he had tried to reach out to Shain through the years, but that she was far less receptive than she may have been on Broadway that day.

“She’s been a smart ass about it all the time so I hung up on her,” he said.

. . .

McDuffie said he was in the city that day to see his girlfriend, Ardith Bloomfield, who lived in Brooklyn, when word came that the war was over.

“I went over there and kissed her and saw a man running at us,” McDuffie recalled. “I thought it was a jealous husband or boyfriend coming to poke me in the eyes. I looked up and saw he was taking the picture and I kissed her as long as it took for him to take it.”