The driver confesses that he is a novice and cannot find Main Street, the gaudy-twee stretch along which much of the film festival’s hullabaloo takes place. The cherubic producer type offers to direct the driver. Every few yards, framed by fancy light structures, there are swag stations and party venues, sponsored by car companies or telephone manufacturers.

At the local supermarket, small-time producers are shouting figures of money into camera phones. Every few minutes, shrill embraces take place over shopping carts as more and more non-locals realize they are in the wild together.

Nightflies Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss have brought their club Marquee and club-restaurant Tao to Park City. It sits squarely at the center of Main Street. The W hotel chain has a papery construction atop the primary swag station, “The Lift,” filled with monochromatic, minimalist furniture and bowls of apples. In “The Lift” (at the bottom of a ski lift!), hordes of unrecognizables and their hangers-on wander among the stations doling out free electronics, shoes, clothing, alcohol, etc. Tommy Lee, of “Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee,” stands outside in a T-shirt, stretching. Brand-new camel-colored Ugg boots of similar height cover most legs. Shiny camel-colored highlights cover most heads.

Inside, New York nightflies are swinging expensive-looking shopping bags filled with free products. “We’re doing a party tomorrow,” Richie Akiva, who may or may not have chaperoned one half of the Olsen twins to a Knicks game, whispers. “It’s going to be really good. We’re doing it with Amanda Demme.” He means the raven-tressed L.A. party promoter, who wins style awards in her spare time. Upstairs in the W lounge, Ms. Demme and her phalanx of former model boys are doing a “walk-through.” This involves lots of pointing, head shaking and whispering. The drywall quivers as her cowboy boots make the rounds. An amply hipped, jeans-in-boots starlet is being interviewed by a television channel. She gesticulates discordantly. There is a table of mini-muffins and coffee in the corner. Pravda vodka sponsors are rearranging their displays. “This is the spot,” one publicist confirms for another.

A bit later, a fake JT Leroy sits in the window of a Japanese restaurant, ostentatiously conducting an interview with two shabby-chic young men. Lily Bright, the producer of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004), walks in and introduces herself. The fake fake waves her away, saying he will “contact” her later. Outside, Diego Luna strolls past, sporting conceptual facial hair, yelling heated Spanish somethings into a phone.

On Friday evening, Dennis Hopper, wife and small child endure a 30-minute wait for their table at Grappa. The nondescript and overpriced “Italian” at the top of Main Street is playing host to the heads of the most important independent studios at the festival. They discuss Little Miss Sunshine across the tables. (The following day, it is announced that Fox Searchlight has outbid the competition.) Someone announces that he is a “jet whore” and then waves at a jet-owning acquaintance. “Biggest waste of money,” he chuckles.

“So we’ll see you at Harvey’s party later?” They are referring to the premiere party for the Weinstein Company’s Lucky Number Slevin, starring Josh Hartnett, at the W lounge. The party is scheduled to begin at 11:30 p.m. By 11:05, a five-row-deep blob has collected at the bottom of the W’s staircase. The headset girls look on helplessly as a fight breaks out and a heating device teeters ominously. “They’re nobodies,” says what can only be an L.A. native, making her way to the front of the group, sailing past the plastic rope. Upstairs, the space is already teeming with puffer jackets, messy hair and the same number of Ugged legs. The film’s stars have not yet arrived. The bar is serving pineapple juice. Harvey Weinstein, svelte and of chipper mood, walks through the room, smiling graciously. Through a back entrance, the “talent” finally emerges: Mr. Hartnett and Lucy Liu, followed by Scarlett Johansson. They sit together in their own celebrity island. Ms. Johansson orders a beer and pours it into a glass. Various revelers wander past and linger unnecessarily. Ms. Demme leans in to embrace the buxom star and her boyfriend. “I hate this place,” one producer is overheard confessing to a friend. “It’s so tacky.”

Elsewhere, at Tao, newly crowned “celebutard” Paris Hilton is hosting a party. “The crowd is slightly less cheesy than in New York,” a partygoer offers.

Saturday evening, at the premiere party for the film adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener at the VW lounge, miniature Zen gardens and bonsai trees line the tables. The same crowd of puffer jackets and Michael Kors wedge boots hovers. The talent, restricted to Toni Collette, arrives after midnight. Photographers select members of the crowd, strategically placing them near bottles of Nicolas Feuillatte champagne and product.

Sunday night, a Park City taxi, which is owned by a dapper young man who goes by the name Ashley, arrives 45 minutes late. “I just poured a $350 bottle of wine on my BlackBerry. So I couldn’t listen to any of my messages. The ride is free. And I’m drunk, so I’m totally unaccountable,” he confesses as I buckle my seatbelt. “You know, I’m writing a book called Regional Discipline.” Regional Discipline? “It’s about how bad all the kids are I’ve picked up. You know what? Southern kids are the best. They always help. New York kids are the worst.”

The driver confesses that he is a novice and cannot find Main Street, the gaudy-twee stretch along which much of the film festival’s hullabaloo takes place. The cherubic producer type offers to direct the driver. Every few yards, framed by fancy light structures, there are swag stations and party venues, sponsored by car companies or telephone manufacturers.

At the local supermarket, small-time producers are shouting figures of money into camera phones. Every few minutes, shrill embraces take place over shopping carts as more and more non-locals realize they are in the wild together.

Nightflies Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss have brought their club Marquee and club-restaurant Tao to Park City. It sits squarely at the center of Main Street. The W hotel chain has a papery construction atop the primary swag station, “The Lift,” filled with monochromatic, minimalist furniture and bowls of apples. In “The Lift” (at the bottom of a ski lift!), hordes of unrecognizables and their hangers-on wander among the stations doling out free electronics, shoes, clothing, alcohol, etc. Tommy Lee, of “Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee,” stands outside in a T-shirt, stretching. Brand-new camel-colored Ugg boots of similar height cover most legs. Shiny camel-colored highlights cover most heads.

Inside, New York nightflies are swinging expensive-looking shopping bags filled with free products. “We’re doing a party tomorrow,” Richie Akiva, who may or may not have chaperoned one half of the Olsen twins to a Knicks game, whispers. “It’s going to be really good. We’re doing it with Amanda Demme.” He means the raven-tressed L.A. party promoter, who wins style awards in her spare time. Upstairs in the W lounge, Ms. Demme and her phalanx of former model boys are doing a “walk-through.” This involves lots of pointing, head shaking and whispering. The drywall quivers as her cowboy boots make the rounds. An amply hipped, jeans-in-boots starlet is being interviewed by a television channel. She gesticulates discordantly. There is a table of mini-muffins and coffee in the corner. Pravda vodka sponsors are rearranging their displays. “This is the spot,” one publicist confirms for another.

A bit later, a fake JT Leroy sits in the window of a Japanese restaurant, ostentatiously conducting an interview with two shabby-chic young men. Lily Bright, the producer of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004), walks in and introduces herself. The fake fake waves her away, saying he will “contact” her later. Outside, Diego Luna strolls past, sporting conceptual facial hair, yelling heated Spanish somethings into a phone.

On Friday evening, Dennis Hopper, wife and small child endure a 30-minute wait for their table at Grappa. The nondescript and overpriced “Italian” at the top of Main Street is playing host to the heads of the most important independent studios at the festival. They discuss Little Miss Sunshine across the tables. (The following day, it is announced that Fox Searchlight has outbid the competition.) Someone announces that he is a “jet whore” and then waves at a jet-owning acquaintance. “Biggest waste of money,” he chuckles.

“So we’ll see you at Harvey’s party later?” They are referring to the premiere party for the Weinstein Company’s Lucky Number Slevin, starring Josh Hartnett, at the W lounge. The party is scheduled to begin at 11:30 p.m. By 11:05, a five-row-deep blob has collected at the bottom of the W’s staircase. The headset girls look on helplessly as a fight breaks out and a heating device teeters ominously. “They’re nobodies,” says what can only be an L.A. native, making her way to the front of the group, sailing past the plastic rope. Upstairs, the space is already teeming with puffer jackets, messy hair and the same number of Ugged legs. The film’s stars have not yet arrived. The bar is serving pineapple juice. Harvey Weinstein, svelte and of chipper mood, walks through the room, smiling graciously. Through a back entrance, the “talent” finally emerges: Mr. Hartnett and Lucy Liu, followed by Scarlett Johansson. They sit together in their own celebrity island. Ms. Johansson orders a beer and pours it into a glass. Various revelers wander past and linger unnecessarily. Ms. Demme leans in to embrace the buxom star and her boyfriend. “I hate this place,” one producer is overheard confessing to a friend. “It’s so tacky.”

