- Ha. Ha. Over the weekend, Bloomberg said that congressmen can't read.  

- Things you need: a Barbie foosball table. Come on, it's only $25k, and it comes with free shipping!

- How quickly we forget. Paul the psychic octopus has already been replaced.

- The Blue Man Group nursery school is moving. We'd be mildly concerned about what facepainting day would entail if our kids went there.  

As far as working on a small scale, he felt it was “so cute! I’m married to a small-scale husband, after all!” A.k.a. Observer columnist Simon Doonan (see p. 6). “I look at all these middle-aged women in pink dresses squealing over blond Barbies,” Mr. Doonan said, “and I wonder what my feminist lesbian activist sister would think of all this?”

Mr. Adler introduced his own sister, Amy Adler, and her escape-bent 3-year-old son, Harry, to the Transom. “Harry, do you remember the story I told you about Uncle Jonny and the Barbie doll?” asked Ms. Adler. Harry tried to twist off his mother’s arm and run away, not unlike what Uncle Jonny used to do back in the ’70s to Ms. Adler’s own Barbies. “It’s a more accepting time now,” said Mr. Adler, cleaning up some spilled Champagne. “Now little boys can play with Barbie.”

4 p.m. The Artists & Fleas: Independent Artist Indoor Market is held at 303 Grand Street in Brooklyn.

6 p.m. A dance improvisation workshop called "The Buzz" will take place at the N.Y. Chinese Cultural Center on 390 Broadway. Admission is $10.

8 p.m. “TIMES 365:24:7” is a "multi-media exploration of today’s hyper-caffeinated media world" hosted by the Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Avenue near Lorimer Street. Ticket prices range from $10 to $18.

8 p.m. "Sex, Animated" features 12 films on the topic of sex, featuring Bill Plympton, the creator of "Courage the Cowardly Dog," John Dilworth, Commercial animator PES and others. The screening will be moderated by Signe Baumane, at 92YTribecca, 200 Hudson Street. Tickets are $12.
 
8 p.m. "Rare Breed Productions" offers "Flanagan's Wake" a mock-interactive Irish wake. At Mr. Dennehy's, 63 Carmine Street. Admission is $20.

SUNDAY

9 a.m. Flea Market is held at the Bay Ridge Jewish Center, 405 81st Street, at Fourth Avenue.

9 a.m. The N.Y. Aquarium hosts "Breakfast With the Animals"  at the Aquarium, 502 Surf Avenue, between West Eighth and West Fifth streets. Human breakfast will also be served, admission is $32, $25 for members.

11 a.m. Eyewitness News Reporter N.J. Burkett will speak at "Covering the War In Gaza" brunch, Congregation Mount Sinai, 250 Cadman Plaza West at Clark Street. Tickets are $18, $15 for members.

12:45 p.m. Park Slope hosts annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, beginning at Prospect Park West at 14th Street.

2:30 p.m. The U.S. Pole Dance Championship is held at the Bleecker Street Theater, 45 Bleecker Street. Ticket prices range from $50 to $70.

3 p.m. Hair the musical holds final performance at Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 West 45th Street.

4 p.m. "Yiddish Dance Party" is held at the Bensonhurst Jewish Community Home, 7802 Bay Parkway. Featuring live Klezmer music, admission is free.

8 p.m. A.C. Newman performs at the Bowery Ballroom with Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele, 6 Delancey Street, admission is $18, $15 in advance.

MONDAY

11:55 p.m. Rockstar Games hosts "Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars" launch party. DJ OhNo will be "spinning throughout the night." At the Nintendo World Store, 10 Rockefeller Plaza.

4 p.m. Lez Zeppelin performs at the Canal Room, 285 West Broadway.

7:30 p.m. Care Bears on Fire perform at the Bell House, 149 Seventh Street and Third Avenue. Tickets are $10.

8 p.m. Cake Shop hosts "Street Meat, a "unique Character Comedy Variety Show." At 152 Ludlow Street; admission is free.

8 p.m. The Beard & Moustache Championship will be held at Public Assembly; bearded people will compete for prizes. The event will feature live music, comedy and burlesque, at 70 North Sixth Street and Wythe Avenue. Tickets are $20, $15 in advance.

The tall PR chick with the headset and the plangent voice was clearly intent on publicly buggering me with her clipboard if I did not get the hell out of her way and allow her to escort some celeb or other to its front-row seat.

The rib-mangling crush outside the Rag & Bone fall 2009 fashion show, held at the Cedar Lake Theater on Friday, Feb. 13, took me by surprise. What happened to the kinder and gentler Fashion Week we had all been anticipating? Smaller shows, more “realness,” a calm and caring vibration, that was the word on the street during the run-up. It would appear that the recession—or “the reception” as my malapropism-prone pal Milly De Cabrol, the interior-decorating genius, keeps calling it—has increased, rather than decreased, the lemminglike stampede into the World of Fashion. 

