“A lot of people ask, like, ‘What’s it like to be the daughter of a celebrity?’” Ms. Mason, who is 23, told the 20-person audience. “And I tell them, ‘It’s really great. It’s wonderful. It’s so cool.’” She paused for dramatic effect. “If I knew him, it would be even better.”

Most of the time, the joke gets laughs. On this occasion, it prompted some sympathetic “awwwws.” Ms. Mason told the crowd not to feel badly; she was in a support group for illegitimate children: “B.A.—Bastards Anonymous.” Anyway, she added, their relationship was getting a lot better. “Last week, I saw him on the street, and he actually recognized me! Pretty good. And I know he recognized me because the minute he saw me”—here she adopted a quavery voice she often uses for tragicomic effect—“he ran the other way.”

But seriously, folks: Ms. Mason said she’s only met her father a few times, once a chance encounter on the street after one of his Broadway shows, shortly after Ms. Mason moved to New York to pursue her comedy career. He’s been out of the picture since she was a baby and his 10-year relationship with her mother, playwright Ginger Reiter, ended. The fallout was messy and widely covered in the press. Ms. Reiter, who lived in Florida, slapped Mr. Mason with a paternity suit and penned a musical theater production, Oh Jackie Oh!, based on their relationship. Mr. Mason retaliated with a libel suit over the play, which was dismissed. Ms. Reiter won child support and continued with the production.

Knowing all this, it’s a little startling to hear Ms. Mason, who plays well-known comedy clubs in New York but has yet to break out, blithely name her father as one of her all-time-favorite comics. Professionally, if not personally, she considers him a role model. “If you’re going to have an absentee father, he’s a good one to have,” she told The Observer. “I’m happy to have his gene pool, because I think he’s a genius.” (Mr. Mason did not respond to requests for comment left with his agent, or to emails sent through his official Web site).

Ms. Mason’s inheritance is not just cerebral; she also bears a certain physical resemblance to her father, with a similarly large, round head, slightly squashed face and elongated ears—a fact she addresses in her act. “I just wish a better-looking comedian was my father,” she jokes. “Like Woody Allen. Or Rosie O’Donnell.”

BEFORE HER PERFORMANCE, her second at the club in a week, Ms. Mason let The Observer buy her a drink a few blocks away. She had entered the bar dramatically, in black stacked-heel boots—she’s 5-foot-1 and has been wearing high heels since she was 11—and a white calf-length fake-fur coat. Her hair was teased into a half updo and her lips generously coated in magenta lipstick. She was sipping a very sweet riesling and reflecting on the constant hustle required in her line of work. Her name helps, for sure, she said, but so far, it hasn’t been a golden ticket.

She spends her days booking gigs, attending English classes part-time at Baruch College and searching for a manager. She performs most nights locally and also does road gigs. (A recent one, for a group of older Orthodox Jews in New Jersey who were major fans of her father, was “a bit nerve-racking,” she confessed. Mr. Mason, ordained as an Orthodox rabbi before turning to comedy, has a large fan base, but “old Jews,” as Ms. Mason pointed out, are among the most devoted.)

On weekends, if Ms. Mason is lucky, she can play five venues per night: two 8 o’clock shows, two 10 o’clock shows and one at midnight. The conventional advice for inexperienced comics is to go onstage as much as possible, before every possible kind of crowd. “I’ve gone on at 2 o’clock in the morning for five people who were drunk, and you try to get what you can out of them,” Ms. Mason said, taking another sip of wine. In addition to the New York Comedy Club, where she waitresses once a week, she also performs regularly at Stand-Up New York and the Broadway Comedy Club, among others.

The schedule is a little hectic, but Ms. Mason is used to the rhythms of show business. By age 4, she was appearing as herself in her mother’s musical theater play, which ran for a few years before it was rewritten and renamed Pickles. At 7, she started on Florida’s comedy condo-circuit, the child sidekick to a comedian friend of her mother’s. She did regional theater and as a teenager appeared in a British documentary on Judaism. Her father appeared in the same documentary, but Ms. Mason says they found her separately, through her profile on a Web site listing of Jewish comedians.