Elsewhere, at Tao, newly crowned “celebutard” Paris Hilton is hosting a party. “The crowd is slightly less cheesy than in New York,” a partygoer offers.

Saturday evening, at the premiere party for the film adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener at the VW lounge, miniature Zen gardens and bonsai trees line the tables. The same crowd of puffer jackets and Michael Kors wedge boots hovers. The talent, restricted to Toni Collette, arrives after midnight. Photographers select members of the crowd, strategically placing them near bottles of Nicolas Feuillatte champagne and product.

Sunday night, a Park City taxi, which is owned by a dapper young man who goes by the name Ashley, arrives 45 minutes late. “I just poured a $350 bottle of wine on my BlackBerry. So I couldn’t listen to any of my messages. The ride is free. And I’m drunk, so I’m totally unaccountable,” he confesses as I buckle my seatbelt. “You know, I’m writing a book called Regional Discipline.” Regional Discipline? “It’s about how bad all the kids are I’ve picked up. You know what? Southern kids are the best. They always help. New York kids are the worst.”

Born in 1923, Ms. Fox is the author of six novels, two memoirs and 22 children’s books. Despite critical accolades, her adult fiction didn’t fare well commercially—it went out of print for seven long years. The nearly mythic tale of her resurrection begins a decade ago with an impassioned essay published in Harper’s Magazine by the novelist Jonathan Franzen, who had come across her second novel, Desperate Characters (1970), at the writers’ colony Yaddo. At the urging of Tom Bissell, then a tenacious young editorial assistant at W.W. Norton, her work was reprinted. Dozens of writers (including Jonathan Lethem, Francine Prose and Shirley Hazzard) came out of the shadows to express what could only be described as ardor.

And then her first memoir, Borrowed Finery (2001), was published to universally admiring responses. It tells the tale of her unnervingly complicated childhood: Briefly left in a New York orphanage by an unloving mother and alcoholic-writer father, she was shuttled back and forth between various family members, their friends, and a compassionate and supportive priest named Elwood Corning—a damaging cycle of abandonment and retrieval.

Last month, Ms. Fox published a second memoir, The Coldest Winter, which tells of her years spent in Europe after World War II. Again, the critical response has been effusive. She’s currently at work on a novel set mostly in 13th-century France, about the massacre of the Albigenses.

Paula Fox is tall and composed and has a warmth about her that one would not expect from her prose, which is cold and precise and minatory. She led the way up a set of narrow stairs to the airy parlor floor, which was composed mostly of shades of brown and dark green and dark red. There was an unobtrusive and comforting sense of symmetry. Through the window was a view of the garden. “We share it with our neighbors. We both had such small ones, we decided to combine them.” She smiles frequently and with such genuine affection that it’s nearly impossible not to become engulfed by her.

She and her husband, Martin Greenberg, the erstwhile editor of Commentary, have lived in this same building for nearly 40 years. Built in 1869, it sold for $32,000 in the mid-60’s. Over the years, Ms. Fox and her husband have spent another $12,000 or so on renovations. “We would not be able to afford it nowadays!” she said. The plans for the house are on display in the Brooklyn Museum. “We keep a laminate of it.”

Despite the fact that she’s lived in New York for the better part of the last four decades, Ms. Fox confessed that she hadn’t wanted to leave Europe after her postwar adventures. “Something drove me home, but I felt bad about it. When I got back, I found a job right away and gave up chaos.”

Thanksgiving had just passed, and Ms. Fox admitted that she “sent for everything” this year. Last year they “had soup.” She had various members of her family (seven, to be exact) around the large table on the ground floor and somehow managed to injure herself. “I threw my neck out. I pulled the trapezius muscle. It must have been the tension of doing everything.”

Nine years ago, walking through the streets of Jerusalem with her husband and a friend, Ms. Fox was attacked by a mugger. She was hurled to the ground and sustained injuries to her head. She said she hasn’t been quite the same since then: It takes her very long to write, and her recall is no longer working as it once did. She mentioned “incipient Alzheimer’s” and smiled: “I can’t recall things I did in the recent past, but I have a very palpable sense of my childhood. I can see things very well.” In The Coldest Winter, she writes of how “impalpable the present is.”

Ms. Fox, who said of herself that she’s neither an intellectual nor an ideologue, quoted the famous Fitzgerald maxim: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” She seemed unimpressed with the present. She made no grand pronouncements, but said that “everything is so poor nowadays. Our culture is brutalized. It’s like this great shifting of gears all the way to the first gear. It’s an atmosphere of irritability, corruption and disgust.”

Her childhood is the key to her work, both children’s and adult novels. “Children have a much more knowledgeable way of thinking about the world,” she said. “They have a true sense of how disappointing life is.”

She tried to explain her fraught relationship with her audience, and the years of absence versus a relatively newfound trendiness. “Fashions seize this country by the neck. And, generally, the middle class—and by that I mean the reading class—don’t like a downer. But you know, there may be a time again when I am out of fashion. I enjoy this, and it allows me to do certain things, but I have no expectations, in a certain way. I am always going forth; I have a great deal of self-reliance. I get impatient with people my age, because I’ve always answered the phone—so to speak.” When asked which contemporary writers she enjoys reading, she mentioned James Lasdun, Richard Ford, Tom Drury and Lorrie Moore.

She makes a strict schedule for herself when writing—she goes into her study after breakfast and writes for several hours until lunch. After lunch she writes again, until she takes a two-hour nap and then prepares dinner. “I often have to fight the impulse of reluctance when I go to work,” she said. “But when it’s a good day, I lose all sense of time. I write, and then it’s time for me to lie down.” She won’t be writing until the New Year because, she said, “I have to order a lot of things by phone.”

And with that she gently but firmly ushered out her guest, apologizing for being tired. On the way, she pointed to a little table to show a picture of Father Corning, her first and most loved guardian, next to a picture of her father, coolly smoking a cigarette, staring into the distance. “Look at him,” she sighed.

I also can’t with much force say that I care about an animal’s well-being over mine. When I watch a crocodile shred a zebra on television, as I did recently, I wince, but only because I find myself identifying even less with the crocodile than the zebra. When a pet, however charming, becomes distressed, I turn away. Often I find myself contributing to their distress. This, of course, makes me rather problematic for some people.

There was a gray-blue cat that lived with my family as a child, and when it died, I mourned its loss for a week, as seemed appropriate. It was replaced with a blue-gray cat, given the same name, and that was the end of it. For a brief period, I thought exotic rodents worth a try. This turned out to be rather shortsighted. Most exotic rodents, of course, spend their time deep inside little wooden exotic-rodent houses. I purchased a hamster with my pocket money. It ran on its wheel, which I found engaging, but then it bit me and was returned to the pet shop. The wheel went, too. I did not mourn its absence, mostly because I thought I was dying of rabies.

The trouble with animals is that they can’t really do anything. They can’t read or do fractions, and they are always trying to kill each other or me. The latter in particular terrifies me. I find myself frequently exposed to dogs trying to maul each other in New York—never mind sport-mauling birds or squirrels and cats. Everywhere I turn, dogs are at it, thirsty for blood. I am bound to be next.

Dogs are one thing; big toothy fish are another. Last weekend a great white shark, or something equally menacing and large, pulled a buoy, followed by two lifeguards on a jet ski, out into the ocean less than a hundred yards from the Amagansett shore. Around the same time, a school of snakehead fish was found in a pond in Queens. Experts suspect they are of the northern variety. The largest of the five captured was 28 inches long. This is nearly the size—give or take eight feet—of a great white shark.

The trouble with snakehead fish is that we don’t even know what they are. Most snakeheads are comfortable in all sorts of temperatures, from icy to tepid water, and are described as being able to tuck their fins under their long vile bodies and march across land from one body of water to the next, surviving on land for up to four days. They have rudimentary feet. They have a set of teeth so extensive and sharp that they devour everything in sight. This makes them more upsetting than eels, which are the only other fish creature known to migrate across land en masse. Thankfully, this is now only the second-worst animal act we might experience.

Snakeheads are strong, ruthless and seemingly invincible. They decimate entire aqueous living arrangements because they can. They muscle their way in and stay. What’s to say they won’t suddenly get bored of that pond in Queens once they’ve eaten every turtle, minnow, bass and carp, and sally forth over the Queensboro Bridge or through the midtown tunnel on their rudimentary feet and into Manhattan’s sewage system? What evidence do we have that I will not soon find a snakehead swimming in my toilet bowl or having sullied my drinking water supply, squeezing itself out of my tap and walking into my bedroom?

