After more than five years of owning the brownfield, discovering different biohazards and revising construction plans, the Austin, Texas-based company announced last week that construction will begin in 2011, as soon as the city approves its plans. A scaled-back 52,000-square-foot version of the store will open late in 2012 (the company originally broke ground in 2006). The canal, which has approximately 10 feet of black sediment the consistency of mayonnaise festering at the bottom, likely won't be clean for another 10 years.

It was only a matter of time before big-box brown rice capitalism landed in Brooklyn, which in the last four years has welcomed Fairway, Ikea and Trader Joe's. Whole Foods has opened six stores in New York since 2001, all in Manhattan. But proximity to Park Slope, the epicenter of purpose-driven, pseudo-suburban family life in Brooklyn, opens a whole new can of worms. Residents have so far staved off high-end retail, other than the odd boutique, despite being a branch office of Manhattan economically. One cannot even find a Gap in its increasingly lily-white environs.

This is Park Slope Food Coop territory, after all.

"I have concerns about the politics of the Whole Foods founder," said Mary Crowley on Saturday morning, walking through the Grand Army Plaza farmers' market with her husband. John Mackey, the company's co-founder and CEO, is a self-taught businessman who believes in small government, and he once compared working with unions to living with herpes--"It stops a lot of people from loving you." In August of last year, he wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal arguing that the government should not interfere in the health-care business. "He's very conservative," Ms. Crowley continued. "And we have good stores here already, so I don't know if we need another one."

Ms. Crowley's husband, John Denatale, walked over with their tall, long-haired dog. "I think people in the Slope get over things quickly," he said, their dog pushing his snout between his legs.

"I think they'll be upset. I disagree," said Ms. Crowley.

There was a strong wind blowing down Eastern Parkway. "People in Park Slope don't like change," explained Mark Germann, a young attorney standing over his son in a stroller while his wife, Beth Aala, a filmmaker, looked at yogurt drinks in the Ronnybrook Farm Dairy stall.

"Chains or change?" she asked, coming over to secure an extra blanket over their son.

"Change," he said.

"Maybe both," she added.

Whole Foods is more of an ideological challenge to the Park Slope Food Coop, the headquarters of arch-Park Slope living, than it is a threat to business. The cooperative, which is 15,000 members strong, was, foot by foot, more than three times as profitable as a Whole Foods in 2010, according to Fortune. Member attrition increased with the arrival of Fairway in Red Hook in 2006, but long checkout lines continue.

"I'm not a member of the co-op," Mr. Germann continued. "It's a little bit like a right-wing regime. They force you to do things, right? ... It's not a democracy; it's a totalitarian regime." He talked about friends getting "blacklisted" for missing shifts.

How will the Whole Foods stack up to the venerable Park Slope Food Coop? The Observer did some comparison shopping! >>

The arrival of Whole Foods is also a benchmark of the gentrification that newer Park Slope residents have wrought: It's now creeping across Fourth Avenue into Gowanus. Two women waiting in line for organic meat on the other side of the farmers' market, both with babies bundled against the cold strapped to their chests, said they would definitely not be going to the new Whole Foods. It was too expensive and too far out of the way. They don't own cars, and besides, they were members of the co-op. They declined to give their names. "Are you a member of the co-op?" one of the mothers asked, glinting at The Observer with a taut smile. "Just wondering."

"Oh, you're talking about Brooklyn! When you said Third Avenue and Third Street, I thought Manhattan," said writer Gary Shteyngart, who rented an apartment on Seventh Avenue and First Street, in the traditional heart of Park Slope retail, in the mid-1990s. "Third Avenue and Third Street, holy crap. Wow," he said. He had just returned from Santa Fe, where he was promoting his latest novel, Super Sad True Love Story, and was talking over the phone on Monday afternoon from his apartment in Manhattan. He said he moved back to the city to be closer to his shrink.

Mr. Shteyngart moved to Park Slope when he was working on his first book, and he expected it to be "edgy." There was a Connecticut Muffin on Seventh Avenue then. "Well, you know, there's an Ikea in Red Hook. Nothing is sacred anymore," he said, adding that in 25 years, no part of Brooklyn will remain untouched. "This elite group of people must be served one way or another," Mr. Shteyngart continued. "These kids need to be fed! Two-point-four kids per person there, so they need organic foods."

Mr. Shteyngart was proud to report that he never joined the co-op, "and I went to Oberlin, where working in a co-op was the cool thing to do."

Mr. Mackey of Whole Foods told Reason magazine this year that the most important variable in selecting a new site for stores is the number of college-educated people living within a 16-minute drive. Hello, Park Slope!

Novelist Amy Sohn, a co-op member and Brown alumna who grew up in Brooklyn Heights, compared Gowanus to downtown Providence before it was cleaned up. "It was dirty video stores," she said, "and now they have this whole festival of candles on the waterfront. I feel like Gowanus is heading in that direction. It's a little bit frightening. I love the gritty feel." She now lives in Park Slope, and her latest book, Prospect Park West, satirizes the neighborhood.

She said she would not shop at Whole Foods but hoped some of the riffraff at the co-op--the type of people who don't have their hearts in the movement, the type who wind up on the blacklist--might.

"They probably come from another part of the country where Whole Foods is very fetishized, and they have been waiting," Ms. Sohn said. "They want to replicate their sort of Mall of America experience in New York City, so they love that you can have a Whole Foods in Brooklyn."

On the other end of the spectrum was a "crazy fringe" of Park Slopers who may object to the presence of the store, she said. "They're just not going to like that it's this massive chain experience, even with progressive values. They're not going to buy into that."

"I guess I put myself in the 'sure, but I won't shop there' category,'" Ms. Sohn said when we asked if she would allow Whole Foods to build on the site if it was entirely up to her. "I mean, they're creating 350 jobs. There's gonna be the greenhouse. It's very ecologically conscious. There's gonna be stations for electric cars.

"They're the devil," she said. "They've made it too good to turn down."

There will also be bike parking and a waterfront esplanade, in the model of Ikea and Fairway in Red Hook. According to a letter sent by Mark Mobley, an executive who oversees construction for Whole Foods, the rooftop garden "will grow fresh, organic produce right on-site!" Michael Sinatra, a spokesman for the company, added that produce grown on the roof will be sold in the store. "The stores that are built in Connecticut use reclaimed wood from torn-down farms in Connecticut," Mr. Sinatra said, "and hopefully this one will feature brick from old torn-down Brooklyn buildings."

No bricks, however, will come from the landmarked Coignet Stone Company, constructed in 1873, on the corner of the Whole Foods lot. The structure will sit just behind the new store.

"I don't know. I just don't want them to tear it down. Do you? Maybe they should. What do you think?" asked artist Dustin Yellin on Sunday afternoon, after a flight back from Art Basel, talking about the Stone Company building. "They should donate it to artists to have a small museum there! I want to build a museum."

He was eating dark chocolate and sitting cross-legged in his office, off the studio, living space and gallery he opened in Red Hook. There were photographs tacked to the wall above his desk, including reproductions of Pieter Bruegel winter-scene paintings, studies for a 24-by-36-foot glass piece he is working on. Mr. Yellin and his close friend, Charlotte Kidd, bought the building on an isolated street in 2007 after his work became too heavy for the floors in his Manhattan studio. Now he finds himself down the street from Fairway, and neighbors with the new cruise ship dock and Christie's new warehouse in the New York Dock Company building. It's a short walk to Ikea.