When she turned 18, her father’s court-mandated child support payments stopped and Ms. Mason decided to move to New York. She had a series of odd jobs, including bartending at Broadway shows, before landing the cocktail-waitress gig. The New York Comedy Club’s manager, Buddy Flip, took her under his wing, inviting her to enroll in his stand-up classes and giving her one-on-one sessions. Mr. Flip recalled that she struck him right away as a “really good kid and great learner and really hardworking and disciplined.” Then there was the lineage, of course.

“Initially, when I met her, I thought, ‘She has this famous name, maybe we could parlay this into something,” he said. “So I talked to her about putting together an act and using her name to get into places.”

One idea Mr. Flip floated involved a reality TV show based on her trying to reconnect with her father. Ms. Mason appreciated his efforts, but wasn’t enthused. “My real career hasn’t really quite begun yet,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I’m afraid deep down, if I do a reality show, I’m gonna wind up … like, where would I go from there?” She’d love to get on TV in some other capacity—like, say, a spot, however tiny, on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, which she watches obsessively on DVD. Ms. Mason doesn’t have cable, but she also watches her father’s weekly YouTube broadcasts.

“I really just crack up. I try to, like, really just withdraw myself from the situation and just look at him as a bystander. And he’s hilarious,” she said, this time with no irony. “By doing that, I do almost feel like I do kind of know him, you know?”

It was almost time for her gig. Ms Mason slipped into an exaggerated New York Jewish accent. “If my father wanted to have a cuppa coffee with me,” she said, “he would find out that I’m such a nice person.”

kbell@observer.com

As an emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a branch of Hasidic Judaism that emphasizes outreach to less observant Jews, Rabbi Heller wants good access to the hipster arrivistes. Unfortunately, his current spot is too far away from the few hangouts – a health food store, a coffee shop, an artists’ studio space, a bar or two – to get noticed.

Mr. Heller moved to the neighborhood three years ago, after hearing from a couple of relatives, Chabad emissaries in burgeoning North Williamsburg, that people were leaving their neighborhood for Bushwick, seeking cheaper rents. He’s currently scouting a more central Bushwick location, ideally akin to the Williamsburg Chabad center’s prime real estate on North 5^th Street.

“I was trying to copy what they had in North Williamsburg, but it’s not working here,” Mr. Heller said recently, with a note of frustration. “People come and go a lot. Most people aren’t married, they don’t settle down. They come for a half-year, then they move out.”

With mixed results, a number of young Chabad emissaries like Mr. Heller have set up shop in recent years in Brooklyn’s gentrified (and gentrifying) neighborhoods: Dumbo, Williamsburg/Greenpoint, Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, Carroll Gardens and Prospect Heights. The Lubavitcher movement sends representatives to all corners of the globe — basically, wherever there’s a handful of Jews — but the transformation of many of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods has provided some rabbis with appealing outreach opportunities closer to their home base in Crown Heights.

“We don’t look at it like, ‘hey, there’s gentrification here.’ It’s where there’s a need,” said Rabbi Motti Seligson, spokesman for Chabad.org, the movement’s extensive online apparatus. “But a lot of times, when there’s gentrification, there are Jews moving in as well.”

The rabbis insist they’re not pursuing a particular demographic, but acknowledge that secular people in their 20s and early 30s are a good crowd to woo, since they’re not usually affiliated with local Jewish organizations and are still open to a certain amount of self-redefinition.

Rabbi Ari Kirschenbaum, 30, who set up a Chabad center six years ago in Prospect Heights, moved in on a hunch that good housing stock would soon put the place on the up-and-up (he was also drawn by a lovely but dilapidated synagogue that called for fixing up).

“Then the real estate boom happened and people were coming in droves,” he said, “So we were kind of in the right place at the right time.”

The rabbi befriended a non-Jewish developer who gave him free space right near Grand Army Plaza. The Lubavitcher community center (slogan: “one of the city’s most unorthodox, Orthodox destinations”) has been temporarily displaced while a luxury tower goes up, but Mr. Kirschenbaum says the developer has promised him a reduced rate in the new space.