They have been called “nasty Frankenfish,” “nightmarish,” “invasive predator,” “freakish,” “the baddest bunny in the bush,” an “outlaw,” a “pit-bull with fins” or, simply, “thing.” One of its staunchest supporters, Maurice Martin, a reporter for the Washington City Paper, told last summer of a cooler of seemingly dead snakehead fish, sealed and weighted down with a brick, out of which one snakehead managed to struggle free and was seen several yards later stampeding towards the Annapolis sewage system. Since 2002, when the species was first spotted on American shores, it has become a national concern (Interior Secretary Gale Norton made one of the first horrified announcements), as well as a cinematic one (the Sci-Fi Channel drama Snakehead Terror, 2004). Just last week, an editorial titled “An Unwelcome Fish” in The New York Times was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune. Snakehead terror gone global.

But snakehead fish shouldn’t be here. They’re not supposed to be in this country or continent, and they’re certainly not supposed to be in my city. When they were hanging out in the Potomac devouring bass, I was concerned, but I knew I was safe. When they slid west toward Michigan and California, I sought solace in the fact that the worst thing I had to worry about in New York were terrorists. New York—resilient, cautious and sort of better than anywhere else—has now reached the ultimately palatable terror code yellow. Except that I can’t savor it, because now I have to worry about monster fish destroying my natural habitat.

Is this yet a further reminder that New York is descending into just-like-everywhere-else mediocrity? We couldn’t prevent everyone-else from taking over large swaths of Brooklyn and east Manhattan; we couldn’t hold back everything-else from corrupting our retail market with dirt-cheap trend wear. But I’d prefer to believe that at least New York long ago superseded the natural world and its disasters. We manage to avoid earthquakes, floods, locust plagues and hurricanes. As New Jersey has begun flapping its wings about a too rapidly growing bear population, I find myself wedged in on both sides by equally disconcerting possibilities for my demise. Could it be that bears swim more efficiently than snakeheads walk? Perhaps I ought to consider a move to London, where terror codes are still adequately high.

In New York, where the sidewalks are mottled with chewing gum, spit, falafel crumbs, congealed ice cream, fur, melting ice cubes, green straws and a relentless number of transparent tooth-whitening molds, its inhabitants insist on exposing their feet en masse the moment the weather exceeds 50 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, there are still at least two, if not four, months of undue foot exposure left in this city. It must stop.

My smutty gym instructor, Mark—who also makes a habit of wearing short shorts without knickers—instructs an hour, sometimes two, in bare feet. The other day, I noticed that one of his students—an elderly woman, rather too zealous for my taste—had taken his lead. She too was unshod! Standing behind her, I was granted the sort of view of her dirty heel that I would not wish upon anyone. It is true that I have seen exposed toes and heels (often, but not exclusively, attached to a woman’s legs) braving far colder temperatures. It is said that employees of a certain fashion publication are nearly forced into such sartorial choices.

But if one absolutely must have feet, it is best to hide them from view. The trouble is that one can only hide them from personal view for so long. When, after a long day of confining my feet in their unforgiving vessels, I must unleash them unto the world—shoe- and sock-seam stencils, blisters both opened and closed, chipped nail varnish, marks and scars and marks and scars—there is nothing I can do. I hate my feet. They aren’t merely an extension of everything else I hate about myself, they are the very basis of my self-loathing. They are too wide, and too bony; the toes are too short and crooked (especially the last one, pinched and sluglike); the nails are too small, the skin too thick on the bottom and too thin on the top. I get blisters if I even think of not “test-driving” my shoes—even in espadrilles. I have scars from wearing espadrilles.

When I had my feet done by a surgeon several years ago, I complained about bunions and pain. Now I get my feet done—as it were—by a matronly Colombian lady around the corner from work. I do this not because I can watch my colleagues across the air shaft doing the sort of things I like to do when I think I’m not being watched, or because I get to stick my feet into a mixing bowl of perfumed spring water, but because there is a conceptual rivulet filled with fat Koi set into the floor beside me. Koi don’t have feet. The Colombian lady’s name is Christina, and she likes to shake her head at me and say: “No, mamí! When you learn to love your feet, it will show.” I want to make her my mamí. But this is not about loving my feet.

The ugly foot runs in the family. Although we like to euphemize it as a “dancer’s foot,” it looks like a peasant foot. As far as I can tell, it is a peasant foot. I have been reminded countless times that the exaggerated hands and feet of Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais denote their working-class stock—the sort of people born equipped with the necessary instruments of manual labor. Quite clearly I was designed to till the soil then. With my feet. So far, only my sister—sinewy and delicate of foot—has managed to avoid this plight. Hers were meant for skipping along moss and silk and moonstone, or to be wrapped in feathers and petals at rest. She complains about wearing heels, but it doesn’t matter because the rest of her is just as sinewy and delicate—she doesn’t need height and complicated design to distract. Occasionally, I hate her for it.

One of my best friends, whose feet are second only to my sister’s in their aristocratic decorum, recently confessed to me that as a teenager, she had had 53 verruca warts on one foot. It was so painful, she told me, that she had to walk on the side of her foot for six months. When she was finally prescribed treatment cream, they fell off—inside her sock. I don’t believe her, only because her feet are so narrow that they do not actually have sides to walk on. At any rate, her feet remain mostly covered. I have yet to see her wearing a flip-flop or sandal.

New York women, who have generally discarded the idea of wearing cross-training sneakers to work before they change into a “sensible heel,” tend to wear their expensive stilts with reckless abandon. They don’t often get verrucas like my friend (those are the result of English boarding-school showers), but they are seemingly unaware of how they offend with the rest of their disorders. We cannot blame the styling department at HBO for this—as many have in the past—for Sarah Jessica Parker’s feet are probably so small as to be invisible. We could blame the ubiquitous pedicurist for spreading foot pride where it isn’t due, or therapists for encouraging self-acceptance, but really New York women are all alone to blame for this. They should take a cue from my friend and slip into an acceptable pair of flats.

A few weekends ago, I packed my bags for a weekend near the sea: sun block, swimming costumes, a few items of clothing in unseemly colors, the egregious espadrilles and a pair of flip-flops. Although I wore them to the beach and back, I had quite managed to lose the flip-flops before the weekend was through. I have finally discarded my last excuse for exposure, and I won’t look back.

By now, that evening has been rendered by the haze of time into Mad Libs.

The occasion was to announce an amount of money- a largish figure-being designated for something- name of a fashionable lethal disease-by a company that could well afford to give that much and more away. Hmm. Name of a fancy merchandising conglomerate?

The evening was horrific. Poor Ms. Spiers spent hours trying to infiltrate the gelatinous human cluster around Demi Moore, the only A-list star present, who squatted in a dark corner like a tick so glutted on blood she couldn't even twitch her legs. As we recall, the weary Ms. Spiers came away with a quotation from someone who was then lucky or savvy enough to be temporarily famous-Scott Speedman, perhaps?

We were reminded of that tragicomic evening for two reasons. The first was this Monday's world premiere for Bewitched, at which the red carpet stretched into the hot, white night outside the Ziegfeld Theater.

The NY1 society reporter (and advocate of enormous, unruly eyebrows) George Whipple wandered the red carpet and chatted on his cell. An English reporter said hello to him from behind our media-barricade lineup. ( In Touch was next to VH1. WB11 was next to Lowdown. MTV alongside Star, which was next to Boldface Names.) Mr. Whipple greeted the English fellow warmly. After: "He doesn't know who I am," the guy said. "I've been standing next to him for three, four years, he doesn't know who I am."

Actually important people-Barry Diller, for one-passed relatively unmolested. But when an actor-type celebrity arrived-which was marked by the screaming of the photographers from down the other end of our bullpen, the sound of which is something like a gang war in an emergency room-four or five journalists from independent publications simultaneously extended their tape recorders, a pool practice which, in a more ideal world, might be opposed by some journalistic cousin of antitrust legislation.

Red-carpet lineups aren't reporting, they're pressers, and Stephen Colbert might as well be Scott McClellan.

And truly: In service of his upcoming television show, The Colbert Report, as well as his role in Bewitched, Mr. Colbert turned on the charm for Inside Edition and Fox News alike.

Fox News told David Alan Grier, the one black man on that side of the barricade, that Michael Jackson had been acquitted just an hour or two previously. Mr. Colbert: "I'm just so thrilled his career is back on top! King of Pop! King of Pop!"