Mr. Yellin described Whole Foods as a "weird art installation, a postmodern clusterfuck of like 55 kinds of the same kind of granola and 55 kinds of the same kind of chocolate." He doesn't like grocery shopping very much.

"If it's not going to be a museum, and it's not going to be a park--'cause those are two things that I think enhance communities--then I say to myself, 'Well, a Whole Foods isn't terrible because a strip mall would suck. And Whole Foods isn't terrible, because don't they have good stuff?' I could definitely shop there to cook dinner for my friends. It's not Wal-Mart."

Outside the co-op on Monday morning, the attitude was live-and-let-live. Doug Ashford, who teaches sculpture at Cooper Union and has belonged to the co-op since 1983, was waiting with his groceries for a ride home. He reached into his cart and tore off a piece of olive bread.

"The practices that are involved with the co-op have more to do with overall lifestyle choices that we all make," he said. "The only problem is that if that creates an economic shift in the neighborhood, where people get replaced. But we've been through so many waves of gentrification--I've been here since the '70s--that I'm not that worried about that, either."

"I doubt I'll shop there. It's too expensive. All of their products have way too much sugar," said Hilda Cohen, another co-op member, as she bungee-corded a cardboard box of groceries to the back of her bicycle. She comes over from Fort Greene to shop.

Ms. Cohen had heard all about Whole Foods' green roof and said she thought the company was doing a good job listening to the neighborhood's concerns. "They're wanting to do the right thing. And for how many times Atlantic Yards doesn't want to do the right thing ..." she said. "So, you know, it feels like they're trying."

Erin Jones, who commutes from Chinatown to the American Can Factory across the street from the Whole Foods site, was conflicted about the new store. She likes the view from her office the way it is. "I like the signage, the big open lot. That's something that I enjoy on my walk to work," she said over the phone on Monday afternoon.

Ms. Jones and her coworkers at Lite Brite Neon make custom neon signage in rented studio space. They keep bees on the roof, but they haven't been able to harvest any honey yet. The office normally orders in lunch together, or everyone brings from home, because there just isn't that much nearby in Gowanus. She wondered whether their bees would like the Whole Foods roof garden better than what's there now. "There's sort of an outlaw nature to it," she said. "It's a great open expanse. I feel like it's sort of a Texas of Brooklyn."

How will the Whole Foods stack up to the venerable Park Slope Food Co-op? The Observer did some comparison shopping! >>

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

The event was co-hosted by Alexandra Posen, the sister of designer Zac Posen and a Carroll Gardens mother of two, and Liz Lange, the maternity-wear mogul (both, like Ms. Sohn, alumna of Brown). Wearing a form-fitting purple Missoni dress and red patent-leather Chanel sandals, the author read an excerpt from PPW, name-checking The Observer and eliciting self-conscious but appreciative laughs as she rattled off parenting techniques with which the partygoers seemed all too familiar.

Ms. Posen, dressed in a tight black Zac Posen dress and metal-studded Alaia heels, was quick to acknowledge the absurdity that is current brownstone Brooklyn. “It’s pretty ridiculous,” she said. “At any given moment there can be like seven red Phil & Ted strollers on the street at the same time.” Ms. Posen, a native New Yorker, puzzled over what life is like with children elsewhere. “In Brooklyn you can structure your time by going from park to park,” she said.“‘It gives you a pathway through the day and I was thinking, ‘What the hell do you do when you’re in the middle of the country? Is there any structure?’”

Later, Ms. Sohn reclined with the Transom on a leather banquette and talked stereotypes. Is gentrified Brooklyn boring? “I think Brooklyn is still popping," she said. "I’ve never bought the ‘Brooklyn is the suburbs’ thing,” she said. “The joys of urban living cannot be compared. I’ve been to Montclair—nobody walks!”

In Prospect Park West, Ms. Sohn offers what she called “a social satire” of her neighborhood that has struck some as mean-spirited. Is she concerned about nasty looks from other moms along the Seventh Avenue shopping district?

“I wouldn’t say I’m afraid because everyone knows that mothers would always rather talk about people behind their back instead of to their face," Ms. Sohn said. "So I haven’t bought wraparound sunglasses.”

Currently in development at her production company, Pretty Matches, is The Washingtonienne, an HBO comedy series about the lives of three 20-something women working on Capital Hill, based on Jessica Cutler’s naughty novel of the same title; The Late Bloomer’s Revolution, a film adaptation of Amy Cohen’s memoir about how she and her father both entered the dating world after the death of her mother; and a Project Runway–style art competition picked up by Bravo a year ago. Just last month, Pretty Matches also optioned Amy Sohn’s novel, Prospect Park West, about child-rearing and sex among the Park Slope mommy tribe, for a half-hour HBO series.

Having Ms. Parker option your book has become a badge of honor. But as the acquistions mount, it’s easy to wonder whether a woman who has just had twins through a surrogate and is about to begin shooting the sequel to the Sex and the City movie will ever get around to seeing your project through. 

“People are always like, ‘Oh my God, look! She bought something else,’” said Ms. Cohen who, like Sex and the City’s Candace Bushnell, was formerly a contributor to this newspaper. “I’ll get an email about it and like I. Don’t. Want. To. Know. That. It’s so easy to just get skittish and nervous.”

Last Ms. Cohen heard, Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls) had written a draft of the screenplay. “I’m hoping they’re having lots of meetings. I saw Amy two months ago, and I sort of just want to be excited and encouraging, but I don’t want to be that person who’s like, ‘Where is it?!’” said Ms. Cohen. “I think it will just get made when it gets made and there’s nothing you can say.”

She is hopeful that the memoir’s being set in New York will work to her advantage since Ms. Parker will be able to be close to her family during filming. “So I’m just trying to be positive.”

About a year ago, Ms. Parker also signed on to star in Warner Bros.’ The Ivy Chronicles (still in development), based on Karen Quinn’s book about an uptown mother who starts a business helping parents get their children into elite kindergarten programs. Reached on vacation in Prague, Ms. Quinn said she was unaware of the state of her project, but had heard that Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada) was making progress on the screenplay. “Not long ago, I got word that they were still working on it. I just don’t know exactly where it is right now,” said Ms. Quinn. “She’s doing a lot and she’s got two new children, but she seems to juggle so much and I am very hopeful. But again, I don’t know because she is doing so many projects and one never knows until they start filming that it will get made.”

In an email, Ms. Sohn confirmed that she will write the screenplay for the adaptation of her novel, but refused to elaborate. The Washingtonienne was cast and a pilot was shot last year, but the show’s producers have decided to reshoot, according to Sue Naegle, the head of programming at HBO; and the Bravo art show held auditions in July, but according to the network, there is no tentative air date as of yet. (Ms. Parker and her production company declined to comment for this article.)

Ms. Naegle told the Transom we can expect The Washingtonienne sometime in 2011. “We do things when they’re ready,” she said. Asked if Ms. Parker seemed overextended, she said: “I don’t think so at all. They’re very exacting and picky with projects. Ms. Naegle had just come out of a meeting with Alison Benson, Ms. Parker’s partner in Pretty Matches, who was there to pitch yet another show: a family series.

