Shame and Fortune: Wayne Koestenbaum is Simply Mortified
The Observer had been waiting in the metallic ground-floor lobby of the Times Square restaurant Mars 2112 for twenty minutes when we began to get impatient.
“Excuse me,” we asked the hostess, who doubled as the gift shop cashier. “I’m meeting Wayne Koestenbaum, the poet, cultural critic, and distinguished professor of English at the City University of New York. Have you seen him?”
“The blond guy by himself? He’s already on Mars,” she said. “He was looking for you.”
Underground, we apologized to the slight man in the fedora, who was texting furiously. Read More