"I'm so happy for him," Mr. Colbert said to New York Times Boldface Names columnist Paula Schwartz, the hot, reigning red-carpet queen, on whom The Transom has a huge crush. She either questioned him-"Seriously?"-or gave him a quizzical look.

"Absolutely," Mr. Colbert told Ms. Schwartz, in deadly earnest.

VH1 asked him to write a news headline for the Michael Jackson story:

"The King of Pop … still … has his … crown?" he tried. (Well, it's still better than "Boy, Oh Boy.")

A German TV guy interrupted our eavesdropping to say that he'd like to interview The Transom, so that we might enlighten the lovely German folk on Nicole Kidman's career.

"You'll be famous in Germany," he said. Smoke from his cigarette curled around him. Brimstone! Devil! The Transom hopped the barricade and fled for home.

The second reason The Transom recalled that long-ago evening with young Ms. Spiers is this: Last week, in her current role as editor of Mediabistro.com, she penned an essay announcing her retirement from the odious, stillborn work of party reporting.

In a luscious piece of irony, Ms. Spiers tardily delivered some excellent party reporting indeed-at a long-ago party, she recounted, Alec Baldwin-who had apparently just weeks before announced his intention to expatriate to Canada in his disgust at the Bush administration- was hugging Henry Kissinger. And instead of documenting that, and instead of transcribing her lengthy and fascinating conversation with Paris Review editor George Plimpton, who would die soon after, and instead of running with light-hearted party chit-chat from Tom Brokaw, who would soon (and quite dramatically) retire, the magazine for which she was employed decided to document that party with some silly, frothy, metrosexual innuendo by Mr. Baldwin.

Who has neither died, nor retired, nor done much else, God bless him, since.

Don't get us wrong: We like pretty outfits. We like sexy rich people. The trivial and the ephemeral and the ridiculous moments that mark our New York days and nights are not without their meanings.

Still, all this might perhaps accrue to suggest that it isn't party reporting-or even party reporters-that are broken. Instead, it's the magazines and their editors, and all those who go with complicity into the publicists' bullpens and red-carpet lineups-"Nicole! What are you wearing?!"-that are.

-Choire Sicha

Shopping and Clucking

Dana Foley matched her dizzying décor. The walls of her boutique are hand-painted murals of Japanese prints, and she'd sewn her wispy kimono-esque top that very day! Imagine! Ms. Foley, the very model of a hasty seamstress, has come a long way from selling prints in a flea-market stall on Sixth Avenue a decade ago. Swimming through waves of Lucky magazine supporters, she and Anna Corinna, her business partner in Foley & Corrina, welcomed a slew of spendy ladies to the opening of their newest, ever more Lower East Side–y location last week. As of just a few months ago, their outpost had been … on the other corner.

"I can't believe that people are actually buying," beamed Ms. Corinna, who was wearing a turquoise top admittedly not from their collection, her wardrobe temporarily in flux due to her slight second-trimester inflation.

"See this black ball gown? You can dress it up or down!" Ms. Corinna continued, showing off a sophisticated garment from their collection that a friend of hers wore under- under!-a tattered black tee. "You can wear it out at night, or with flip-flops and a funky shirt shopping on Broadway on Saturday," she said.

Between the pomegranate martini bar and the fun race of outfits to the dressing room, one guest found it difficult to remain vertical on her high heels. Taking a spill in the crowd, she suddenly stumbled-a silk tank and snakeskin bag in hand-before grabbing the arm of a sunglass-clad stranger to keep herself afloat in the party.

"We attract a mix of uptown and downtown girls, wives of football players from Atlanta, regulars who live in the South of France, and the bartenders from down the street," Ms. Corinna added, without mentioning such names as Jessica Simpson, who had recently purchased a gold bag with a peacock inlay.

Sweltering from the summer heat, party hosts Eleanor Ylvisaker-who is the Earnest Sewn jeans P.R. queen-and Christian Dior rep Ali Wise sought refreshment in a cigarette. They laughed about Ms. Ylvisaker's wedding video, the newlywed having tied the knot with hedge-funder and surfer Jon Ylvisaker in April. The fun couple has just returned from a secluded honeymoon in Sumba, off Bali, where Mr. Ylvisaker took advantage of the waves. When asked if she surfed, Ms. Ylvisaker laughed and admitted that she's horrified by the big waves. "Sometimes I can barely get my toe in," she said.

And speaking of waves! The night eventually cooled when a cranky upstairs neighbor threw buckets of cold water onto the smokers and cell-phone chit-chatters below. See? The Lower East Side, celebrity-friendly boutiques and all, still reeks of anarchic authenticity.

-Sara Levin

Amis, Austen Ankled

Last week, the New York Public Library's Conservator's Circle hosted a reading of Martin Amis' eternally unfilmed screen adaptation of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. The critic, novelist and son-of's precocious career is only trumped by Ms. Austen just a little. Both got their start early, she as a teenage historian, he as a barely 20-year-old book critic. A wisp of a man, Mr. Amis talked mostly into his chest and then summoned two young actors-Catherine Kellner and Matt McGrath-onstage to read from his script in characteristically hopeless approximations of a British accent:

CATHERINE: So if a man is poor ….

JAMES: … then he must marry a rich lady.

CATHERINE: And if a man is rich ….

JAMES: … then he must marry a rich lady, too.

CATHERINE: Then who is to marry the poor ladies?

(James frowns; he hasn't thought of this.)

(cont., feelingly)

Oh those poor, poor girls.

So true! According to Mr. Amis, the adaptation was commissioned in 2001 by Miramax, with whom he had entered into a vertically integrated deal-writing novels for the Miramax Books imprint, articles for Talk magazine and screenplays for Miramax Films. In this "multilevel atmosphere," Northanger Abbey was conjured, first as a rewrite, then for TV, then perhaps a movie-and, after more rewrites, it met purgatory.

In early 2004, Mr. Amis' mega-agent, Andrew Wylie, sent the script to The Paris Review, where it fell into the hands of Lea Carpenter, who was then the magazine's deputy publisher. Unfortunately, the staff held widely differing opinions as to its reproduction in the quarterly's pages, so when Granta published a few extracts in its 25th-anniversary edition that fall, the matter was put to rest. And it was Ms. Carpenter who finally brought the screenplay off the page into a live forum. "He could make even the least sexy book provocative," Ms. Carpenter said, going on to lament the fact that Mr. Amis isn't as institutionalized as his idols, Austen and Saul Bellow.

When Mr. Amis spoke to The Transom from his home in Uruguay, he himself wasn't quite sure what the screenplay's status was at the moment. Buried under the rubble of a disintegrating Miramax, things don't look good. "It is the only Jane Austen novel that hasn't been filmed yet, and not because of any shortcoming. In some ways, it's the most appealing for any director, what with its Gothic elements. I mean, they keep making Pride and Prejudice every few years …. "

-Jessica Joffe

Young Animals

The Whitney Contemporaries, the philanthropist-in-training arm of the Whitney Museum, charges $400 for its 25-to-40-year-old members. MoMA's Junior Associates clique comes in at a minimum charge of $500, including mandatory museum membership (sneaky!). But instead of joining "the one where the pictures are," as Holden Caulfield put it, some opt for "the one where the Indians are." Indeed, the thriftiest mate-hungry youngsters hop to Central Park West for the bargain of the group, the American Museum of Natural History's Junior Council-in which membership comes at the low, low price of just $275.

Last Thursday's end-of-year celebration for the Junior Council and assorted hangers-on was capped off by a speech from the museum's commanding president, Ellen V. Futter. Naturally-hey, we're all animals, right, fellow evolutionists?-the evening quickly evolved from sober scientific-progress report to skirt-chasing and chest-thumping beside the Rose Center for Earth and Space and its Hayden Planetarium. At the end of her optimistic account of the museum's technological and financial growth, Ms. Futter surveyed the audience. "I know many people here have questions," she said. "But I also know that I'm the only thing standing between you and the terrace," she added. They laughed, but the 300 guests made no secret of their preference, shouting "Terrace!" on their rush outside toward cocktails.

The terrace in question overlooks Central Park West and Jerry Seinfeld's quarters in the Beresford, and on it, the 22-to-39-year-old men and women finally mingled: Most had arrived in gender-segregated clusters. Trios of uptown bankers and real-estate developers hungrily eyed manicured young women in skin-tight summer dresses. "Look, it's a way to meet other single people," said one guest. "It's a lot better than online dating. I would never do that."