He also forged ties with Matt Roff, who owns Southpaw, a popular Park Slope music venue, and the Franklin Park beer gardens, which opened this year on the edge of Crown Heights. As Mr. Roff, a 33-year-old who describes himself as “pretty loose” in his Jewish observance, tells it, Rabbi Kirschenbaum first stopped by his office a couple years ago, took him out to the parking lot for a toast and a vodka shot, and returned a few days later with a mezuzah, a tiny replica of an important Hebrew prayer that religious Jews keep on their doorframes.

For the past two years, Mr. Roff has lent out Southpaw for the rabbi’s Purim party. Although last year featured Matisyahu, a Hasidic Jew whose mix of hip-hop, rock and reggae has earned him a mainstream following, the scene wasn’t Southpaw’s usual. “On a regular Saturday night, I have hipsters from Nebraska,” Mr. Roff said. “And on a Purim party I have a rabbi and women with wigs.”

Rabbi Kirschenbaum wasn’t the only Lubavitcher who seized on Prospect Heights. Rabbi Tali Frankel, 31, moved in three years ago and started hosting Friday night dinners and beer and religious discussion nights at Bar Sepia on Underhill Avenue. (His activities resulted in a brief dispute over who could claim the title of official Chabad representative in Prospect Heights. Both parties now say it belongs to Rabbi Kirschenbaum, who was there first.)

There are frustrations. It’s tough to meet people, concedes Rabbi Avrom Tov Chakoff, 27, of Dumbo. “It’s not a place where people are like, ‘Yes! We want a rabbi!” This, despite Dumbo being “six blocks by four blocks” and the rabbi having staked out a high-ceilinged, industrial-chic space down the hall from Rebar, a favored hangout. One solution, which he says has had some success, was to invite local Jewish artists to participate in art installations. Last year’s show, which took place close to Passover, was called “The Exodus Sessions.”

In Carroll Gardens, Rabbi DovBer Pinson, the neighborhood’s Chabad emissary and an eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, has elected to let residents take him as-is. No watered-down, Madonna-style Kaballah for him. “I’m, like, the anti-cool,” Rabbi Pinson, 36, said. “But I think sometimes the anti-cool is actually really cool. I believe in being authentic.”

The neighborhood’s large population of artists, musicians, models, actors and writers, “people whose time is in their own hands,” Mr. Pinson says, has helped with turnout for Kaballah classes. It probably also doesn’t hurt that his center is housed in a converted warehouse, lovingly restored for free by Akiva Reich, a 29-year-old developer who specializes in environmentally-friendly materials.

Mr. Reich, who grew up in a Lubavitcher family and went through a rebellious partying stage on the Lower East Side before settling on an ethos somewhere between the two, calls the aesthetic of the warehouse, which has a distressed cement floor, exposed brick, high ceilings and chandeliers, “rustic modern.”

Back in Bushwick, Rabbi Heller still dreams of such a space. He wants a storefront “library lounge,” where it’s easy to pop in and out. Something casual.

“I want one of them to design it,” he said of his hipster neighbors. “Something really artsy, something that they would like.”

“Most of my life is inside my head,” said Professor Bobbitt, who, when he is in New York, and not at one of his other homes in London or Austin, Texas, teaches Legal Methods at Columbia Law School. LM is a three-week introductory course for first-year students, and Columbia regularly pulls out its biggest guns for it—the shock-and-awe tactic law schools often employ to stun their 1Ls into thinking they’re enjoying themselves. This year you could’ve had Justice Ginsburg’s daughter, or a former president of the university! But you wouldn’t have known it from the campus chatter.

“Did you get Bobbitt?” was all you heard throughout August. “Did you get Bobbitt?”

“I wanted to yell at them and say, ‘How do you know this? You’ve been here 10 minutes,’” said Craig Greiwe, co-chair of the orientation committee and himself one of Professor Bobbitt’s most fervent student admirers. “But apparently they’ve been researching this for months on end.”

Through some combination of gossip, online stalking, hounding their teaching assistants and perusing the Facebook group “Phillip [sic] Bobbitt is Our Hero,” students piece together the following:

Professor Bobbitt, who is 60, arrived at Columbia only 18 months ago, after three decades at the University of Texas. He is an eminent scholar of the Constitution and used to teach modern history at Oxford. He’s a former member of the Carter, Bush I and Clinton administrations and an adviser to foreign heads of state.

Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair blurbed his latest book on terrorism, which both current presidential candidates have reportedly read.

He’s the nephew of Lyndon B. Johnson.

He can blow smoke rings, and sponsors a national poetry prize in honor of his late mother.

Also: He rotates seasonally among his homes, and can’t shake his habit of a nightly cigar and scotch-and-soda.

He claims to be oblivious to all the attention, but he says he likes teaching first-years, who are, as he told them on the final day of class in August, “embarking on an important voyage in conscience.”

“My classes are pretty authoritarian, and pretty rigorous,” he said. “But I have changed. And now when the students want to know something about my life, I’m not quite so standoffish.”

Professor Bobbitt doesn’t believe a professor ought to try to make friends with his students, but he does want his pupils, the first-years especially, to befriend each other.

This year, it was a field trip to the Frick and MoMA, capped off with sunset cocktails in Bryant Park. Also, a fancy affair at Covington & Burling, from whose offices, at the top of the New York Times Building, you can see the Statue of Liberty.

Professor Bobbitt has advice for you, too. Have a life outside law school. Share notes. In the middle of a take-home exam, take a walk or a nap.

On the final day of Legal Methods this year, he shared a pearl from “my celebrated uncle,” meaning President Johnson. Every afternoon at 4:30, go into a dark room, change into your pajamas and lie down. After half an hour or so, start working again. (He stopped short of recommending that students conduct bathroom meetings, another of his celebrated uncle’s pearls.)

Not everyone takes to Professor Bobbitt’s teaching style. Gillian Horton, a 1L who calls his lectures an “elegant, intelligent approach to the law,” noted that he inspires both intense admirers and vehement detractors. The latter have complained that he hews too closely to his own books, and gets defensive when his ideas are challenged. Professor Bobbitt is aware of the criticisms. In this year’s terrorism seminar, he read out loud a negative course review from a former student, so the class would know what to expect. “Everything the student said is right,” he told them. 

Students who actually get into his class describe his soft but sonorous voice, his dapper seersucker suits—some students have taken to aping them—his white-tipped gray hair and his penchant for using elegant literary allusions (Conrad, Auden, Trillin) to illustrate legal concepts. (Ah yes, he sighed, but do not forget “the Samuel Johnson debacle,” in which no one in class could identify the 18th-century lexicographer to the professor’s satisfaction.)

Most students see him as a dedicated teacher who happens to lead an impossibly cultured and glamorous life.

“His mannerisms just kind of ooze a James Bondian kind of quality,” says Vishal Agraharkar, a former LM student and a teaching assistant for this year’s class. “Someone who acts like that in class and outside class we assumed must have just an incredible personal life. James Bond has a hell of a personal life, so he must as well.”

“You turn around and you realize that he teaches class on Monday and Tuesday and flies around the world solving the world’s problems Wednesday through Sunday,” said Mr. Greiwe, who has been a teaching assistant for three of Mr. Bobbitt’s classes.

A story from the end of last year’s LM course: “I think he had a flight to catch or something,” Mr. Agraharkar said. “He just said, ‘Welcome to law school!’”—here, Mr. Agraharkar demonstrated with a vigorous arm pump—“and ran out of the class. It was pretty surreal.”

He remembers Professor Bobbitt in his seersucker suit, pulling out a cigar he was about to smoke. “That might be blending myth and what actually happened,” Mr. Agraharkar said, “But that’s how I think of it.”

kbell@observer.com

In recent weeks, it’s often been difficult to walk on Broadway between Columbus Circle and Columbia University without stumbling on some effusive Obama volunteer with a clipboard and a stack of voter registration forms. But in this notorious Democratic stronghold, are there so many people left to register?

Apparently, yes. Volunteers tick them off readily: transplants from other states, including new Columbia University students and faculty, plus young people and old lefties too disillusioned in recent years to vote.

“You would think this being the Upper West Side, this being a bastion of progressive and reformer politics, that everyone would be energized and ready to go,” said Tim Foley, a former Obama new media director for New Hampshire and New York who now works for the SEIU and organizes many Obama events on the Upper West Side. “But it’s human nature to put things off. So just the sheer number of people who just possibly wouldn’t have been registered in time if we hadn’t been out on the streets is amazing to me.”