“EXCUSE ME!”

Being the team player that I am, I capitulated and stepped aside to allow the flack to do her “job.” Imagine my surprise when I saw, not Madonna and Jesus (the new Brazilian boy toy as opposed to the beloved Nazarene) being whisked past me, but golden-tressed stylist Rachel Zoe and her husband.

As I took my seat, I began to ask myself deep, existential questions: Does Rachel Zoe have THAT much more wattage than me? Am I less than the dust on her chariot wheels? Or, is there a simpler explanation: Am I just a spotlight-grabber who cannot bear it when the klieg lights are aimed at cheekbones other than my own?

Don’t answer that!

All existential concerns and nagging worries about “the reception” were erased on Saturday, Feb. 14, when I attended a fashion show celebrating the 50th anniversary of Mattel’s Barbie doll. Talk about a freaky scene! Courtney Love’s song “Doll Parts” kick-started what turned out to be the most entertaining and escapist, no-expense-spared event of the week. Clearly the toy biz is “reception-proof.” Fifty designers created 50 deranged looks, one for each year of Barbie’s life. She is only six years younger than me, but I have to admit, that skinny bitch is looking good!

Why did I love this extravaganza so much?

Firstly, it was great to go to a runway show where I was not the shortest attendee. This was due to the presence of many, many small children. Secondly, the clothes were a lot of fun. The angst-ridden pretension that currently dogs most fashion shows was totally missing. Here was the kind of exuberant fashion explosion that could conceivably get women back into the stores to shop full price.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I loved it because me and my Jonny were totally feted and VIP’d and spot-lit. God, it felt good to have those lights aiming in the right direction once more! It was our Rachel Zoe moment. It was our turn to be whisked in ahead of the irate teeming masses, many of whom were, as I have mentioned, satisfyingly more truncated than yours truly.

Honesty compels me to admit that it was my husband attracting all the heat. Here’s why: Mr. Jonathan Adler has spent the last few months designing a human-scaled version of Barbie’s Malibu Dream House, unveiling March 9 in, you guessed it, Malibu! For reals! Yes, my husband is all up in Ms. Barbie’s business. And he has become totally obsessed. The phrase “Barbie’s Malibu Dream House” pops out of his mouth continually. He never mentions “the reception” any more.

Take a tip from my Jonny: Find an escape hatch in these dark times. Create your own infantile pink fantasy world. Hopefully when you emerge a few years from now, “the reception” will be over.

sdoonan@observer.com

We weren’t introduced—I only caught a sidelong glance—but judging from Ms. Flanagan’s new book, a sleek little package of essays, it seems she leads a pretty sweet life. Gets up, changes out of a satin peignoir (she’s big on keeping the sexual spark alive in a marriage). Waves hubby off to his lucrative job producing official Barbie doll films (“of all things!” as she might put it). Shepherds their young twin boys to school. Then comes home to a fat stack of library books and bangs out a few pensées on the domesticity beat. Not bad, eh?

Ms. Flanagan has incited plenty of ire among contemporary feminists for her titillating proclamations about men who work long hours at the office deserving hot meals, hot sex, etc., from their wives upon returning home. (“There’s a certain point at which you have to suit up and do the job yourself,” she writes, in a priceless comparison of servicing one’s spouse to delousing one’s children—the implication being that both tasks deserve the same brisk, red-knuckled efficiency.) Without detracting from the outrageousness of those remarks, I think that some of her critics might be jealous.

Befitting her Irish heritage, Ms. Flanagan (herself quite a sleek little package, if the author photo can be trusted) can be a lovely, lyrical writer—the kind whose phrases enter your head and linger there, like the aroma of—oh, why not?—baking cookies. “I was going to be like someone at a tennis match,” she remembers thinking when pregnant with her twins, “gazing down into one little face and then snapping my head around to gaze at his double.” When considering the dubious problem of overscheduled upper-middle-class kids, she comically conjures up “scores of tots furiously reporting the news and belting out ‘Second Hand Rose’” while their neurotic parents try to unwind with yoga.

But just when you expect to find chocolate chips in her sweet little prose treats, there are little rat-poison pellets instead. In a discussion of the by now exhaustively over-discussed Martha Stewart (“My god, the woman’s way with simple white daisies.” trills Ms. Flanagan), the author declares point-blank: “Women have a deeply felt emotional connection to housekeeping.” Oh, really? Not in this household, sister … unless rank indifference to hospital corners counts as a deeply felt emotional connection.