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Park Slope may be an easy mark, but Montgomery manages to transcend the stereotypes: it’s too darn pretty to be dismissed as a smug yuppie enclave. Turn-of-the-century developers built it as a private, block-long street, commissioning architect C.P.H. Gilbert to design the Romanesque Revival row houses. In 2006, Time Out New York called it one of the 10 best blocks in New York.

At 36 Montgomery Place, Warren Lewis Realty was showing an extravagantly beautiful five-story townhouse, built in 1901 and designed by Gilbert himself. With its high ceilings, period details, and sunflower-yellow walls, 36 shows off just the sort of quirky-yet-opulent domesticity that gives the neighborhood its mystique. But when broker Judith Lief was told about Prospect Park West, she was dubious.

“Do we like that?” she asked.

Perhaps the house doesn’t need HBO to give it an aura of privilege and intrigue. Times articles from the 1920s and 1930s mention it in connection with dispossessed heiresses and gunshot-wounded lumber tycoons.

The current owners were downsizing after 35 years, and Ms. Lief had seen one or two serious families per open house—mostly young couples who were pregnant or had one child, “typical Park Slope,” she said. The house would provide ample space for a much larger family. With seven bedrooms, it was asking $3,650,000.

Across the street, at No. 55, Montgomery Place magic was available on a more modest scale. The walkup one-bedroom 4F was asking $389,000.

“I’m selling my own little apartment!” said owner and Corcoran broker Sarah Parsons.

She had hoped to rent the place out, and had mixed feelings about selling. She loved its light. The view made her feel like she was in London. But the apartment was too small: She plans to move someplace larger, the better to accommodate her mother’s visits from Germany. Indeed, it was hard to imagine the apartment housing visitors much larger than Tulip and Finnegan, Ms. Parsons’s Pomeranian and Chihuahua.

“Finny, come here, my pussycat,” she beckoned. The dogs have the run of the 550-square-foot apartment—tidy kitchen, wood-floored living room, and a bedroom that snugly holds a queen-size bed. Of the five-floor co-op’s 10 units, all but two are the same size, and couples occupy many. Some had been there 20 years; Ms. Parsons, only four. Over 30 years of apartment hopping, she had developed a Candace Bushnell-worthy approach to New York real estate.

“Never fall in love with something—a street, a house, an apartment,” Ms. Parsons warned. “Make a cold-blooded decision.”

Some of the visitors to 55 Montgomery had been young couples, a couple were young attorneys, and many were single young women. There had been two so far Sunday.

“Women are more adventurous,” Ms. Parsons said, at least when it came to spending money on an apartment. But the day’s third prospective buyer was a 30-year-old computer programmer and first-time buyer—and, despite the owner’s predictions, a man.

Ms. Parsons said she hated chick lit, and seemed to prefer discussing Nabokov with the Russian-born, Cornell-educated programmer. Still, she was intrigued by Prospect Park West. And her cold-blooded advice belied a romantic optimism befitting of a chick-lit heroine: In spite of herself, she had fallen hard for Montgomery Place. The apartment she herself was considering was just down the street.

“You also have to buy with your heart."

mfischer@observer.com

After a few beats, Ms. Sohn launched into a sort of spoken-word performance based on the sex columns she wrote for the New York Press in the 1990’s, mixed in with excerpts from her novels, Run Catch Kiss and My Old Man.

“I felt nasty, smelly and foul in front of my boyfriend and it really bummed me out,” she said in the retelling of “Stench of a Woman” from 1999, about her exploits with a guy she was seeing named Novel Lover, and her inability to restrain herself from farting in his presence. “I put my hand on his Member Only,” she continued. “It grew firm and proud. ‘Oh Novel Lover, you have such a beautiful healthy cock.’”

Ah! Sex columns!

Ms. Sohn went on about her fetish for musicians and guys with bad skin, her stalking of various boyfriends and the excuses boys make to bolt in the morning. The audience members sprinkled throughout the 450-seat auditorium, including many friends of the performers as well as a clutch of teenage girls and a scattering of single men, laughed.

There was a certain time-capsule quality to the Merkin Hall stage show, a memorial to the grand ol’ 90’s, when women still had the power to shock bored magazine readers with tales of their seemingly glamorous dating lives. Ms. Sohn, 32, one of the genre’s pioneers, is now ensconced in Brooklyn, married with a 9-month-old daughter. She won’t be returning to “Mating,” her own sex column in New York, any time soon.

After “Female Trouble,” the raunchy, first-person sex narratives she produced weekly at the New York Press in the 90’s, and a watered-down series at the New York Post, which were followed by five years of “Mating,” Ms. Sohn has decided that she doesn’t want to “be writing just about sex anymore.”

While Ms. Sohn was on maternity leave, New York hired Nerve.com writers Em & Lo to fill in, with the understanding that Ms. Sohn would return, post-baby. Instead, she’ll be contributing features to the magazine dealing with motherhood, “relationships and, yes, family,” Ms. Sohn said. According to New York spokesperson Serena Torrey, Em & Lo will continue with the “Mating” column; the magazine’s editor, Adam Moss, “is very comfortable having a diverse body of relationship, dating, sex and parenting writing in the magazine.”

Indeed, some of the energy that once went into chatty sexual-adventure writing has been sucked out by a hybrid form of mommy/baby porn. Writers like Caitlin Flanagan and her sensual ruminations on nannies and $700 baby buggies in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and Ayelet Waldman’s kooky version of family erotica in Salon and The New York Times, seem to have garnered more column inches of discussion than single gals listing their sexual conquests. Three pieces by Sandra Tsing Loh, who’s on the mommy-book beat at The Atlantic, were just nominated for a National Magazine Award for criticism. Perhaps Ms. Sohn has seen the future and is hitching her stroller to it.

“I think that motherhood and parenting is hot right now in a way that it wasn’t even just five years ago,” Ms. Sohn said by phone, citing the publication of Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness, the “baby boom” underway in Manhattan, Ms. Flanagan’s new book To Hell with All That and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, which seem to feature weekly debates about the division of housework. “In New York, people become obsessed with their children the way they were once obsessed with their mate.” (She mentioned Ms. Waldman.) “I think as people start having children at an older age,” Ms. Sohn continued, “especially in New York City, in a time in their lives when they’re more affluent, they’re thinking about the meaning of parenting and worrying about it in ways that parents in my generation didn’t do.”

No one seems quite as intrigued by bikini waxings as they once were; even the ubiquitous thong has morphed into the granny-panty. Candace Bushnell, who wrote Sex and the City for this newspaper, is now married, and her latest novel, Lipstick Jungle, is about women’s professional power struggles rather than romance; Anka Radakovich, who virtually invented the sex column in Details in 1991, is now doling out advice to married women in Redbook. (She also writes the more adventurous stuff she used to do for Details for British GQ.)

“I had the most loyal readership where I had one place where I wrote the column every month,” Ms. Radakovich said, referring a bit wistfully to her Details column. “That was a fun job. But now I’m sort of moving on to novels and screenplays.”

The sex writer Susie Bright, who filled one of several columns that dealt with the topic at Salon, said that she was still doing the same kinds of things, but that the oversaturation had driven her crazy.

