Philadelphia woman says was only planning to 'bat her eyelashes'

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PHILADELPHIA - A Philadelphia woman charged with offering sex for World Series tickets says she's embarrassed about her arrest, but did nothing wrong and is still hopeful of attending a game.

"I didn't do anything wrong, so I'm not embarrassed about my actions. I'm embarrassed about how I was arrested," Susan Finkelstein told The Associated Press in a phone interview yesterday, a day after meeting at a suburban bar with an undercover police officer responding to an ad on Craigslist.

Finkelstein's lawyer said his client is merely "a nice lady overcome with Phillies fever."

She might have dropped double entendres in her Craigslist ad but never explicitly offered sex, her lawyer William J. Brennan said. The 43-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate student wanted to take her husband to a game between her beloved Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees. The self-described "buxom blonde" said she was simply trying to score tickets online, as she had in the past.

Over a few beers at a suburban bar, she told a police officer she needed two tickets, one for herself and one for her husband. No price had been discussed, and Finkelstein and her lawyer stopped short of recounting specifics of what was said before several officers sitting at a nearby table came to arrest her.

Brennan hopes to get the misdemeanour charge of promoting prostitution dismissed.

"If somebody read into that posting a sexual connotation, that's on them. There's no overt sexual reference," Brennan said.

Finkelstein told WPVI-TV she was looking to get a deal on tickets. "I was hoping to get cheap tickets," she said, "maybe meet someone, and talk, and bat my eyelashes and maybe get some tickets."

Finkelstein faces a preliminary hearing in Bucks County on Dec. 3. On the bright side, she's been offered a pair of tickets to a weekend game in Philadelphia, courtesy of a radio station and car dealer. "It definitely wasn't worth all this ... turmoil and anxiety," she told the AP with her lawyer and husband on the line. "Hopefully, the silver lining is I do get to see the game."