The Junior Council's online mission statement is more demure; its Web site extols these events as exclusive chances to learn about the museum: "A stimulating mix of science, education, and revelry, these occasions present young professionals with the opportunity to go behind-the-scenes at one of the world's greatest museums …. " Stimulating! Revelry! Behind! Aha!

"I would say 30 percent care" about the science, said one attendee, a real-estate developer from across the park. "Seventy percent are here to socialize." Added his friend, "I mean, look at these women. Look at what they're wearing. Do you think they're here to learn about science?"

Now, now: Science-minded women like to look sexy, too, our chauvinist friends. As the noises of mating rituals filled up the hot night, two girls emerged from the powder room, one adjusting the other's cleavage-baring top. "We figured we'd come to this, have some drinks," said one, all tee-hee. "I mean, it's for a good cause, right?"

-Zoe Slutzky

Drink, Memory

When former New York Times managing editor Arthur Gelb first started as a cub reporter at the paper, his editor on the city desk told him of an old New York newspaper aphorism, which he relates in his book, City Room: "Drink is the curse of the Herald-Tribune. Sex is the bane of the Times." Alas, neither vice was in evidence last Saturday at a party for today's young Times men to welcome the paper's summer interns. About 70 journalists gathered at the East Side bar Dip for an evening of fondue and quiet conversation. Now, The Transom knows deep down that the Gray Lady isn't a teetotaler, but by the end of the night (and yes, we stayed for the whole thing), this crowd was still sober and composed. As the group dispersed early, one waitress-in quiet deference to the Gelb years-began passing out the drinks for free.

-Rebecca Dana

Loving Art

"My dog doesn't like disco," said Mickey Rourke. Loki, his Chihuahua terrier, lay trembling in his arms. "She likes country, rock 'n' roll-and some classical." Loki, he said around a mouthful of cocktail, also loves art.

Does anyone-or even any dog?-actually hate art? Model Karolina Kurkova arrived at Phillips, de Pury & Company at 7 sharp, blond hair snuggling her shoulders over her dress' drooping, cleavage-baring neckline. She leaned in close to say that her most recent purchase was a painting from Berlin. "I love everything," she explained, nodding slowly at her own words. "It just has to get my eye. It can be Picasso, but doesn't have to be. I have to get that feeling. I like a lot of black and whites, but art is everywhere."

We hope she got that feeling-and wasn't put off by the D.J. and her love of dog-irking disco-inside the Sixth Annual Art Auction Benefit for Free NYC. (Free NYC is a nonprofit which offers mentor programs and family events for the sort of youngsters who are always described as "underprivileged.")

But tonight, even the overprivileged went a little hungry. Awww. Slivers of salmon topped with caviar on pig-shaped pumpernickel bread-the surrealist cuisine of mixed metaphor!-and bite-size grilled cheese circulated; but only sugar cookies followed the hors d'oeuvres, a sign of this swimsuit season's revolt against the main course. "We ate in the 80's-why does it matter?" said distinctly non-fat John Findysz, a visual director at Jeffrey New York. "We'll eat again when we're 40." Um, excuse me? Who's going to admit to 40?

Honorary chair Naomi Watts, dressed simply in an off-the-shoulder navy shirt that gathered at the elbows and a knee-length, flared blue skirt, strode gracefully from one piece of art and its attendant socialite cluster to the next, politely stopping at each like a bride at her wedding reception. Before a Gary Hume: "It's a beautiful photo. There is a lot going on," she said thoughtfully. "The colors stand out, and I like the juxtaposition." Ms. Watts placed bids only in the silent auction-including on a mysterious Tanyth Berkeley portrait of a nude, shadow-faced woman-but sat front-row for the live action, cheering with the rest of the audience as the bids jumped by thousands.

Auctioneer Simon de Pury-chairman of Phillips, de Pury, who led his forces to collect sales of $23.6 million at last month's contemporary auctions and even cleaned up at the prints and multiples auction last week to the tune of $1.6 million-broke from his usual serious tactics and made like Tom Cruise in love with love. When a Christopher Wool photograph temporarily stalled at $17,000, Mr. de Pury came down into the audience, practically jumping as he clenched his fists and yelled, "$17,000? No more?! Come on now! Only $17,000?!" At $20,000, Mr. de Pury was down on his knees, face red. The crowd responded with an encouraging wave of hoots and wows, prompting one man, eyes averted, to slowly raise his paddle in the air. "Very good taste, sir," Mr. de Pury snapped calmly, returning to his podium.

During the sale for the Chuck Close picture-a self-portrait of the artist which eventually topped out at $70,000-Mr. de Pury took to isolating bidders like an auctioneer scorned. He peered down into the face of one gentleman, surely too close for comfort, speaking loudly about the piece. The bidder blushed and turned to his wife, who was laughing hysterically, exalted by her husband's shame. "It's embarrassing," said an onlooking bidder. "He doesn't need a speech. The few thousand dollars up doesn't make a difference."

-Amy Lieberman

My Friend Leonard, by James Frey. Riverhead Books, 357 pages, $24.95.

James Frey wants you to know he's a real man. A manly man. Perhaps even a manimal. Two years ago, when A Million Little Pieces, the first installation of his unrelenting odyssey into sobriety, was thrust upon the world, James was already proving what a man he was. He kicked his 10-year drug and alcohol addiction just like that, because that's what people like James Frey do. He hopscotched through the 12-step program, because he didn't really need it. He fell in love with one of those pale-skinned misunderstood crack whores, because real men aren't afraid to be held. He became best friends with big-time Mafia types, because James. Frey. Will. Not. Be. Intimidated! He self-administered pedicures, endured root canal au naturel and performed a little auto-surgery with a pen knife, because pain is awesome. Watch me, he roared, boxing his chest with those big doughy hands, I am not a wimp like all you wimps. I don't even need to punctuate! And then he crouched down, bow-armed and bow-legged, to share a bowl of raw meat with his pit bull.

We all know James Frey's story, whether we read his first memoir or not. Critics and mortals alike took it upon themselves to bloviate: "Gripping," they wrote, "inspiring," even "lacerating." Of course, Jimbo bloviated better than anyone else. He announced that he wanted to be (perhaps already was?) the best writer of his generation. He ate with his hands, tattooed feisty acronyms on his body parts and-oddly-listened to N.W.A. His best friends were his dogs. His fey contemporaries-three-named wonder boys like Jonathan Safran Foer and David Foster Wallace-could go back to their M.F.A. programs and stay there. For those of us who actually endured the million little pages of his monotome, Mr. Frey's editor Sean McDonald (with whom he has now decamped to Riverhead from Nan Talese) hammered home all that gripping, ripping business by refusing to edit any part of the unchaptered, artistically punctuated ramble. Over and over again, the dull banalities of rehab life: from early-morning vomit to late-night, bedside-table epiphanies. "Lacerating," indeed.

Apparently, there was another part of James Frey's life yet to be explored, so he did what any self-respecting memoirist would do: He picked up his pen and scribbled a 350-page second installment-life post-rehab. (Watch for a third installment, perhaps entitled The Girl Next-Door.) From Mylanta blue, the cover turned Pepto Bismol pink, inscribed with the words My Friend Leonard in the large, looping cursive normally reserved for high-school binders. And here it is: James Frey, 35 going on 16, delivering more revelations about himself … and some odd tidbits about a guy named Leonard.

Unfortunately, Mr. Frey made a big mistake when he gave away the major plot points of his second memoir in a featherbrained epilogue to the first. In a few somber paragraphs, he described the fate of the rehab comrades he'd feverishly wanted his readers to embrace: Lily, the crack-whore love-of-his-life, committed suicide; Leonard, his best friend, died of AIDS.

So, in the new book, we turn the first 27 pages waiting breathlessly for an event we know is coming; and then we turn the remaining 320-truly breathless by now-waiting for another event, also foretold. In between, apart from the many meals he ingests and enjoys itemizing in shopping-list detail, not much happens.

James goes to jail and reads Tolstoy to another inmate (sensitive). He moves to Chicago by truck, even though his license has been permanently suspended (bold). Hangs out with terminally dull friends (accommodating). Courts terminally dull women and then doesn't sleep with them (respectful). Gets crap minimum-wage jobs (humble). Still hasn't learned how to punctuate (subversive). Resists all drugs and alcohol (superhuman). And starts working for Leonard!