“He’s been working here for two years,” Ms. Flanagan remarks almost proudly of her crooked-toothed Central American gardener, “and I don’t even know his last name.” Well, at least she’s honest …. “One does not want to compare oneself to a slaveholder,” she goes on, of her relationship with a devoted Honduran former nanny named Paloma, yet she finds it hard to resist: “In our own way, we loved each other. Still, I was the boss.” Sort of like Scarlett O’Hara and Mammy. Though Ms. Flanagan is strongly convinced that her household help should get Social Security benefits, she can’t help revealing herself as an Old World elitist of the most lip-curling kind: “[T]his is not a book about equal rights or equal opportunities.” God forbid we should think Caitlin Flanagan is, you know, agitating for social change or anything.

She’s not just a conservative, she’s a conservationist. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of this book—most of which has previously appeared in either The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly—is its resurrection of feminine narratives that otherwise might have been consigned to the dustbins of history: out-of-print (or at least out-of-fashion) gems by all those snappy, percussively named mid-century writers: Erma Bombeck (The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank), Peg Bracken (I Hate to Housekeep), Jean Kerr (Please Don’t Eat the Daisies) and the Kennedy children’s nanny, Maud Shaw. Occasionally, Ms. Flanagan adopts their patois herself, sprinkling phrases like “whiz-bang,” “madder than a wet hen” and “yesterday’s Cobb salad,” to somewhat twee effect.

The specter of a better-known and more substantial female writer, erstwhile fellow Californian Joan Didion, also looms over the text, and not just because of the title, a wishful wink to Goodbye to All That. Forty years ago, Ms. Didion reported on the Las Vegas wedding industry; now, her would-be successor takes on the crass registry practices of twenty- and thirtysomethings. “Putting on lipstick was an oppressive act,” Ms. Flanagan writes, recollecting the radical mothers of childhood friends in Berkeley who—heaven forfend!—let the housekeeping go for awhile to pursue self-realization. “Cooking nourishing dinners was an oppressive act.” It’s a resonant echo of Ms. Didion’s well-known line about needing someone “oppressed” to break eggs for an omelet.

But Ms. Flanagan, ma’am, you are no Joan Didion.

Nor is she Mary McCarthy, though her memories of a Catholic girlhood under the supervision of a capable and loving mother, interspersed throughout the spotty cultural analysis, are vivid and poignant indeed. Ms. Flanagan, whose father was a prominent intellectual in his day, is anxious that her mother’s way with a lobster salad not be forgotten, that we not forget the innocent joys of stamp collecting and of kids playing T-ball. But not so anxious that she decided to toil at, say, Family Circle rather than The New Yorker. “Now I’m ironing the placket,” little Caitlin’s late mother would tell her, and little Caitlin “would stand beside her, thinking, Placket. Good word.”

It’s upsetting to note that Ms. Flanagan seems to think of her writing as something she does for kicks, like some lady romance novelist of the Victorian era; her real job is at-home mother, though her helplessness in the face of simple household chores borders on the pathological. And she’s clearly in desperate need of professional interaction in public places. “What I liked was seeing people up and dressed and doing their jobs,” she writes of her addiction to the Today show. And later: “How thrilling! How important I felt!” on the rare occasion when she had to travel for work.

That she’s aware of her hypocrisy—“craven enough to change colors” at the playground to ingratiate herself with women on either side of the picket fence—makes it only marginally more tolerable.

In the last essay of the book, Ms. Flanagan reveals that she was treated successfully for breast cancer; sympathy for this ordeal does not obviate the feeling that she has been chloroformed to some extent by an excess of nostalgia, of conventionality, of narrow-mindedness about the flexible configurations that families might take, and the roles that women and men might play in them. Again, she’s a lovely writer. But it would behoove her to get out of the house sometime.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.

We weren’t introduced—I only caught a sidelong glance—but judging from Ms. Flanagan’s new book, a sleek little package of essays, it seems she leads a pretty sweet life. Gets up, changes out of a satin peignoir (she’s big on keeping the sexual spark alive in a marriage). Waves hubby off to his lucrative job producing official Barbie doll films (“of all things!” as she might put it). Shepherds their young twin boys to school. Then comes home to a fat stack of library books and bangs out a few pensées on the domesticity beat. Not bad, eh?

Ms. Flanagan has incited plenty of ire among contemporary feminists for her titillating proclamations about men who work long hours at the office deserving hot meals, hot sex, etc., from their wives upon returning home. (“There’s a certain point at which you have to suit up and do the job yourself,” she writes, in a priceless comparison of servicing one’s spouse to delousing one’s children—the implication being that both tasks deserve the same brisk, red-knuckled efficiency.) Without detracting from the outrageousness of those remarks, I think that some of her critics might be jealous.