“I’m thrilled that we kicked the door open, but with a lot of the imitation and duplication, we’re starting to see [that] a great deal of what’s called erotica now is—yuck, what we were trying to get away from,” Ms. Bright said. “You began to see more and more banality come out of it. It’s like hearing that your favorite Beatles song—that you wept over—is being used to sell beer or a car. And you’re like, ‘What happened?’”

“The official State of the Candace Bushnell–esque Sex Column is horribly hackneyed at this point—so out, that who knows?” said Julia Allison, who is fresh out of college and writes “The Dating Life” for AM New York (and who appears on her Web site lounging on a bed staring into her iBook), writing via e-mail. “But by and large, the formula of first-person accounts of one’s sexcapades is unbearably clichéd, undoubtedly narcissistic and inevitably boring as hell. I tend to shy away from that type of writing.”

But the fact that the whole sex-writing thing was practically flogged to death didn’t exactly dissuade her from entering the field.

“One of my boyfriends in college went to Medill and now is a reporter at a newspaper. He went the quote-unquote traditional route espoused by my teachers,” said Ms. Allison. “And now he writes about—I’m going to get in trouble here, but things that I wouldn’t want to write about. So, God, if you can get a column right out of college, I’ll take it.”

According to Ms. Sohn, her desire to branch out and try other subjects didn’t suddenly overwhelm her after childbirth, but was a decision she’d been “coming to for a while.”

“You can only test-drive female-arousal creams for so long before you have to get a life,” she said.

Citing Paul's claim that increased availability of internet pornography has changed the way men relate to—and have sex with—the real women in their lives, Sohn concludes:

Not an actual trend? Why, just this past May, New York Magazine ran a story (its third in two years, incidentally) with the unambiguous subhead, Online Porn is Changing (Read 'Destroying') Relationships. In that piece, the author claimed:

The author of that unimpeachable bit of pop sociology? Amy Sohn.

Related: A quick Nexis search reveals that Sohn's review marked the debut of the term "bukkake" in the pages of the Times. Expect a William Safire 'On Language' column shortly.

—Matt Haber

We've learned some valuable lessons this week : The city can survive the constant threat of terrorism , sudden electrical blackouts, the G.O.P. and 100,000 hippies, but can be brought to its knees by rain ; that no matter how many times we read Real Simple , our closet is still a disaster; and that Fashion Week schwag is only fun for five minutes, before it turns into just more junk to pile up on our desk. Today another Fashion Week draws to a close (ker- plunk !), and there's no doubt an underweight portion of the city is feeling the aftereffects of the blitzkrieg of too much champagne, bright lights and Moby music. Closing it down is bastion of classic prep Ralph Lauren , no doubt showing something elegant and vaguely tweedy. Ciao , Fashion Week! Sundown marks the start of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana. For those hip young Jewish guys out there who either think the High Holy Days involves a bong and Channel 35 or only vaguely remember something to do with itchy woolen clothes, temple and some apples with honey, the Jewish Enrichment Center presents "Curb Your Judiasm." Matt Mindell , former actor (he played Guy on Saved by the Bell ) turned rebbe , explained: "I think a lot of people have a misconstrued vision of Judaism, and we want people to curb their perceptions. Besides, I think Larry David is a comic genius." The J.E.C. offers a two-hour service and meal. It's also a great time to drop that WASP-y, repressed, good-for-nothing drinker and find yourself a fellow tribesman: "The people that come to us are mainly in their 20's and 30's, and 95 percent of them are single," Mr. Mindell yenta'd out on us. "Believe it or not, we've had 11 or 12 marriages come out of the last five years." If nothing else, it will make your mother happy-which, by the way, is a mitzvah .

[Ralph Lauren spring 2005 collection, the Annex, 545 West 22nd Street, 10 a.m., by invitation only; Rosh Hashana service, Shelburne Murray Hill Hotel, 202 Lexington Avenue, dinner to follow at the Jewish Enrichment Center, 176 Madison Ave,

6 p.m., www.jeconline.com.]

Thursday 16th

Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold …. The press-shy S.E. Hinton , best-selling author of teen favorites like The Outsiders , Rumblefish and That Was Then, This is Now , makes a rare appearance in New York today to discuss her new novel, Hawkes Harbor . Speaking from her Oklahoma home, Ms. Hinton explained why she ventured into adult-fiction territory for the first time. "I wanted to start writing again and to move on to something different," she said. "Also, I was living with a teenager, which makes it awfully hard to drum up sympathy for one." The novel, which she describes as "when the worst thing that can happen to you turns out to be the best," tells the story of an orphan suffering from partial amnesia, depression and fear of the dark (the last bit we can totally relate to). "I felt a lot of freedom writing for adults this time," Ms. Hinton said, adding, "I even got to write a racy scene, which I've been wanting to try for some time." At the Columbus Circle Borders inside the Time Warner mothership, Ms. Hinton will give a short talk and participate in a Q&A session, preparing herself for the inevitable questions about The Outsiders , a book she wrote when she was 16 years old. "It's always going to be my most popular book," she said. "I find it rewarding that generation after generation loves it." Meanwhile, the Corner Bookstore presents readings from a new book about William Maxwell , the late writer and longtime New Yorker fiction editor (his era predated the magazine's young-braless-women-in-Vaseline-lensed-photos-accompanying-their-stories trend). Expect writers such as Ben Cheever , Paula Fox , Alec Wilkinson and Donna Tartt -hey, is she back ?-to read from A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations .

[S.E. Hinton bookstore signing, Borders, 10 Columbus Circle, 7 p.m., www.tor.com/hinton; readings from A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations , the Corner Bookstore, 1313 Madison Avenue, 6 p.m., 212-831-3554.]

Friday 17th

Just like the absence of outdoor seating and the introduction of butternut squash onto our local diner's menu, here's another sign that summer's over : benefits for serious events. To wit, the Second Annual New York AIDS Film Festival (which runs till the 23rd, when Meryl "I *Heart* Accents" Streep presents Angels in America 's Mike Nichols with the festival's highest honor) kicks off tonight with "The Red Ball" at the usually wanked-out Hudson hotel . Women are required to wear red ball gowns-not as an homage to creepy feminist favorite The Handmaid's Tale like we initially thought, but, according to its flack, "because besides being visually striking and fun, it reminds people they are there for a cause." Due to perform are the ladies of Broadway, among them: Hairspray 's Laura Bell Bundy, Mama Mia! 's Karen Mason, Cabaret 's Kate Shindle and The Boy From Oz 's Isabel Keating . Further south, Downtown for Democracy -a group whose press release states its goal "to invigorate progressive politics by mobilizing Americans who share our liberal values but don't usually participate in politics" (meaning just about everyone we know)-presents John Sayles' new film, Silver City . The movie, which stars the increasingly pickled-looking Richard Dreyfuss , Chris ( American Beauty ) Cooper, Thora (also American Beauty ) Birch and Kris ( A Star Is Born ) Kristofferson, is described as "a scathing political satire about a grammatically challenged, born-again candidate from a wealthy right-wing political dynasty who fumbles his way toward elected office." Nope, don't sound like any President we know! For a $25 donation (read: ticket ), you can see Mr. Sayles himself introduce the screening and attend a drinks thing at Soho bar the Dove, with complimentary Brooklyn Lager ( burp !). But $125 buys you into a catered reception with something called "Potocki cocktails" (no relation to the Governor, we think) and a late-night screening on 19th Street (which has much better seats, we presume). If this isn't democracy in action, we don't know what is.