Foley was registering voters at 110th Street and Broadway on Labor Day Monday, along with two local Democratic groups. It was the third day of tabling over the long weekend; four additional events were scheduled for the remainder of the week.

On Monday, Steve Max, a longtime member of Three Parks Independent Democrats who has lived in the neighborhood for most of his 78 years, had stationed himself at 105th Street, in front of a temporary phone banking station being painted by a bevy of young volunteers. Max called the weekend’s crop of voter registration forms, which he estimated at several hundred, “totally, totally remarkable.” The registrations came from a mix of people, he said, though young people and African-Americans were heavily represented.

New York may be going for Obama no matter what, Max said, but there is still good reason to care about the popular vote. A key mistake in 2004, he said, was exclusively focusing on swing states, rather than racking up extra Democratic votes in strong blue states such as New York. With a popular mandate, he added, John Kerry might have had the traction to challenge apparent voting inconsistencies in Ohio.

The Upper West Side Obama volunteers also say that tabling in the neighborhood is a good way to find (yet more) volunteers.

Across the sidewalk from the 105th Street phone bank on Monday afternoon, two women had set up a “Hungry for Change” bake sale. “Guys, we’re baking for Obama – baking for Obama,” filmmaker Eunice Fearé called out, to no one in particular.

“Every bite gets him, uh … one step closer,” Hariette Rugg, a retired teacher, told a hesitant customer, who caved and bought a brownie and a cupcake.

Rugg’s two prior “Hungry for Change” bake sales, in the lobby of her West 110th Street apartment building, had been rather slow going. On Monday, though, the cupcakes (chocolate, with white frosting and multicolored sprinkles) were really going fast, as were the Ghirardelli chocolate brownies.

A transcript of a 911 call begins Kathryn Harrison’s While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family. It’s 1984, and 16-year-old Jody Gilley reports that her older brother, Billy, has murdered their abusive parents and 11-year-old sister with a baseball bat in the small town of Medford, Ore. This opening, and Ms. Harrison’s self-confessed "addiction" to true-crime stories, seems to augur an understated book of cold, hard facts. Instead, what we get is a dutifully exhaustive, though overwrought, account of a crime, filtered through the prism of Ms. Harrison’s own incestuous affair with her father.

Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Ms. Harrison is famous for The Kiss, her 1998 memoir of the affair and the resultant psychological damage. Two previous books of fiction dealt with the same theme. And she confesses near the end of While They Slept that "There is nothing I write … that doesn’t respond to the chaos he ushered into my life."

Still, for a book hyped as the heir to true-crime masterpieces such as Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, we might be forgiven for expecting Ms. Harrison to edit herself out and focus on the story itself. Instead, she dwells on the causes and effects of the Gilley murders as a way of making sense of her own experience.

WHILE THEY SLEPT INCLUDES SOME solid and revealing reporting. Ms. Harrison has conducted meticulous interviews and pored over court transcripts, psychological assessments and other documentation in an attempt to re-create not only the murders themselves but also the family history. Her descriptions sometimes shine with brutal clarity. In one particularly agonizing scene right after Billy’s murderous rampage, Ms. Harrison describes, step-by-step, how Jody leaves her gravely injured little sister at home, heads with Billy to a neighbor’s, and plays cards for over an hour while she tries to figure out how to get help without endangering herself. includes some solid and revealing reporting. Ms. Harrison has conducted meticulous interviews and pored over court transcripts, psychological assessments and other documentation in an attempt to re-create not only the murders themselves but also the family history. Her descriptions sometimes shine with brutal clarity. In one particularly agonizing scene right after Billy’s murderous rampage, Ms. Harrison describes, step-by-step, how Jody leaves her gravely injured little sister at home, heads with Billy to a neighbor’s, and plays cards for over an hour while she tries to figure out how to get help without endangering herself.

The structure, too, is effective: Ms. Harrison alternates accounts of the physical and emotional abuse Billy and Jody suffered at the hands of their vindictive parents with the story of the murder and its aftermath. In so doing, she presents a remarkably sympathetic portrait of Billy, whom we come to see not as a cold-blooded killer but as a child whose "sense of self was so impaired that he no longer believed in the possibility of his freedom—not so long as his parents were alive." Ms. Harrison is eager to examine how Billy and Jody created "a coherent narrative" as a means of "salvaging what they could of the children they had been before."