Befitting her Irish heritage, Ms. Flanagan (herself quite a sleek little package, if the author photo can be trusted) can be a lovely, lyrical writer—the kind whose phrases enter your head and linger there, like the aroma of—oh, why not?—baking cookies. “I was going to be like someone at a tennis match,” she remembers thinking when pregnant with her twins, “gazing down into one little face and then snapping my head around to gaze at his double.” When considering the dubious problem of overscheduled upper-middle-class kids, she comically conjures up “scores of tots furiously reporting the news and belting out ‘Second Hand Rose’” while their neurotic parents try to unwind with yoga.

But just when you expect to find chocolate chips in her sweet little prose treats, there are little rat-poison pellets instead. In a discussion of the by now exhaustively over-discussed Martha Stewart (“My god, the woman’s way with simple white daisies.” trills Ms. Flanagan), the author declares point-blank: “Women have a deeply felt emotional connection to housekeeping.” Oh, really? Not in this household, sister … unless rank indifference to hospital corners counts as a deeply felt emotional connection.

“He’s been working here for two years,” Ms. Flanagan remarks almost proudly of her crooked-toothed Central American gardener, “and I don’t even know his last name.” Well, at least she’s honest …. “One does not want to compare oneself to a slaveholder,” she goes on, of her relationship with a devoted Honduran former nanny named Paloma, yet she finds it hard to resist: “In our own way, we loved each other. Still, I was the boss.” Sort of like Scarlett O’Hara and Mammy. Though Ms. Flanagan is strongly convinced that her household help should get Social Security benefits, she can’t help revealing herself as an Old World elitist of the most lip-curling kind: “[T]his is not a book about equal rights or equal opportunities.” God forbid we should think Caitlin Flanagan is, you know, agitating for social change or anything.

She’s not just a conservative, she’s a conservationist. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of this book—most of which has previously appeared in either The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly—is its resurrection of feminine narratives that otherwise might have been consigned to the dustbins of history: out-of-print (or at least out-of-fashion) gems by all those snappy, percussively named mid-century writers: Erma Bombeck ( The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank), Peg Bracken ( I Hate to Housekeep), Jean Kerr ( Please Don’t Eat the Daisies) and the Kennedy children’s nanny, Maud Shaw. Occasionally, Ms. Flanagan adopts their patois herself, sprinkling phrases like “whiz-bang,” “madder than a wet hen” and “yesterday’s Cobb salad,” to somewhat twee effect.

The specter of a better-known and more substantial female writer, erstwhile fellow Californian Joan Didion, also looms over the text, and not just because of the title, a wishful wink to Goodbye to All That. Forty years ago, Ms. Didion reported on the Las Vegas wedding industry; now, her would-be successor takes on the crass registry practices of twenty- and thirtysomethings. “Putting on lipstick was an oppressive act,” Ms. Flanagan writes, recollecting the radical mothers of childhood friends in Berkeley who—heaven forfend!—let the housekeeping go for awhile to pursue self-realization. “Cooking nourishing dinners was an oppressive act.” It’s a resonant echo of Ms. Didion’s well-known line about needing someone “oppressed” to break eggs for an omelet.

But Ms. Flanagan, ma’am, you are no Joan Didion.

Nor is she Mary McCarthy, though her memories of a Catholic girlhood under the supervision of a capable and loving mother, interspersed throughout the spotty cultural analysis, are vivid and poignant indeed. Ms. Flanagan, whose father was a prominent intellectual in his day, is anxious that her mother’s way with a lobster salad not be forgotten, that we not forget the innocent joys of stamp collecting and of kids playing T-ball. But not so anxious that she decided to toil at, say, Family Circle rather than The New Yorker. “Now I’m ironing the placket,” little Caitlin’s late mother would tell her, and little Caitlin “would stand beside her, thinking, Placket. Good word.”

It’s upsetting to note that Ms. Flanagan seems to think of her writing as something she does for kicks, like some lady romance novelist of the Victorian era; her real job is at-home mother, though her helplessness in the face of simple household chores borders on the pathological. And she’s clearly in desperate need of professional interaction in public places. “What I liked was seeing people up and dressed and doing their jobs,” she writes of her addiction to the Today show. And later: “How thrilling! How important I felt!” on the rare occasion when she had to travel for work.

That she’s aware of her hypocrisy—“craven enough to change colors” at the playground to ingratiate herself with women on either side of the picket fence—makes it only marginally more tolerable.