[Second Annual New York AIDS Festival's the Red Ball, the Hudson Hotel, 356 West 58th Street, 7 to 11 p.m., 212-592-1950; Downtown for Democracy's evening with John Sayles, screenings at B.A.M.,

30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 6:30 p.m.; Loews Village VII, 66 Third Avenue at 11th Street, 7 p.m.; and Loews 19th Street East, 890 Broadway, 10:30 p.m.;

www.downtownfordemocracy.org.]

Saturday 18th

A- ha ! A conflicting sign that, while summer is almost over, winter is not quite here yet: the street fair. The Kitchen , a center for "artists whose art influences its medium and culture" (we were completely thrown by the misnomer, too), celebrates its fall 2004 season with a fair that "celebrates the diversity of the West Chelsea community." Uhhh, isn't that community really just a stampede of dudes in tight shirts with ripped abs who sorta look like the "grooming" guy on Queer Eye ? Expect artist booths, street performers ( meep! ), the Slavic band Zlatne Uste, a.k.a. Golden Lips (we're not kidding), puppets, stilt-walking and food from local eateries. Whatever-it's free. Further north and east (both geographically and spiritually) at the Leo Castelli gallery, flag immortalizer Jasper Johns' Prints from the Low Road Studio starts its six-week run. More art with flags, this time in Southampton (which was, like, so two weeks ago): The Southampton Historical Museum presents The Red, White and Blue in Black and White: 9/11 , which consists of photographs of flags taken by John Jonas Gruen in the aftermath of Sept. 11. If you're uninterested in flags and willing to give be barraged by some "ethnic humor," ride your show pony to Joe's Pub for "What I Like About Jew." Hosted by singer Sean Altman and writer/singer Rob Tannenbaum and featuring stand-up Todd Berry , former Screw publisher Al Goldstein and singer/actress/writer Cynthia Kaplan , the organizers promise "an unorthodox night of songs and comedy." Remember the good old days when Jews just sat quietly around hating themselves?

[Kitchen Neighborhood Street Fair, 19th Street between 10th and 11th avenues,

2 to 5 p.m., 212-255-5793, ext. 10; Jasper Johns, Prints from the Low Road Studio , Leo Castelli, 18 East 77th Street,

www.leocastelli.com; The Red, White and Blue in Black and White: 9/11 , the Southampton Historical Museum,

Rogers Mansion, 17 Meeting House Lane, Southampton, 5 to 7 p.m., 631-283-2494; "What I Like About Jew," Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, 7:30 p.m., 212-539-8778.]

Sunday 19th

Give your regards to Broadway at the 18th Annual Broadway Flea Market, an event that benefits the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, a nonprofit fund-raising organization. Not a flea market in the traditional sense (read: no cracked teacups, vintage coats or mirrors from the 70's), one has the opportunity to buy that hard-to-find Jesus Christ Superstar record or pose at the Celebrity Autograph Table with stars such as Hairspray' s Peter Scolari (ask him about his Bosom Buddies co-star, Tom Hanks , and see if his head will explode!), Wicked 's Carole Shelley , Annie Get Your Gun 's Larry Storch or Christopher Guest favorite Michael McKean. Speaking of which, it's not often that drag-show performers make a name for themselves north of 14th Street. However, Kiki & Herb have been (as their press release reads) "blowing minds and breaking hearts around the world since 1985." The duo features Kiki, a brash, boozy vocalist, and Herb, her shy accompanist, belting out songs by artists ranging from Britney Spears to Eminem, all while delivering crippling one-liners. Their Carnegie Hall gig tonight is their farewell New York City performance, as star Justin Bond (Kiki) will be moving to London a mere four days after the show. "You wouldn't believe how crazy it's been," said Mr. Bond, who will be pursing his M.A. in scenography at Central Saint Martins College in England. "I think, since we're playing Carnegie Hall, every single person I know is planning to be in New York that weekend." Is Mr. Bond made apprehensive by the 2,800 seats that will be filled that evening? "Oh, please-it's fantastic !" he drawled, Kiki-style. "The bigger, the better."

[Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction, Shubert Alley and West 44th Street, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., www.broadwaycares.org;

Kiki & Herb Will Die For You , Carnegie Hall, 154 West 57th Street, 8 p.m., www.carnegiehall.org.]

Monday 20th

Unbelievably enough, it's Monday again , but there's plenty to do, so grab a double latte, push your hip fat back into your jeans, ladies, and follow the smell of girl power to Avery Fisher Hall for the Seventh Annual "Mothers & Shakers" Awards Luncheon, with keynote speaker and rumored Presidential candidate John Kerry. " Redbook is a magazine that's dedicated to the young married woman who has to balance it all-being a wife, mother, professional, etc.," explained editor in chief Stacy Morrison. "We're celebrating that incredible spirit." Expected 2004 honorees include multilinguist Teresa Heinz Kerry , the always-lovely Uma Thurman , vampire-slaying Sarah Michelle Gellar and she-looked-better-when-she-was-pudgy Sopranos gal Jamie-Lynn DiScala . September 'tis the season of the book-release party, it seems, and tonight New York magazine's saucy porno columnist Amy Sohn celebrates the publication of her second novel, My Old Man . "It's about a May-December affair from the perspective of the young woman," explained Ms. Sohn. "But it also deals with her relationship with her father, who is the other old man." Ms. Sohn was looking forward to her party at Lotus , which will have themed drinks called "My Old Man" and "My Young Girl" ("I'm not sure what's going to be in them yet," admitted Ms. Sohn) and a buttload of well-wishers, estimated at anywhere between 100 and 500. "I sort of just whipped out the old Rolodex," said Ms. Sohn, "and may have even invited a few ex-boyfriends, but I won't tell my husband which ones."

[ Redbook 's Mothers & Shakers Awards, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, Broadway at 65th Street, 11:30 a.m., by invitation only; My Old Man book party, Lotus,

409 West 14th Street, 6:30 to 9 p.m.,

by invitation only.]

Tuesday 21st

"Take a Loved One to the Doctor Day" is today, and if we've learned anything from Bubba's recent medical scare, it's a) that you sometimes have to pipe up when something's wrong, and b) don't cheat on your wife ! ( Kidding, sir!) In that spirit, the North General Hospital on Madison Avenue offers free confidential screenings, perfect for the paranoid and hypochondriac in all of us. Off island , Mike Loew and Joe Garden of the humor magazine The Onion , along with co-writer Randy Ostrow , read and sign copies of their new book, Citizen You: Helping Your Government Help Itself , in Park Slope. As one might expect, Citizen You is a satirical "Patriotic Handbook" that includes such helpful instructions as how to tell if your neighbors are in Al Qaeda , how to say no to terror sex and how to convince yourself we are winning the war in Iraq. "It's really one of those situations where you have to laugh to keep from crying, " said Mr. Loew, a soft-spoken transplant who moved from Wisconsin with the rest of The Onion 's staff four years ago. "We wanted to be honest about how we felt about the state of the nation today." Mr. Loew, who worried the Republican convention was a sign of things to come, said that the Brooklyn reading would be more of a presentation, starting with the authors' own prayer to open the event. "Last week we did a prayer for all the Republican delegates to go back to their peaceably rectangular states," said Mr. Loew. If you haven't enough benefit in your diet for this week, check out former Talking Heads singer and wild bicycle rider David Byrne, who performs tonight with Brazilian pop star Gilberto Gil at Town Hall. Presented by Wired magazine- who knew they still published? -the concert benefits Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization whose goal is to challenge the expanded limit for federal copyrights. Watch for lots of bald guys in square glasses in the audience. And if you're playing the Tuesday-is-the-new-Thursday game, kiss summer's sweet ass goodbye at El Rey del Sol's end of summer party. For $25 a person (the invite instructs you to write "margarita party" in the memo section of your check), you can have said margarita, eat some Mexican food, stare at the sky and wonder what you the hell you did with the last three months of your life.