At times the author sounds like a heavy-handed English professor obsessed with symbolism and metaphor. We get analyses of Jody’s favorite books as they relate to her psychic healing, plus ample and close readings of her autobiographical college thesis and of the children’s stories Billy writes in jail. When literary analysis comes up short, Ms. Harrison resorts to psychological interpretation. This is occasionally provocative: Does the fact that Jody wished her abusive parents dead, for example, make her somehow complicit in their murder?

Kathryn Harrison collected many compelling anecdotes and enough vivid detail to tell a powerful and resonant story. Too bad she didn’t let that story stand on its own, unencumbered by her emotional baggage.

Kaitlin Bell lives and writes in Manhattan. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

At the terminal, reporters were greeted solicitously by British-accented airline staff, but didn’t get to skip going through security. Turnout was good: The Associated Press, the BBC, the New York Post, Agence France-Presse, CNBC, the Financial Times, and assorted others, including Golf for Women. (The English are big golfers, the executive editor explained.)

After 45 minutes of mulling about and sipping breakfast-y beverages came the press conference. The 18-month renovation would be to enhance what British Airways C.E.O. Willie Walsh referred to as the company’s “premium ground product.” The airline is seeking LEED certification for the terminal.

Images of the planned Terminal 7 redesign flashed on flat-screen TVs nearby: modernist furniture, clean lines and general sleekness seemed to be the prevailing theme.

The “break-out sessions” included a tour of the newer retail features in the terminal, including Tumi, Brookstone, and the Sapphire Lounge (decorated in deep blue, courtesy of Bombay Sapphire Gin). A free massage was offered at the Elemis Spa.

During the massages, Moreton Binn, the CEO of XpresSpa - the speeded up version of Elemi -- dropped by “to check out the competition” and say hi to Steve Clark, British Airways’ senior vice president for customer services in the Americas, who was leading the retail tour.

“It’s the only place you’ll find where money is less important than time,” Mr. Binn said, explaining the need for readily available, if pricey, goods and services.

During the tour, a bagpipe player in full plaid regalia played. He would not be a regular fixture at the terminal, Mr. Clark said. “We brought him in for today,” he said, then, lowering his voice, “I like bagpipe music – in small doses.”

Lunch was at Bonfire, the terminal’s sit-down, upscale flagship restaurant, created by celebrity chef and restaurateur Todd English (also of People’s Most Beautiful People fame). The restaurant was offering elaborate finger foods, including lobster in a mini tortilla, flank steak kabobs and mini pigs in blankets with chorizo.

With Bonfire, Mr. English said, he aims to recreate the kind of dining experience you can get in any major city – just in an airport. It’s also an attempt to recreate some of the lost glamour that used to be part of air travel.

“I remember when I first started traveling it was dress up, tie. It was a big deal,” he said. “And obviously we’ve gotten away from that. It’s become sort of like the bus terminal.”

On the way out came the swag – three bags of it. The freebies included Yves St. Laurent’s L’Homme cufflinks, Godiva chocolates, Bacardi playing cards in a leather case, and a mysterious charm bracelet with a pair of mini handcuffs dangling from it.

Then it was back to Bryant Park on the chartered bus, and back to the office to file a story.

Actress Bebe Neuwirth, of Cheers, Frasier and Broadway fame, told the audience that it was a makeup artist’s fabulous lipstick and lip-liner that “gave me my character” for The Paint Job, about a woman dating a serial killer. A “just disgusting” pair of boots inspired the dapper and dignified Pierce Brosnan, his costume designer revealed, “to let go of the ego” and adopt a sleazy strut for the hit-man comedy The Matador. And the legendary Faye Dunaway gushed in a video tribute that the wig and hairstylist who tends to her wavy golden tresses is “one of the very special people in my life.”

Costume designer Catherine Marie Thomas was honored for her work in movies such as Kill Bill and A Prairie Home Companion. Another honoree, makeup artist Patricia Regan, who appeared not to be wearing any cosmetics herself, allowed that actors are “not always” cooperative when she applies disturbing, macabre or weird face paint. (Surely not endearingly creepy Christopher Walken, who appeared on a screen while Ms. Regan spoke, as a vampire in the 1995 film The Addiction.)