In the last essay of the book, Ms. Flanagan reveals that she was treated successfully for breast cancer; sympathy for this ordeal does not obviate the feeling that she has been chloroformed to some extent by an excess of nostalgia, of conventionality, of narrow-mindedness about the flexible configurations that families might take, and the roles that women and men might play in them. Again, she’s a lovely writer. But it would behoove her to get out of the house sometime.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.

So I have started dating, or trying to date, or trying to open my mind to the idea of dating. Because of my self-imposed solitude these last few years, a recent dating-related incident made it clear to me that I have lost all of my seductive techniques. Or that I have finally lost my mind. Either/or. In the confusion of first encounters, I've become a sort of compulsive blurter of my psyche's darkest realms. What my friends find amusing-my interest in bizarre birth defects and forensic crime shows-may be coming off as a behavioral problem to the men I meet.

For example, after meeting a man at a friend's art opening, I crafted an e-mail that I didn't send, for reasons that will become crystal clear in a moment. After we were introduced at the event, I was delighted to find out that this man was a doctor-a radiologist, to be specific-and so might possibly be knowledgeable about the weird medical things that interest me: vestigial tails, for example, or the full rainbow of craniofacial disorders. I quickly raised what I thought were promising conversational topics: a TV show I watched last year called 101 Things Found in the Human Body; a recent case of child abuse where the children were reduced to eating the windowsills; and the case of man who was considered "lucky" after falling from a roof holding a nail gun which shot six long nails into his head.

"Wow!" I said, "Imagine that C.A.T. scan!"

A sardonic half-smile indicated that the doctor was willing to play this game. This man knew the scientific names for my favorite medical oddities. Brainless babies? Anencephaly. The eating of non-nutritive matter? Pica.

During our conversation, the doctor kept looking over my head as I piled on the questions: "Are tumors of hair and teeth actually absorbed fetal twins?" and "Do you know anything about the connection between dwarfism and polydactylism?" At a certain point, I registered that he wasn't meeting my eye and thought: "How sweet! He doesn't want to appear interested. Men are such babies!" I chattered on: "What about the two-headed baby, where the second head's lips mimicked nursing and its eyes blinked? Really, what was Nature thinking?"

Finally he said, "Look, sorry, I'm 20 minutes late for dinner at my cousin's. Nice to meet you." He handed me his card-maybe in case I felt I ever needed a full body scan. After he edged away, I looked behind me and saw there was a clock on the back wall. He hadn't been blinded by my conversational effervescence; he had been waiting for a chance to break away.

When I mentioned this encounter and the tragic placement of the clock to my friend and confidant, Mark, he encouraged me to ask the doctor out for a drink anyway.

"Just ask him. Send an e-mail. What is there to lose?" He added, "I mean, at this point."

Here is the e-mail I did not send. Names have been changed to protect the identity of the participants-except, of course, for my own:

"Hello Bob,

It was nice to meet you a few weeks back at Mary's opening. I very much enjoyed our discussion of people who ingest pounds of nickels and Barbie doll heads and those tumors made of hair and teeth. I'd like to continue the conversation if you have the inclination. I actually looked at a C.A.T. scan of my father's brain last Saturday. He had a massive intracranial stroke (he did not survive, sadly, though in the end this is a merciful thing) and the E.R. doctor wanted to show it to me. You could explain to me how those images work. It was very beautiful-very run-of-the-mill as far as scans go, I am sure, but it was moving to see inside my father's brain, something I have been trying to do without the benefit of science for about 37 years.

"Let me know if you'd like to meet."

Interesting ploy, no? I sent the e-mail to Mark for vetting, and he called almost immediately (I had barely hit "send" before the phone rang) to say that under no circumstances was I to send that e-mail-not only did I sound disturbed, but it was also unclear if I was asking this man out for a date, consulting him for medical advice or requesting an interview.

"Darling," he said, "I had no idea you were so inept. How did this happen? You are an intelligent woman. Get a grip. Next time, don't launch into the full arsenal of morbid interests, O.K.?"

"But they aren't morbid interests," I said. "They are simply interesting anomalous situations that can occur at any time to anyone. Fetal-twin tumors are not a joke."

"Trust me. Now delete that thing and try again."

Mark was right. Forget Nature-what had I been thinking? What had compelled me to be so vocal about interests so obviously disturbing? In the face of a bona fide male prospect, why had I trotted out the image of that baby with the two heads? Why use my father's death to segue into my interest in the science behind medical imaging? Was I subconsciously trying to repel this man?

And what was really behind those interests, anyway?

After some thought, I deduced the following.

One: By consuming a steady diet of freakish news stories, I was clearly trying to inoculate myself against the many horrors the world has to offer. At an early age, I witnessed some bad juju, and I've been a scholar of the macabre ever since. With my predilections I am saying, "Dark things happen every day. Randomly. Without meaning."