["Take a Loved One to the Doctor Day," North General Hospital, 1879 Madison

Avenue, 8:30 a.m. to noon, 212-423-4905; Citizen You: Helping Your Government Help Itself reading, Park Slope Barnes & Noble, 267 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn,

7 p.m., www.citizenyou.com; David Byrne and Gilberto Gil benefit for Creative Commons, the Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, 8 p.m., www.ticketmaster.com; End of Summer Party, El Ray del Sol, 232 West 14th Street, 6:30 to 9:30 p.m., 212-838-9410.]

Wednesday 22nd

Happy first day of autumn, suckers! The air is fresher, the leaves are brighter, the drop in humidity makes our hair look better, and there's less sticky knees to rub against on the subway. But anyway, today Seventeen magazine (the magazine you read back in the day when you wished to be older) celebrates its 60th anniversary with a screening of First Daughter , starring former Creeker Katie Holmes . Or skip it and try to crash the after-party at Marquee. If you have curly hair, just tell them your name is Atoosa.

[ Seventeen 's 60th-anniversary First Daughter screening, Clearview Chelsea West Theater, 333 West 23rd Street, 7 p.m.; Marquee after-party, 289 Tenth Avenue, 10 p.m., by invitation only.]

WNBC's 11 o'clock news plunged directly into the mouth of hell on Sunday night, March 19.

Here's what viewers saw when they tuned in: weekend anchor Glen Walker, sitting all alone in a vaguely familiar, bare-bones newsroom, reading the day's news, sports and weather, and apologizing over and over for major technical difficulties. There were no graphics. No fancy set. No animated weather maps. No weather man ! It sort of looked like what New Yorkers might get if a nuclear bomb landed squat on Rockefeller Center.

At times, when Mr. Walker would introduce video "cut-ins," there would either be footage with no sound or an entirely black screen with only sound–or nothing at all. The problem lasted for the entire broadcast.

Toward the end of the half-hour, Mr. Walker introduced Chuck Scarborough, reporting on the Pope from Jerusalem. All those miles away, Mr. Scarborough–cool as a cucumber, as usual–looked beyond the many woes of the Middle East to send along his regrets about the terrible state of things back home at News Channel 4 at 11 P.M. As the sun rose over Israel, he did his live report on the papal visit. Then he signed off. But the camera stayed on him, recording his every breath and flinch for an uncomfortable while, until viewers practically ached over the nightmarish state of affairs at WNBC. The station's misery ended at 11:30.

So what happened? According to Liz Fischer, WNBC's publicity director: "Two minutes to air, our audio board stopped working." The audio board, Ms. Fischer noted, controls both the studio's microphones and tape machines. "The logic that runs the software failed," she said. "It put the audio board into record mode rather than playback mode, and you need playback for air. We had no microphones and no audio from the playback machines."

With seconds to airtime, the News Channel 4 team rushed upstairs to another studio. It had only one camera, though, and sportscaster Bruce Beck and meteorologist John Marshall had to stand by, watching and helping Mr. Walker from the sidelines. Unfortunately, the cut-ins were being inserted from the master control board, causing the apparent inability to get both sound and footage at the same time.

NYTV tried to call Paula Madison, WNBC's news director, but her assistant informed NYTV that she'd been on vacation since March 16, a few days before the fateful night. Mr. Walker couldn't be reached; chances are he didn't want to relive the horror, anyway.

Ms. Fischer said the station had taken measures to prevent a recurrence; they've installed a new backup mini-audio board. [WNBC, 4, 11 P.M.]

Thursday, March 23

Debut of NBC's new show Daddio , starring Michael Chiklis, about a stay-at-home dad. [WNBC, 4, 8:30 P.M.]

Friday, March 24

Cinemax airs Idle Hands , about some guy who can't control his possessed hands. [Cinemax, 33, 8 P.M.]

Saturday, March 25

Bodacious Jennifer Tilly hosts the Independent Spirit Awards on the Independent Film Channel. Last chance to set eyes on her until the next Chucky movie. [Independent Film Channel, 81, 11:30 P.M.]

Sunday, March 26

It's Oscar time, and that means Joan Rivers and daughter Melissa do their feisty Academy Awards Pre-Show . Also, watch out for Joan Rivers' new line of skin-care products on QVC. "I wouldn't put my name on anything unless it was great," Ms. Rivers said. [E Entertainment, 24, 6 P.M.]

Monday, March 27

The scene is a grungy downtown bar. A boy and a girl stand face to face. Moody, alternative music hums in the background. Above the din comes the voice of a girl. "I met Indie Rocker at Drinkland. He had a wicked sense of humor, but he had such a pale face and slender bod that I wasn't sure I could get it up for him. But when I asked him to walk me home, I found myself getting increasingly curious about his mouth."

Sound familiar? Yup, it's Amy Sohn, the ex- New York Press , ex- New York Post columnist in her new animated TV show, Avenue Amy , about–you guessed it–Ms. Sohn and the opposite sex. Avenue Amy is part of a rotating cycle of animated shorts on X-Chromosome, which airs on the Oxygen network on Saturdays and Sundays at 10:30 P.M. Sort of like the way The Simpsons first ran on the Tracy Ullman Show , if the Tracy Ullman show had been animated.

Ms. Sohn left the New York Post in December because they did not let her compare Rudy Giuliani to Hitler. She had some time on her hands so she started dreaming up a show, a TV show. Avenue Amy is loosely based on Ms. Sohn's Female Trouble column in the New York Press . Joan Raspo, an in-house director of the production company Curious Pictures, called up Ms. Sohn and wanted to talk business. "We got along really well," Ms. Sohn said. "They were a cool New York City production company! On the first day, she bought me milkshakes."

Aside from the authentic slacker dialogue, Avenue Amy features some pretty cool animation–a mix of real-life images and drawings. The characters move about the screen in a trippy kind of way, which is achieved by showing them every third frame.

It seems Ms. Sohn was born to trouble. "We're operating under some language restrictions," Ms. Sohn said. "Like a 'shit' became 'shh' which is like when they don't bleep the whole word but they put some air in there. I think they might do the same thing with 'bitch' and 'freakin'' in a later episode."

Ms. Sohn is willing to put up with the intrusion if Oxygen asks for more Avenue Amy s. They've already broadcast three, and there are three more to go.

In April, Ms. Sohn learns whether or not Oxygen will keep her show. Meanwhile, she's written an epic poem in 26 cantos, each one representing … no, wait, that's someone else. Ms. Sohn has written two screenplays and is busy pitching them to Hollywood producers. One is a romantic comedy, "and that's all I'll say," she said. The other is a slasher film about a glam-rock band visited by the ghost of their dead lead singer.