After a softball Q&A led by InStyle managing editor Charla Lawhon, coiffeuse Colleen Callaghan noted that in the five decades that she’s been working, only one actor wanted a hairpiece as a souvenir: Dakota Fanning’s little sister, Elle, who sports long red locks as the child version of Cate Blanchett in the upcoming The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “She loved her wig,” Ms. Callaghan said. “But she’s only about 8 years old.”

The décor was already in place: Persian onyx bar top, gold Greek-key furniture detailing, lots of velvet and fringe. A “heavy, older kind of setting,” is how the composer, who is 34, described it.

A resident of L.A. who was born in Tel Aviv and educated at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mr. Blumenthal researched the Plaza project by prowling New York’s hotel bars with a colleague. He was not impressed. “You hear a very narrow sound image so everybody can speak and make noise,” he said. “That’s it. The whole night. On the other hand, when you go to a club, then you hear all the low end—the beats and all that. What we’ve created here is something much more dramatic.”

The four tracks Mr. Blumenthal has composed for the Rose Club include a “Plaza theme”—embedded, he said, because “they didn’t want it to feel too commercial.” By the bar, the beat is louder and more insistent; next to the staircase on the lower level, the sound is muted enough to permit conversation. And off in an enclave he has dubbed “the stoner corner,” one hears lots of bass and guitars and not much else. “You won’t be able to play this mix in any other room,” he said, “because it’s mixed into this specific setup of these specific speakers here. The music is kind of embedded in the wall.”

Meet Elizabeth Royte, the extremely rare New Yorker who until a couple of years ago had never tasted Poland Spring water. Then she began researching Bottlemania, her book on bottled water, and in a meeting with Poland Spring executives, she succumbed to a single sip from the alluring bottle they had put in front of her.

The fact that this anecdote will sound incredible to many readers makes Ms. Royte’s Bottlemania all the more relevant. In less than 20 years, bottled water has gone from rare to trendy to ubiquitous, "an unparalleled social phenomenon," Ms. Royte argues, that is "one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."

But Bottlemania is less a primer on a marketing revolution than a sharp indictment of the bottled-water industry and, in the case of spring water like Poland Spring, the strife it generates in communities where the water is drawn. Freely confessing her bias for tap as cheap, unelitist and probably less damaging to the environment, Ms. Royte walks us through her personal quest to discover the social and environmental effects of bottling spring and purified waters; along the way she explains what differentiates bottled water from tap water.

She marshals an impressive and often overwhelming array of data, plus some interesting historical context about clean drinking water. We learn that Americans bought nearly $11 billion worth of bottled water in 2006; that 14 percent of water leaks through cracks in pipes before it reaches our taps; that 44 percent of bottled water actually comes from municipal drinking supplies; and that during the 17th century the area between Chambers and Canal Streets served as Manhattan’s public reservoir, as well as a notorious dumping ground.

Despite a marked anticorporate thread running through it, Bottlemania does more than bash big-time water purveyors such as Nestlé, Coke and Pepsi. It also provides some devastating revelations about the quality of America’s public water supply. In stomach-churning detail, Ms. Royte describes how arsenic, rocket fuel, antidepressants, birth-defect-inducing herbicides and even potentially carcinogenic byproducts of the disinfection process all make it into municipal water supplies. Pipes running into homes can trap microorganisms. Even the plastic in Ms. Royte’s beloved Nalgene bottle isn’t safe: It leaks chemicals that are linked to prostate cancer, early puberty in lab animals and other unpleasant-sounding conditions.

Unfortunately, resorting to bottled water isn’t necessarily a recipe for perfect health, either. The E.P.A. requires cities to disinfect their water and to test for viruses and parasites like giardia, but spring-water bottlers don’t have to do the same. And Nalgenes aren’t the only bottles that leach scary-sounding chemicals. PET, the plastic in disposable bottles, releases some not-so-benign substances, too.