Mr. Frey becomes a runner for the mob. (At last we figure out why he has Matisses and Picassos and Dalís lining the walls of the sprawling Tribeca loft he's just sold.) And then, because carrying money-filled suitcases generally inspires that sort of thing, he decides he wants to be a writer. He writes a screenplay. It sucks. He writes another screenplay. That one sucks, too. He sits in front of his computer, listens to love ballads and swears! He moves to L.A., writes and sells Kissing a Fool, buys a dog. The dog is his only friend. He makes a short movie. He spends some time trying to do a Nathanael West, but fails: "There it is, that mean and wondrous wench. The best place and the worst place in America, a place where dreams come true, where people are destroyed, a place that doesn't care about the past and is a vision of the future." He sits in front of his computer and continues to swear.

That's all there is: James Frey's mid-20's as a struggling screenwriter, eating a lot of food and hanging out with his mobster friend. Is the story worth telling? His mind-numbingly simple insights haven't evolved. Emotionally, he hasn't even completed the adolescent stage. Without the drugs and the self-mutilation, he's a boring specimen.

But author and subject are by now wholly conflated. James Frey will get a few new tattoos, climb on a taller table, bang his fists a little harder and perhaps tear into a few copies of McSweeney's with his teeth. For a few minutes he'll give us something to talk about, which is all that finally matters.

Jessica Joffe is a reporter at The Observer.

"Sex: in America, an obsession. In other parts of the world, a fact," said Marlene Dietrich. And in that vein, The Washingtonienne arrives this month, to celebrate the beginning of the summer-intern season and the fact that we've only managed to regress further into the abyss of American prurience.

Jessica Cutler, the comely former envelope-stuffer, staffer to Senator Mike DeWine and Twilo aficionado now turned blogtastic authoress, delivers an account of her brief sojourn in Washington, D.C., as a professional mattress. Aided by her alter ego, Jacqueline Turner, Ms. Cutler explores the barely washed underbelly of our nation's capital-and finds a few hotel bars, many middle-aged lobbyists, lawyers, medium-weight bureaucrats, a bike messenger and a nightclub named after a Japanese wine.

There are about three girls living in Washington, D.C., as well-an insalubrious triumvirate composed of our protagonist and her two friends, April and Laura. They take friendship lightly, choosing instead to undermine one another as though their lives depended on it. As provincial 24-year-olds might, they consider nothing sacred, except perhaps their (post-)post-feminist right to have sex wherever, however and whenever they please. There is, after all, nothing better to do as they waft through their jobs and relationships with as much purpose as a tiger in a tofu factory. What these young bored things discover is that everyone in D.C.-which is, after all, "the Hollywood for the Ugly"-is horny as hell, unapologetically disloyal and driven by all sorts of unsurprising sexual urges: spanking, Astroglide, mirrors ….

Monica Lewinsky was clearly no anomaly.

The difference is that Ms. Lewinsky turned, post-cigar, to handbag design and insignificance, while Ms. Cutler cashed in-on a scandal that wasn't one. "She's not even that hot!" the blogosphere yammered after she'd shagged her way through the Men's Warehouse of Washington politicos; spread the news online; pocketed an estimated 300-grand advance on her "novel"; and sauntered into her very own Playboy shoot. (The props? Laptops and cardigans.) Ms. Cutler was hot, all right, mussing glossy sheets, spreading her legs, smiling lasciviously. She was a good concubine, and the capital was crowded with a surplus of entitled and willful men with just enough power and money to command her services.

A 300-page e-mail, The Washingtonienne is insufficiently hair-raising and occasionally entertaining, a plodding narrative of the " … and then … and then … " sort. It descends, predictably, into platitude: "Right now I was hardly the trash-talking bitch on wheels who wrote the blog. I was a frightened, lonely girl who was all dressed up with nowhere to go." For charm, Ms. Cutler throws in some flirty self-effacement-very plausible when you've made your career from turning other people's private lives into public fodder without ever having the courage to accept the implications: "Women! I don't know how men put up with us. Oh, that's right: sex, otherwise what good were we?" Or: "Girls like us would never be fat cats. In this town, we were nothing but pussy." She's right: Girls who engage passively in demeaning sex out of boredom are indeed good for little else. On the other hand, Ms. Cutler thinks she's the master puppeteer, destined for bigger and better things than her partners, co-workers and friends. It's easy to claim (as she did recently in Roll Call) that "it wasn't all that interesting"-especially when you've got your face on the cover of magazines and your book on display at Barnes & Noble.

Most of Ms. Cutler's observations reinforce the notion that the highest form of morality is amorality. Her alter ego is ostentatiously nonjudgmental: "Of course I had reservations about letting someone from work butt-fuck me, but if he was game, so was I." She thinks she's endowed with the freedom of choice, and it suits her well: "Obviously, I was being rewarded for my behavior, and while my life wasn't perfect, I was getting what I wanted. Maybe I wanted all the wrong things, but I was so busy chasing after all of this shit that I forgot what the difference between right and wrong was in the first place." Plagued by this convenient forgetfulness, she continues to accept money for sex, encourage flagrant infidelity, allow herself to be exploited by co-workers, parade her knickerless crotch in public and so on. She's perfectly aware of her wrongdoings, of the harm she inflicts on herself and others. Her excuse? "If you want to be rich you have to be bitch." And this: "We were … going to rot in hell anyway, right?"

Read as fiction, Jessica Cutler's book barely stands up to potboiler erotica; it's only interesting insofar as it resembles a memoir. Thanks to various blogs and some well-timed lawsuits, we now know the identities of some of her suitors (but not her clients), and even though none of them is a public figure, we find ourselves hooked by the details of these debauched lives. But are the details accurate and true? Perhaps not: "Wasn't everyone in politics a goddamn fucking liar anyway? Perhaps that was my niche. I told lies all the time. Hell I was good at it, a real bullshit artist." Well-at least she's some kind of artist.

Jessica Joffe is a reporter at The Observer.

Mr. Freeman just wanted to get home. "Let’s get out of here," he told his buddy, a elderly man in a loose gray suit. "Hey, Mickey—why didn’t you get your piece of the Donald?" The former TV actor muttered, "Ah, he’s too easy to roast," before shuffling across the room.

The chance to turn Mr. Trump, that ultimate New York character—billionaire, skirt-chaser, blowhard, TV phenomenon—into a human piñata for a bunch of sour standup comics might seem too easy, too natural, too perfect. But all too tempting (who wouldn’t want their chance to take a shot at Mr. "You’re Fired"?). So, after a lunch of baked chicken, broccoli and scalloped potatoes, washed down with Johnnie Walker Black Label and Trump Ice spring water, some professional comics and a few amateurs (Al Sharpton, Regis Philbin, Jeff Zucker) took their whacks at the man and his mane.

"I like your hair—it looks like Nicole Kidman’s bush," snapped Stewie Stone, an old-school comic in a rumpled gray suit, veering to glare at Mr. Trump, who sat at the dais, a beatific grin on his face. "Do you realize if your father weren’t [a millionaire] first, you’d be a fucking waiter at this event?"

Mr. Stone set the agenda for the roast, which consisted of grilling Mr. Trump for his real-estate tactics, his taste in women such as current girlfriend Melania Knauss and, of course, his hair.

The man of the hour, orange hair glinting in the light, pink tie anchoring his suit, reserved his biggest laugh for Norm Crosby’s joke about buffalo ejaculate making the ground sticky. Most of the time, he flashed that bland smile ("On the show, in the boardroom, you’ve got that pursed-lips thing," cracked Susie Essman. "It looks a little like a vagina. And that might be a good thing, because this way when you’re sucking [NBC chief] Jeff Zucker’s cock, you’ll both be playing it straight.")

Mr. Zucker, Mr. Trump’s boss as the mastermind behind The Apprentice, guffawed, his bald head bobbing up and down, reflecting the house lights, as he elbowed Katie Couric, who was seated next to him. (Later, he got his own chance, reading from scripted notes: "Donald’s wedding will have something for everyone—for Donald and his friends, there will be a cigar room. For Melania and her friends, a bouncy castle.")

When Mr. Stone deadpanned, "I read your new book—it only goes up to Chapter 11," fellow comedian Jeffrey Ross banged his fist on the table in frustration, mouthing the words "That was mine!" A mile away, at the far end of the 75-strong dais, sat a grinning Tom Cantone, the vice president at Foxwoods Resort and one of Mr. Trump’s rivals.

Mr. Trump’s smile faded when Mr. Stone cracked, "The last person who changed the skyline of a city so much was Hermann Goering," emphasizing over the tepid applause, " … who was a Nazi."