Two: By talking about such things with a stranger, I was throwing up a wall. That was obvious. But bringing up ugly realities is also a bit of a cheeky challenge, a kind of Darwinian test: Can you deal with this much darkness? Either way, not inviting.

Three: While it may look like hiding, I am simultaneously doing the opposite. Talking about brainless babies is, in effect, a kind of radical self-exposure. I am flashing the red cape at the bull and daring him to really see me and my radical, ontological fears.

This all seems nearly healthy, right? No matter-No. 3 gives me faint hope.

So last night I crafted another e-mail. It's straightforward and light and sane; it merely mentions a drink and a meeting place. No intracranial-stroke digressions. No updates on the latest child abduction. If he says yes, we can start anew and talk about art openings, movies and N.Y.C. real estate, like other single people. I figure if things work out with the doctor, there'll be plenty of time to discuss the dark stuff later.

Her friends and family clamored for her guidance: "'Hillary, could you look at this?' I'd look at it, and you know what? It was a crummy stone," Ms. Beckman recalled. "Did it have the right clarity on the cert? Did it have the right color on the cert? Sure. There's more to it than that. If I looked at the percentages for the table and the depth, I would know if that stone was a good make. I could look at a stone and see if the girdle was consistent." Excuse us? Cert ? Girdle ?

It was only when Ms. Beckman, then a schoolteacher, was shopping for her own wedding band that the terrible frustration of buying a diamond ring hit home with full force. All she wanted was an emerald-cut wedding band with matched stones in a common-prong platinum setting. What was so hard about that? But nothing was easy in the diamond district. "They would show me a layout of emerald-cut stones and tell me that they were VS1," she said, throwing around more of that fancy terminology. "I'd look at them and I'd see black piques. And I'd look at them and I'd say, 'These are not VS1 stones.'"

She made up her mind to buy a plain band devoid of diamonds-a passive-aggressive statement of puritanical restraint.

Then she had dinner with her future father-in-law, a lawyer who had done a restaurant deal for a guy whose family owned a diamond-manufacturing company, "'Listen, I spoke to him about your problem," her father-in-law told her. "He said, 'Send her up to me. We'll do something for her.'"

Immediately upon meeting this man, Ms. Beckman realized that his company was different. "They wanted to know about my problem: What was I experiencing? How was I feeling?" Her emotional landscape was just as important to them as the hard, cold facts. This evolved into a diamond experience unlike anything Ms. Beckman had ever dreamt of. "I watched people with their hands and the wheel cutting these stones …. And I watched it from birth to finish," she said. Through the intimate process of creating her perfect ring, Ms. Beckman formed a deep bond with the owners of this manufacturing company, a family that keeps a low profile, whose inventory is "only whispered about on the street."

Ms. Beckman compared the owner, an expert cutter, to a horse whisperer, describing his uncanny ability to "look at a stone, feel a stone, listen to it … and find the right grains to cut on …. To maximize the light and vitality and potential, the brightness and the sparkle of it-that's a true artist."

She ended up with the ring she'd always dreamed of, her excess joy spilling over even to her husband. "Before it was like: 'You want a diamond wedding band-well, I want a flat-screen TV. Which one are we getting?'" she said.

And when the mystery manufacturer needed to present a critical proposal to the Diamond Trading Company, the rough-diamond sales arm of the De Beers Group, they asked Ms. Beckman to do it. "Here I was, a teacher who just wanted a wedding band, and now all of a sudden I was intricately involved in this business," she said incredulously. After her initial success with the presentation, Ms. Beckman and this mystery family continued to work together, developing their concept of a high-end retail store that would offer the highest-quality diamonds while allowing customization of each piece of jewelry.

Seated behind the desk in her chic, intimate fourth-floor store, Ms. Beckman pointed out her favorite pieces of jewelry. The opera-length eternity necklace, 198 diamonds with a total weight of 38 carats, would certainly be hard to beat. "You have to find enough diamonds that match, that are so similar that you can put them into one piece of jewelry and it looks consistent," she said. "When you wear it and you walk"-Ms. Beckman demonstrated, her long hair cascading into the diamonds-"it moves …. And it just catches the light beautifully.

"Look at these things," she proclaimed, gesturing towards the display of glistening jewelry in front of her. "They're like stars!"