Hardly heartening, especially given that Bottlemania also warns that "rising temperatures, population growth, drought, and increased pollution and development continue to strain water resources" worldwide. It’s hard not to conclude, as Elizabeth Royte does, that "as we hurtle into the future, all of our drinking-water choices seem to be problematic." As imperfect as tap may be, though, she points out, "it’s the devil we know, the devil we have standing to negotiate with and to improve." So drink up.

Kaitlin Bell lives and writes in Manhattan. She can be reached at kbell@observer.com.

“No bag?!”

Often, New Yorker consumers are finding, one has to practically wrest one’s purchases from store employees’ hands.

Jennifer Corson, a teacher who was searching for the bag-recycling station at the Park Slope Food Co-op on a recent Sunday, said her use of reusable sacks tends to prompt a fair amount of eye-rolling. Recently, she said, she’d bought a sweater for her 10-year-old son at Macy’s. But telling the cashier she didn’t need a bag apparently so disrupted the ingrained checkout routine that the cashier forgot to take off the security tag. When Ms. Corson walked out the door, the alarm started blaring.

“They need to have a protocol,” Ms. Corson said, sounding frustrated. “I felt like I was penalized … because it wasn’t part of the routine. When, really, they should be changing their routine.”

Many stores are trying. Whole Foods stopped offering plastic bags in its stores on Earth Day, April 22. Other places have started selling reusable bags near the checkout counters, à la Europe. For a while this year, The New York Times was offering a free D’Agostino tote—very 1978—with the purchase of a Sunday Times. For the consumerist-environmentalist, an annoying breed that is popping up everywhere, there are those “I’m Not A Plastic Bag” Anya Hindmarch totes ($20 on eBay), and the “I’m Not a Smug Tw*t” parody purse. Pretty soon we’ll be like (perish the thought) San Francisco, which has banned disposable bags altogether.

The hipper it gets to be green, and the more the phrase “carbon footprint” gets tossed around, the worse plastic-bag guilt gets. New Yorkers use about a billion of the things a year, according to an article in The New York Times, and the city will soon require larger stores to sell reusable bags and provide recycling drop-offs for the plastic bags they give to customers. But in Manhattan, keeping a bunch of reusable totes in the car is rarely an option. And all too often, even the most well-intentioned consumer can be thwarted by a last-minute stop at the corner deli, or the drugstore, when two very New York emotions—feeling of entitlement to a convenient freebie, and distaste for waste—do immediate, furious battle.

“We do have a rhythm,” said Andy Azez, a manager at Around the Clock Deli, also in Park Slope. Mr. Azez said when it comes to his own shopping, he avoids the whole awkward counter encounter altogether. “I order from FreshDirect!”

Arlene Griffith, who has worked the checkout counter at the Food Emporium on Madison and 87th Street for six years, says about half her customers bring their own bags and more and more are buying the totes the store sells. But the habits of the rest are enough to make her feel seriously guilty about how many bags she passes out every day.

“What’s really annoying,” Ms. Griffith said, “is somebody could have one item, or two items, that are not heavy, and they ask us to double-bag it.”

Lisa Sacoor, an Upper East Sider who used to live in London, was listening as Ms. Griffith packed up her groceries in, yes, plastic. “It’s a complete waste, isn’t it?” she said. In Britain, she said, it’s easy to find good sturdy totes for sale at pretty much every register. In New York, Ms.Sacoor has yet to find any she likes, although she confessed that she hasn’t looked that hard.

This is, after all, a city where many people care an awful lot about their purses and briefcases, often to the tune of a thousand dollars or more. Interviewed at a 72nd Street subway station, a guy named Kevin, who lives on Central Park North but didn’t want his last name used for fear of offending the cosmetics company where he works, said he was thrilled when his employer handed out two free shopping totes. Well, pleased at the idea of it, anyway, he added, a cluster of plastic Fairway bags in his paws.

“They were purple and black and marigold” with patent leather trim, he said distastefully of the company swag. “I’m not carrying around that!”

Pam Amodeo is less vain; she bought simple reusable net grocery sacks for her shopping trips.

“But the problem is, I don’t always come straight from home,” Ms. Amodeo said with a sigh as she perused the shelves of the Upper East Side Food Emporium. Carrying the net bags around all day is annoying, she said, and running home to fetch them is too time-consuming.

She left the store a few minutes later, with three plastic bags in tow.