A hush came over the room. The audience, including two bottle-blond young women sitting up front, tucked into their cheesecake. Victoria Gotti, in a tight black top, snoozed, resting her chin in her palm.

Grim-faced Richard Belzer went even further as he promised to "take a closer look at the man, the legend, the fucking grafter wrapped in a fraud perpetrated on society known as Donald Trump." After cursing the audience for hissing at one of his jokes, he proceeded to evaluate some of Mr. Trump’s famous sayings, as popularized in his books. "Here’s a quote from Donald J. Trump: ‘Money was never a big motivation, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.’ Wait a minute—I thought the real excitement was evicting a crippled orphan just before the bulldozer shows up."

But Mr. Trump barely dropped his smile, and with reason. At this point, the ritual verged on the ridiculous, a strange little game in which the peasants get to poke fun at the king once a year, emphasizing all the more who wields the power. And Mr. Trump knew it, playing along with that plastic grin.

Al Sharpton, who looked catatonic throughout most of the coarse humor, even got into the act. "The Friars Club needs sensitivity training. We could start with the guy who called me up to come to this roast. I said, ‘How diverse will the audience be?’ He said, ‘Oh, that won’t be a problem. We’ll have as many blacks there as Donald has living in his buildings.’"

An orange-suited elderly man sitting at a table in the front grabbed Ben Stiller: "Pinch my cheeks—do you feel that?" Mr. Stiller obliged him, slinking away to greet his father and past honoree, Jerry Stiller.

A large man stretched into a tuxedo, his brown beard crowding his chin, almost fell out of his chair, teetering on the edge, as Ms. Essman took her turn at the dais, thanking Mr. Philbin for his introduction, "Thank you, Rege. I had no idea you had such a sharp tongue. It must severely hurt Mike Eisner’s ass." (Mr. Eisner is the chairman of Disney.)

Ms. Essman, better known as Jeff’s wife on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, was on a roll, telling Trump: "We met once, but you don’t remember because you weren’t trying to sleep with me. That’s ’cause I’m not your type. It’s O.K.—because, you know, I’m smart, my tits are real, and I speak English." Mr. Trump looked into the audience and smiled reassuringly at Ms. Knauss.

"I think you should make the Trump condom, and you should have your face right on the tip. That way at least someone is getting fucked by you besides your business partners …. At this point, the only thing you own that’s not going down is Melania," quipped Ms. Essman before turning her tongue on Ms. Couric, who wore a glittering silver "K" pendant on her black sweater.

"Katie Couric had been dating the owner of the Boston Red Sox. The Boston Red Sox! I mean, why don’t you just fuck Saddam Hussein?" And Mr. Sharpton: "He probably has no idea who I am. Essman is a Hebrew word for Tawana." And, of course, Bill O’Reilly: "Bill O’Reilly has a new reality-TV show on NBC. Jeff Zucker just told me it’s called The O’Reilly Fucked Her. He’s also pushing a new children’s book, it’s called When Billy Gets Big."

By the end, Mr. Trump was still grinning and in control. Getting up to thank the crowd, he apologized to Ms. Knauss; pushed Mr. Philbin aside ("You sit down," he growled); teased Ms. Couric, attending her very first roast, about the first word she’d been privileged to hear ("cunt"); and fired back at the enemies and detractors who’d been making light of his casino’s financial problems. "Now, as far as Atlantic City goes, we’re doing very well. Watch—you watch, you watch. We’ll pull rabbits out of a hat."

Someone in the audience laughed.

—Marcus Baram with Blair Golson

Buying Souls

Politics makes fellows get into strange beds. On the night of Oct. 12, about 150 young New Yorkers joined together at the Slipper Room for a singles auction to defeat George W. Bush and elect Democrats to federal, state and local government. It was sponsored by Girls Gone Political, which, according to a flier being distributed, is a grassroots organization that is "disgusted with the Bush Adminstration!"

Techno star Moby, who was with a beautiful and brainy blonde, said he’d do "just about anything" to get John Kerry elected.

"I mean, humiliation is my forte," he said. "I would walk backwards from New York to Washington D.C. Not naked."

"Stop having anal sex?" Musician Dolce Fino asked him.

Silence.

Would the famously vegan Moby start eating steaks?

"If the difference was between George Bush and John Kerry winning, yes, I would eat a steak," he said. "And I would probably be projectile-vomiting for the next month, but I would gladly take one for the team."

And what would it take to vote for Bush?

"I would vote for George Bush if part of his problem was allowing Manhattan to secede from New York, happily, and let the rest of the country have him."

His friends cheered.

Writer Jay McInerney, up onstage to say a few words in support of John Kerry, told a joke his precocious 9-year-old son had told him. "He said, ‘Dad, there was a journalist interviewing George Bush, and he asked George Bush the significance of Roe vs. Wade. And George Bush said, ‘Roe vs. Wade was the most significant decision that George Washington had to make before he crossed the Delaware."

Snickering laughter.

"I thought that was pretty good for a 9-year-old, and I’m very proud of my son for being against George Bush, for being a Democrat," Mr. McInerney said to more applause. "Particularly in the hotbed of Republicanism which is the private-school environment in Nashville, Tenn."

Finishing up, he said, "We know what’s happening here: We want to elect John Kerry and defeat George Bush." But asked how much money it would take to get him to vote Republican on Nov. 2, Mr. McInerney replied, "A couple of million would do it—but they’re against everything I believe." Still, he said, "I’d sell my one vote." He paused. "Two million."

It was time to auction the celebrities present for dates. Moby was sold for $800 (after agreeing to match the bid).

Kyrie Collins, wearing a tuxedo-style blouse, velvet snakeskin-print pants and pointy Jimmy Choo boots, stepped outside. One of the organizers of the event as well as an entrepreneur and a "motorcycle chick," she said she has given a lot to Kerry already.

"What else would I do? I’d pretty much walk over glass, eat dirt, pull my own hair out, rip at my breasts, run naked through the streets—whatever it took," she said.

A few nights later, on the other side of town and the political landscape, there was a literary-political salon-type gathering at William F. Buckley’s Park Avenue spread. In his plush, modern-art-filled living room, Mr. Buckley moderated a lively but pretty serious discussion on the war in Iraq and the Presidential race. While in line for the bathroom, The Transom asked Fox News correspondent Monica Crowley what she’d do to get Bush elected.

"I would give up all of my Duran Duran albums," she said. "And I just saw them last week in person, and I would still run off with any one of them. So for me to give up all my Duran Duran albums—that’s saying a lot. That’s serious. I would never listen to them again. This is a huge sacrifice. Life without ‘Come Undone’ and ‘Rio’ is not worth living, and I’m willing to give it up."

How much to get her to vote for Kerry?

"No, they would have to bust the budget for the amount of money. Inconceivable! I don’t have a price like that. For me to vote for Kerry, he’d have to become a Republican."

National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru was asked what Kerry could do to buy his vote.

"I am reminded of something that I read in an Alex Cockburn column years ago about some union leader who was upset with Jimmy Carter, and he was asked, ‘What could Jimmy Carter do to make you happy?’ And he said, ‘Nothing!’ And he thought for a minute and he said, ‘Wait! Wait! One thing: die." And then he laughed.

—George Gurley

The Passion of Payne

Alexander Payne, taking a break from the hectic schedule of promoting his new movie, Sideways, is sitting on a silver bollard in front of the Time Warner Center on Oct. 15. Handsome and slender, his eyes betray more mischief than it seems he would like. He speaks and moves with determination and makes sure to be on time, if not ahead of time.

Mr. Payne’s protagonists are not made of the same stuff. Young or old, male or perhaps female; wealthy enough or just scraping by; professionally accomplished or unemployed, they all share a certain quality. From Citizen Ruth’s Ruth Stoops to Sideways’ Miles Raymond, they suffer from the same disorder: high levels of self-absorption coupled with low levels of self-awareness. They are often repellent in their dishonesty and obliviousness, the sort of small people who leave audiences laughing awkwardly in the knowledge that it is their own helpless humanity depicted onscreen. Certain critics have taken this to mean that the Stanford-educated Payne, who speaks in full paragraphs and is disarmingly self-aware, is a condescending prick, an arrogant bastard and, worst of all, pretentious.

"I make comedies!" Mr. Payne says. "So when a guy slips on a banana peel, you’re not supposed to laugh? We’re supposed to understand his pain? Give me a break! You know, I remember one negative review, written by a guy—who shall remain nameless, but whose initials were Anthony Lane—who called me pretentious! Mind you, I agree with a lot of negative reviews, but it was just so clear that this said far more about the reviewer than it said about my film. Jim and I like our characters! We think they’re funny!"