The Observer ’s intrepid cosmetics correspondent met this young pup of a makeup artist on a crisp Friday morning at Dylan’s Candy Bar, near his apartment. "It’s a total cliché, and as revolting as I feel saying it, I really do believe that Kevyn and I were kindred spirits in a lot of ways," Mr. Jessup said, munching on a concoction of Lucky Charms and Marshmallow Fluff. He was wearing high-waisted, disco-era black pants, a pinstriped black shirt and a denim jacket with a Kerry-Edwards button. "Kevyn’s mission in life was to make women not feel threatened by beauty—to make it a fun thing where people looked at nothing as a flaw, but merely as a beauty mark that defines and individualizes you," he continued. "There so much in cosmetics that involves human emotion. Makeup artists should almost be trained as therapists before we start."

Like many members of his profession, Mr. Jessup has a colorful background. He’s the only child of two cabaret singers (a fan of theirs apparently paid his delivery expenses). His peripatetic parents brought their only child on tour throughout toddlerdom. Mr. Jessup claims that he didn’t know any children, other than a single cousin, until he entered kindergarten.

Mr. Jessup’s father had inherited a 13-acre orange ranch in the San Joaquin Valley, and the family eventually settled there, opening a country store. When Craig was 5 years old, he said, he sold $2,000 worth of handmade quilts and homemade jams to Star Trek actor William Shatner. Later that year, Anjelica Huston passed by and bought a scoop of orange ice cream; her then boyfriend, Jack Nicholson, was waiting in the car.

Our li’l entrepreneur began doing business off the shoulder of Highway 65, selling sprigs of mint and greeting cards decorated with paint flung from a salad spinner. His first foray into the world of cosmetics was a mud mask made of soil from the orange groves and liquid dish soap. It was priced at 25 cents.

At the age of 9, Craig was put in Catholic school, where he immersed himself in the fashion and beauty world to escape "the mean kids": reading Vogue, religiously watching Style with Elsa Klensch with his grandmother (side by side in easy chairs), and mimicking Todd Oldham’s House of Style designs by using coffee filters on a Barbie doll.

When he was 13, Craig wrote Mr. Oldham a fan letter and got a handwritten note and a signed photo in return. After Mr. Jessup’s commendably progressive father took his son to Mr. Oldham’s perfume launch at the San Francisco Neiman Marcus, the designer invited the gangly teen to his fashion show in New York. "Every big model was in the show that year," Mr. Jessup said reverently. He met Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Kristen McMenamy—and their favorite makeup artist, Kevyn Aucoin, who granted Craig an autograph that read "Big kisses, gorgeous! Love, Kevyn."

"I just thought that was so New York and glamorous," Mr. Jessup said.

A few years later, he wangled a job as a makeup artist at the Prescriptives counter in a San Francisco Macy’s. By the time his bosses discovered he was only 16 years old, he was already bringing in a 150 percent increase in profits, he said.

After graduating from high school, Mr. Jessup went to New York and got an apprenticeship with Darac, the flamboyant director of artistic development for the Prescriptives cosmetics at Bergdorf Goodman. "My first year with Darac, I aged about 10 years—in good and bad ways," Mr. Jessup said. "I invested so much of my teenage life in this fantasy and came in and realized it was all a sham, which was slightly depressing: the ways the beauty and fashion industries take advantage of the emotional states of women and feed into women’s insecurities about their image, that moment where the hope turns into hopelessness and women think: ‘God, I wish I could look like that, but I never can.’ It can be like an abusive relationship." He shook his head.

Still, when Mr. Aucoin floated the possibility of a job with his new line, Mr. Jessup jumped at the opportunity to work under the great makeup artist.

Six months later, Mr. Jessup was manning the counter at Bendel when Kevyn Aucoin business manager Margo Haynes-Fason called him into the corner. "Something terrible has happened," she said. "Kevyn died."

"I thought I was going to die," Mr. Jessup said. "Everything seemed like it would just end immediately."

But it didn’t.

At Henri Bendel and on editorial and private assignments, Mr. Jessup tends the faces of top models, actresses, political figures and royalty. He refuses to name his famous clients. "It embarrasses me," he said. He calls it "shameless self-promotion" when unknown makeup artists try to raise their stock by attaching their names to celebrities. "You shouldn’t think about the makeup artist before you think about the person wearing the makeup," he said. "Kevyn didn’t attach himself to celebrities; they attached themselves to him. He was so enjoyable, they always wanted him on their arm."

Not that Mr. Jessup plans to remain in the shadows forever. The makeup artist is currently playing Judge Danforth in Marymount’s production of The Crucible and is developing a 1970’s-style variety show. After he graduates in May, he plans to find an agent to help him "horizontally integrate" his career. "It’s a privilege to work on people’s faces," he said, "but at some point you want to be the one people are putting makeup on."

Eschewing false gaiety, I want a minimalist décor to match the melancholy within. Christmas always seems essentially sad, a letdown from the part-recollected, part-imagined bliss of childhood and its enchanted moment of family togetherness–that brief interlude on the stairway, blindfolded by a parent's hands, leading up to the epiphany of the Christmas tree. That's as good as it gets, or so we keep telling ourselves in our wised-up, post-Santa tristesse .