Good luck, Ms. Sohn! If you make it to Hollywood, and we have a feeling you will, don't forget your pals back at NYTV. Meanwhile, since you slobs don't have a satellite dish, you can't get Oxygen. Settle for Golden Girls on Lifetime. [Lifetime, 12, 11:30 P.M.]

Tuesday, March 28

Jeff Boggs, a writer and producer for The Tom Green Show , met Monica Lewinsky at a party in Los Angeles last summer. He spied her across a crowded room and came up with a line: "I've got a black Corvette." Ms. Lewinsky took the bait. The couple dated for the next two months, attending movies and a David Brenner show while sharing their mutual interest in Dawson's Creek . Then in the fall, Ms. Lewinsky moved to New York to pursue a career in fashion design and the relationship ended.

Mr. Boggs, 27, grew up outside Indianapolis and studied communications at Indiana University. After college, he was hired as a writer's assistant at Late Show With David Letterman . He got coffee, wrote some jokes and helped out with the Top Ten list. Writer Gerry Mulligan was his mentor. During the 1998 Winter Olympics, Mr. Boggs came up with the idea of the Zamboni race, which cost NBC $37,000 to produce.

After Letterman , Mr. Boggs got a job with Monday Night Football writing gags for the ill-fated preshow.

"After Monday Night Football I went to Arizona to an Indian reservation where my sister's husband was a teacher. It was a goal of mine to play poker for an entire year, but I got my ass kicked in a week. The same Indian woman beat me three nights in a row."

On that third night, Mr. Boggs lost $400 to the Indian lady and went home to rethink his future. He took a job on The Tom Green Show . After he met Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Boggs asked Ms. Lewinsky to film an episode of the show in Canada, and Ms. Lewinsky agreed.

Though broken up, the couple remain friendly. Mr. Boggs described Ms. Lewinsky as "very nice, personable and an all-around nice girl."

Meanwhile, Mr. Green is telling people he has testicular cancer. [MTV, 20, 9:30 P.M.]

And, anyway, did Mr. Clinton really write this stuff?

Did he get a check from Time Inc.?

Time managing editor Walter Isaacson said, "I'm not going to pretend he sat at the word processor." But he added that Mr. Clinton was "quite involved."

The middleman between Time and the President was Strobe Talbott, formerly of the State Department and Time magazine. "I asked [Mr. Talbott] if either he wanted to write an assessment of Yeltsin or, even better, if he could get the President to do one that had a personal component based on the fact that Clinton and Yeltsin had met an astonishing 19 times," wrote Mr. Isaacson in an e-mail. "Strobe said that he would be talking to the President after the President phoned Yeltsin that Friday morning, and he would put in the request. After Clinton and Yeltsin talked, Talbott asked the President whether he'd be willing to write such a piece, and the President consulted with Joe Lockhart and said Yes. Both Strobe and Lockhart called to tell us. I assume that Strobe worked with him on the piece, but the President spent time working on the piece and revising it right after his weekly radio address taping early Saturday morning. One of our folks was on the phone with the White House press office as they were deciphering his handwriting and typing up the piece. It was faxed to us Saturday just after noon from the White House press office."

Was the President paid?

"There was no fee."

This isn't the first time Mr. Clinton has tried his hand at freelancing: He wrote on Franklin Roosevelt for a recent issue of Time and in a Newsweek special issue on the future.

Jan. 4 marked the last "Amy Sohn on Tuesday" column for the readers of the New York Post . Ms. Sohn said she quit Jan. 3. Post features editor Vicky Ward described her leaving as "mutually agreed," saying that Ms. Sohn was quite aware of the problems the paper had with her column. "I don't think any of us thought she'd found an edge," Ms. Ward said. "I wanted her to find an edge and a voice that was different from other voices in the Post and be relevant. And I don't think she ever found that relevance."

Maybe the Post just wasn't the right match for Ms. Sohn, who gained a measure of writer fame as a chronicler of sex and the city for the New York Press and, later, with the novel Run, Catch, Kiss .

"Ultimately, I felt that the problem wasn't the format but the culture of the paper and readership," Ms. Sohn said.

She said she had problems with the "notorious conservatives" who ran the Post who kept her from ranting against Mayor Giuliani. She wanted to compare him to a mosquito that needed to be fumigated, but the paper cut that line. Also, in writing about a female model at fashion week, she wrote: "Half of me hates her, half of me wants her." The part about wanting her was changed to "half of me wants to be her."

Her final column was certainly not very Post -like, with its reference to the Mayor as "Herr Giuliani" and lines like the following: "If the world wasn't going to end, I was still hoping a couple hundred people were going to die in a Times Square bomb blast so I could watch it all on TV and for once feel glad I lived in Brooklyn."

Ms. Sohn was quite proud of it. "One of the reasons I was most proud of today's column was as far as I can tell not a word was changed. Can you believe they let me call him Herr Giuliani?" she said.

The redesign of Harper's Bazaar was just finished when Karen Johnston suddenly left as managing editor of the Hearst fashion magazine. Ms. Johnston, who another former editor said had distinguished herself keeping Harper's Bazaar running during former editor Elizabeth Tilberis' bout with cancer, was one of the last of the old guard left at the monthly.

Now, in these early days of the Katherine Betts regime, only celebrity wrangler Maggie Buckley and design director Paul Eustace remain in the top tier of the masthead. Fifteen other fashion grandees have simply disappeared.

Ms. Johnston is to be replaced by Mary Gail Pezzimenti, who has been managing editor of Women's Sports & Fitness for the past year.

The publisher of Bride's magazine, Deborah Fine, gave out small, paddle-shaped, battery-operated, Bride's -embossed objects to the magazine's staff over the holidays. They have the magazine's logo on them and nobby, circular pads that seem to come alive when pressed. In short, the little gadget is a vibrator.

The magazine's spokesman disagreed. "It's a back massager," she said, adding that it was meant to commemorate "how hard the staff works."

So it's not a vibrator? "Oh, no, no, no. It's not a vibrator, not supposed to be a vibrator and not meant to be a vibrator. It's a back massager. Although that's interesting, too."

Attention, all ye seekers of fame and status: your name in boldface type on the New York Post 's Page Six column is no longer enough. In the era of dot-com riches, you only know you've made it when some soul out there–be it an admirer, fortune-hunter or crazed stalker–has seen fit to register your name as a Web site address.

A 38-year-old computer network engineer named Jim is the man who registered the name Maureendowd.com. "I'm a fan of hers," said Jim, who wouldn't give his last name. "I'd just like to get it transferred back to her, if she wanted it." He added that he got to know Ms. Dowd's work not through The New York Times , which runs her column twice a week, but through a hyperlink at Matt Drudge's Drudge Report Web site. Jim, who lives in Bay Pines, Fla., said he also likes Dick Morris and Ann Coulter.

Domain names are doled out on a first-come, first-served basis. Anyone anywhere can register any word they want as an Internet address, just by providing a name, phone number and e-mail address on a Web page. (Network solutions.com and Register.com are two of the biggest Web pages of this type.) It costs about $70 to reserve an address for two years. Now, with common words and the most famous names having already been turned into Web addresses, some Internet users have taken to registering the names of the not-so-famous, including members of the media and literary establishments.