Funny, indeed—when Jack Nicholson received his 2002 Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic Feature, he mumbled, "Did anyone notice we were making a comedy?"

Mr. Payne has spent the last 13 years writing screenplays (and doctoring other directors’) with his best friend, Jim Taylor. Each script is hammered out on one computer with two keyboards over the course of six months, eight hours every day. "There’s a lot of noodling time and obsessive e-mail checking," but they get done on time. And so with Sideways, one set of best friends found itself writing about another. "No, the relationship is not a lot like ours—it’s a lot like the characters in the book. It’s based on a book. We’re professionals!" Mr. Payne is eager to emphasize, several times throughout a conversation, that he is a professional, and by implication that The Transom may not be.

Nevertheless, Mr. Payne is also eager to emphasize that he does not wish anyone, least of all himself, to make pronouncements on his work. For a while he was "the Bard of Omaha," until he started filming in the Santa Ynez Valley. To others, it seemed apt to describe him as the "midlife-crisis guy," forgetting that Ruth Stoops was still several decades removed from one. "It’s all a work in progress. I’m just beginning to learn what a film is. It’s a very elusive thing. I do know that I want to find myself in the position where I am only getting better with age. Lina Wertmüller once said that ‘Artists over many years lose many things, but not their anger.’ I admire directors who finished strong, like Buñuel. He always said that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. I find myself, with age, getting angrier. The more you find with experience is a greater awareness of the subtleties of how we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. I don’t really see how we can lose anger."

—Jessica Joffe

Mike’s Likes

Mike Wallace likes to ask a lot of questions—which can prove problematic when he’s the one being interviewed.

At Central Park Conservancy’s Oct. 14 fête honoring this year’s "Living Landmarks" honorees, we tried to get the 60 Minutes man’s opinion on the Presidential debate the night before. "Were you offended by the talk about the lesbian?" he asked The Transom. We told him we thought mentioning Mary Cheney was in poor taste. "I didn’t!" he harrumphed. "I mean, it had been a subject of public discussion before, handled very personably, I thought, by the Vice President the first time it came out …. I thought that Kerry was in charge, didn’t you? I think the consensus is that he was in charge.

"Who’s going to win?" he asked suddenly. "Do you think the fact that they’ve caught bin Laden will make a difference?" We raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Had we missed a press release? "Haven’t you heard? I say they’ve found bin Laden!" he repeated loudly. Asked if he was busting The Transom’s balls, Mr. Wallace crowed delightedly, "Absolutely!" So who’s going to win Nov. 2? "I’m not damn fool enough to answer that!"

Regardless of who prevails on Election Day, the following night will find Mr. Wallace at the $10,000-a-table gala with new inductees like actresses Candice Bergen and Whoopi Goldberg, literary agent Morton Janklow and Yankees pooh-bah George Steinbrenner. "I became one of these old hunks a few years ago!" he said as Liz Smith (who’ll host the Nov. 3 event) came over with socialite Iris Love, the aptly named archeologist who excavated what is thought to be the Temple of Aphrodite in Knidos. The two flirted for a moment. "You better get out of here or I’m gonna tear off your—" Mr. Wallace gestured to the front of Ms. Love’s blouse. She giggled girlishly.

"And now I’m going to give you a kiss on the mouth!" he said, leaning over to peck Ms. Smith—whom he’s known for 50 years—on the lips. The pair pleaded with the veteran newsman to join them for dinner downstairs at Le Cirque. He said that first he’d have to check with his wife, Mary. "Is it that your wife wouldn’t believe you were with two old maids?" Ms. Smith cackled. The two women scurried downstairs while Mr. Wallace secured permission from his wife via cell phone.

—Noelle Hancock

Before Bed, by Melissa Panarello, Grove Press, 176 pages, $22.

Contrary to what you might expect, 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed has almost nothing to do with hair-maintenance. The artfully obscured young thing on the cover of this book (she’s brushing a chunk of hair across her face) is the author and protagonist—or heroine, as she would no doubt prefer—of an X-rated fairy tale. Her name was Melissa P.; recently, she’s added a few more syllables to achieve Melissa Panarello. No longer artfully obscured, she’s regularly captured on camera spreading her milky thighs in a stiletto-boot-and-short-skirt ensemble, not quite concealing her knickers, or the modest teenage bosom spilling out of her Versace corset. Occasionally, she’s wearing a necklace with the words “Eat Me” on it, or smoking a cigarillo. Her doughy little face betrays little: She’s not frightened like a child, lascivious like a nymphomaniac or knowing like some media-savvy Lolita, although she’s been accused of being all three. Her face traffics in only one peculiarly modern commodity: adolescent ennui verging on disgust.

The erotic-chronicle epidemic has swept the globe, from France’s Catherine M. to our very own Jane J(uska), Japan’s Hitomi K(anehari) and Spain’s Valerie T(asso). Ms. Panarello is the Italian model, a porn principessa, the crucial difference being that Melissa P. is only 18, and was only 16 at the time of the events recounted in her book.

In Italy, her book has managed to sell nearly a million copies and remain on the best-seller list since its release last summer. She has become a national celebrity, appearing regularly on television and in magazines. Further book deals have been signed and there’s talk of feature films. In short, Melissa P. has become an icon of Italian youth culture.

But is her story emblematic?

The dull Sicilian suburb of Catania, where she scoots around on her scooter and lives above the mid-range clothing shop her parents own, is not enough to contain the worldly aspirations of Melissa P. She feels terribly misunderstood, particularly by her parents and teachers. In order to empower herself, young Meli starts keeping a diary and having oodles of sex: “At sixteen I’m mistress of my actions.” There’s plenty of fellatio; weekly sessions of gang rape, during which she wears over-knee stockings and five young men use their “lances” and “members” to “unload their whitish liquid on [her]”; a spot of S&M with an older man, whom she does with a dildo and leaves; a few ménages à trois; sex with a transsexual; sex with a lesbian; endless accounts of masturbation (she regularly “slips her fingers” into her “Secret”—in a moment of poetic magnificence, her widely shared “Secret” becomes her “foaming waves”); and an orgy.

And yet Meli is a dutiful girl. One hardly knows when she finds the time to do her homework, let alone brush her hair—100 strokes per night. Her mother taught her that to be a princess, one must brush away, and Meli really is a princess—though no one seems to recognize it.

Her insights are profound: “Who cares if it was right or wrong? The important thing is that we felt good, we lived deeply.” Who cares about AIDS or pregnancy? One wonders whether life is really so footloose and fancy-free in Sicily.

In fact, Meli feels dirty and ashamed after she strips off her over-knees and finds that she can’t quite get rid of that extracurricular stench: “I am dirty; only Love, if it exists, can cleanse me again.” But she hasn’t found Love despite all her carnal adventures. Near the end of her quest, she takes another peek at her tattered soul and finds that living “deeply” is not the key: “No, the fact is that nobody ever taught me how to express the love I kept hidden inside, concealed from everyone.” Then she meets a special boy, a liberator. Here she finds her voice and expresses her fervent gratitude: “[W]hen we are with you, in your arms, my panties and I are free of any impediment, any chains.” Melissa P. is not just a princess, but a bona fide wordsmith.

Forget the book—let’s take a look at how Meli became a best-selling author. She sent her diary to a few publishers via e-mail. Simone Caltabelotta, an editor with Fazi Editore (who is now—big surprise—Ms. Panarello’s boyfriend), read the manuscript and decided that with a little rewriting (or perhaps a great deal), it was publishable.

Sex sells. The book flew off the shelves in several European and Latin American countries; it’s been translated into most modern languages. Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove/Atlantic, has deemed it worthy of sharing sentence space with Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence. Ms. Panarello—who, to judge by her facial expression, finds all this terribly dull and not at all scandalous—says she would like to see her book reverberate beyond sexual boundaries. It’s really about growing up in a dangerous world, she claims, though “the dangerous world” doesn’t get much play in between lances, members, secrets and brush strokes.

Ms. Panarello has been praised for her courage and honesty, but in fact her book is sentimental, coy and crass. It’s simultaneously clinical and euphemistic, because the author (or perhaps it’s her publisher) can’t decide what she wants. So what we get is a sequence of “ Penthouse Forum”–style fantasies mixed up with a whimper of adolescent angst and a handful of fairy dust.

Jessica Joffe is a reporter at The Observer.