While being childless (or, if you prefer, "child free") is a condition we share with so many New York friends that we rarely feel anomalous, at Christmas that state is accentuated, all the ups and downs in glaring relief. We've avoided many of the cycles of mass market hysteria that have seized our contemporaries over the years, having bypassed must-have items and must-see spectacles–from beanie babies to Pokémon. The Nutcracker Suite , with or without live music (which our friends are now attending with their grandchildren) we've avoided altogether, and animation films, however tarted up for adults, remain low on our moviegoing wish list.

On the other hand, we've never tested our mettle as parental tigers, exploited our warrior genes combating other mall-rat parents for the last Cabbage Patch doll or Nintendo game. Still, I haven't had to choke on my feminist principles in buying a daughter a Barbie doll or bow to the inevitability of testosterone aggression when a son demanded war toys.

We arise when we want to on Christmas Day, lazily have coffee and open our stocking presents–our one concession to Santa Claus. No patter of little feet, no nudging of soft hands and sweet slobbery kisses waking us up at 6 A.M. No reliving Christmas past through a child's excitement-gorged eyes. No crèche or school pageant, no midnight service for the whole family. We vow we'll attend Handel's Messiah at the church on the corner, the very church where we were married many moons ago, but we get lazy and just put on a CD. Meanwhile, high in the hall closet there's a box of ornaments taking up expensive domestic real estate. We had a tree once, maybe twice, maybe we will again.

Refuge with Jewish friends used to be an option, but Hanukkah has become almost as prolonged and gift-driven as Christmas. Our lobby is a Scylla and Charybdis of competing symbols; the Hanukkah menorah on one side conducts its night-by-night vigil while the overdressed cedar winks back.

This year, some fortuitous interventions enabled me to slide through several weeks in sweet oblivion, and I pass them on in the hope that, reworked and adapted to others' specific holiday needs, they might serve as defenses for other artful dodgers.

I caught a cold, which, instead of shrugging off, I treated as heavy weather: canceling appointments, postponing shopping, avoiding midtown (an absolute necessity), nestling into pillows and listening to books on tape. Being one of those bibliophiles who likes the feel of a book in my hands and prefers to read at my own pace, I never thought I'd go for audiocassettes. But ever since a friend gave me Maximum Bob , Elmore Leonard's hilarious tale of a deep-South scalawag judge, when I was sick, I've been hooked. I've always been a Trollope fan (preferable to Dickens in the holiday season), but the Barsetshire chronicles read by David Case are a revelation. Reading The Small House at Allington and Framley Parsonage , Mr. Case's versatile voice slides up and down the social and musical scale, from the basso profundo of Mrs. Proudie, the bishop's mighty wife and scourge of the diocese, through various virile lords and lordly ladies, to the breathless soprano of Lily Dale, that marvel of wit and womanliness.

If this weren't diversion enough, I've been preparing for the arrival of some old school chums from Richmond, Va., for a reunion weekend, two to stay with me, five with my friend J. on East End Avenue. Having had four children, J. and her apartment are no strangers to sleepovers, but my office-cum-storage room hasn't been open for visitors in decades. After finally clearing a path to the double bed my guests will share, I warned B. on the phone to think Girl Scout camp. She said, "Just tell me how many sleeping pills to bring."

Then there was the question of what to do with my husband when the giggling gang of seven takes over. J.'s husband will be conveniently off on a hunting weekend with the boys, but such an option is hardly available to my sedentary spouse. The very thought of this landlubberly, sofa-hugging pantouflard in plaid shirt and hip boots in a duck blind, waving a 10-gauge shotgun, is frightening to contemplate.

Once we get past these distractions, it will take a more vigorous effort to ignore Christmas. One strategy is throwing out, without even a glance, anything that looks like a catalogue, even if it means forsaking the mouthwatering images in the Williams-Sonoma booklet. If, like me, you've already rebelled against the rampant proliferation of New York Times sections and gotten your newspaper reading down to a speedy skim, you can now race past the advertising and faux sales, which will reduce mandatory reading to a mere column or two.

To "just say No" to the siren song of commerce isn't easy, but you can develop a reflex for the task at hand. It's like those ads on the Internet with their screaming color headlines and then, down in a corner, the all-but-invisible little gray-on-gray "No thanks." Click the button. Zap the enemy before the enemy zaps you.

And there's always the consternation over Y2K. As pesky as the computer problem is, at least it takes the mind off Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, and such media profundities as the meaning of the 90's, or whether Jesus or Hitler will be the most important man of the millennium.