Michael Kinsley, editor of the on-line Microsoft magazine, Slate , unwittingly lost his name as a cyberspace address in January. That was when Jacqueline Marcus, a philosophy teacher at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo County, Calif., registered Michaelkinsley.com. "I bought it because I think Michael Kinsley is cute," said Ms. Marcus, who also runs a Web site called Forpoetry.com.

She mentioned that she had an ulterior motive: She sent two copies of Mr. Kinsley's book, Big Babies , to the author, asking him to autograph them. Now she's upset that he never returned them to her. "Until he sends my two books back, he cannot have his own domain name," Ms. Marcus said. "That's the deal. And even if he sends my two books back, that may not be enough. It may require some begging on his part."

Mr. Kinsley had no comment.

The fact that anyone can register a domain name has brought about a brisk trade. Big money can be involved. In April, the rights to the name Wallstreet.com went for $1.03 million; in July, the name Drugs.com sold for $823,456. Celebrity names, too, are popular with poachers. For a while at least, Vannawhite.com and Woodyallen.com took Web surfers to a pornography site. But people who register the names of novelists and columnists and that ilk have in mind things other than sex or money.

Tim Lyman, 29, bought the rights to David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest , Brief Interviews With Hideous Men ) to annoy the author's fans. Late one night, Mr. Lyman was following an on-line debate about which author was better, William Vollman or Mr. Wallace. Mr. Lyman disagreed with those who were arguing on Mr. Wallace's behalf; and so, in a kind of revenge move against them, he went and registered Davidfosterwallace.com. Next, he rigged things so that anyone typing Davidfosterwallace.com into a Web browser would end up at a William Vollman appreciation page.

"From what I've seen, fans of one or the other talk smack on the other," said Mr. Lyman, who works at a punk record label in Los Angeles. "So I thought it would be funny to register his domain name and direct it to the Vollmann page, to piss off his people or fans."

Mr. Lyman succeeded in pissing off the author himself. "What you should tell that guy," said Mr. Wallace, "is that he should take an enormous breath and hold it if he thinks I am going to call and offer money for my own Web site. I don't even have a modem yet and have no desire to be on the Internet."

Former New York Press sex columnist Amy Sohn got together with a Web site designer in August, not long after she started writing life style columns for the New York Post . She learned that, just days earlier, an outfit called TCN Inc. had registered Amysohn.com.

Ms. Sohn was flattered. "I feel the poaching is an indicator of somebody's faith in my future earning potential," she said. "You know you're a boring schmo that nobody cares about when nobody wants to poach your name."

A representative of TCN Inc.–which has also registered Girlssuckcam.com and Asswife.com–responded to queries about Amysohn.com with an anonymous e-mail: "When we acquired this name in a package of multiple names, we were told this person was an actor." (Ms. Sohn went on many an audition before the writing career took off.)

Ms. Sohn's solution: a hyphen. Yea, her self-promotional Web site shall be called Amy-sohn.com.

Peter Miller, an Internet software developer in Manhattan, is the proud owner of Johnupdike.com, Philiproth.com, as well as the more obscure Richardhoward.com (in honor of the poet and translator of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida and Stendahl's The Charterhouse of Parma ). Mr. Miller, who meets writers through his wife, Colette biographer Judith Thurman, said he's protecting authors from having their names fall into the wrong hands.

"When I run into someone, like when we have a party or something, I'll ask, 'Do you know what an Internet domain name is?' And they'll either say, 'Noooo,' or 'Well, I heard something about it,'" he said. "And I'll say, 'Have you checked to see if your name has been taken by anybody?' And almost invariably the answer is No, and so I'll bring them upstairs and show them what to do and say, 'Here. You're now registered.'"

Here's a rundown of somewhat famous people whose names have been registered by someone else: Lou Dobbs, Lillian Ross, Walter Isaacson, Pete Best, Tommy Mottola, Herb Ritts, Anna Wintour, Spike Lee, Roone Arledge, George Stephanopoulos, Ron Perelman, Ian Schrager, William Safire, Steven Brill, Mel Karmazin, Ingrid Casares, Gloria Steinem, Kurt Andersen, Bianca Jagger, Gerard Cosloy, Jay Mohr, Bill Blass, Shane Spencer, Charlie Rose, Kate Betts, Michael Lewis, John Gutfreund, Nina Griscom, Mortimer Zuckerman, Caroline Herrera, Edward Said, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Breslin, Todd Pratt.

The following semi-famous names are among those still up for grabs: Susan Faludi, David Denby, Michiko Kakutani, Graydon Carter, William F. Buckley Jr., George Plimpton, Neal Travis, Christopher Buckley, Louis C.K., Jay McInerney, S.I. Newhouse Jr., John Fund, Ileana Douglas, Howell Raines, Art Cooper, Brooke Astor, Seymour Hersh, Tabitha Soren, David Remnick, William Styron, Janet Malcolm and Melvin Mora.

The Story of Us

Three New Yorkers defied common sense, friends and Janet Maslin, and sneaked off to the United Artists Union Square megaplex for a 4:40 P.M. showing of The Story of Us . Each had his own silly reasons–residual affection for Bruce Willis after what he did for that kid in The Sixth Sense , a couple of spare hours before an evening show at the Tonic and simple Sunday boredom–but there was one more thing. That preview. "I saw it, like, four times and in spite of myself I bawled every time," marveled one.

Incidentally, it is not for nothing that the United Artists 14th Street megaplex is fast gaining a reputation as the most loathsome movie theater in Manhattan. We paid $9.50 each, went up a series of labyrinthine escalators, settled comfortably into choice seats at 4:35P.M. sharp–only to be herded back into the lobby along with approximately 50 spooning couples when United Artists personnel suddenly decided that the previous audience's debris should be removed. People whipped out cell phones; girlfriends settled into boyfriends' neck-crooks; "I've Had the Time of My Life" whined on the Muzak.

Finally, show time. A Coca-Cola commercial, a Kodak commercial, a concession stand commercial. Doug Flutie plugged an autism charity. Four or five epic previews–none so compelling as the one that sucked these people in on this warm October afternoon. Then, The Story of Us .

It was brutal. You could just imagine the pitch meeting: It's When Harry Left Sally , with Bruce Willis as the Seinfeldian ambi-Jew and Michelle Pfeiffer as the anal-retentive WASP. The principals addressed the camera like they do in Woody Allen and Nora Ephron movies; their quirky friends offered shrugged aphorisms about marriage; Mr. Willis and Ms. Pfeiffer yelled at each other, made up and yelled again. A baby in the audience yowled as Eric Clapton plucked softly in the background.

About seven-eighths through this torture came a ripple of recognition. There, patched into the movie like a flashback, was a montage sequence–and this montage had served as the preview for The Story of Us ! Half a dozen life events whirring before one's eyes–babies born, diseases contracted, relatives and pets dying, a heartwarming family line-dance number–half a dozen stories that had not been told in the film, a recap of a narrative that no one had bothered to construct! Several viewers shifted in disbelief and disgust. Had Rob Reiner actually released a trailer in lieu of a movie he was too lazy to make?

He had. A final, excruciatingly long soliloquy from Ms. Pfeiffer ("Please stop," whimpered one captive), and The Story of Us ground to a close.

We felt hollow and gypped as we exited into the autumn darkness. Not a single tear shed. Cheap catharsis denied.

–Alexandra Jacobs