These days, most of Mr. Bohnett's vast wealth (Yahoo bought the social networking company for $3.6 billion) goes to worthy causes—LGBT rights, gun control, the arts, AIDS research—through his eponymous foundation. But Mr. Bohnett has clearly kept a little cash in the bank for real estate deals, as he's just purchased a $1.9 million pied-a-terre in Midtown, city records show.

The Rockefeller Apartments penthouse at 17 West 54th Street was listed with Douglas Elliman brokers Magda Schenone, Richard Hottinger and Adam Hernandez since December. It sold at the asking price—Mr. Bohnett may have driven a hard bargain with Yahoo, but he's clearly a soft touch when it comes to real estate. The seller was Gary Lumsden.

Mr. Bohnett lives primarily in Beverly Hills, where he is Chairman of the board of LA Philharmonic Association and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but he often jaunts into New York on business. He's a busy, bi-coastal man, after all. Besides volunteer and foundation work, Mr. Bohnett also manages and chairs OVGuide.com, his latest Internet venture in a long string of tech start-ups, (stamps.com, LowerMyBill and NetZero number among them).

"It's a personal residence," said a representative of Mr. Bohnett's. "He has business in New York, and decided that rather than stay in hotels..."

And what a lovely personal residence it is! The listing talks of a wrap-around  terrace, floor-to-ceiling windows with glass-enclosed bays, herringbone floors, a renovated kitchen and decorative fireplaces.

If anything, the one-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom co-op seems almost too modest, especially considering the splashy, opulent spaces that so many of the rich and powerful are dropping tens of millions of dollars on these days.

But then, modest houses are a trend among the captains of the tech industry, from Mark Zuckerberg's nice-but-normal looking $7 million Palo Alto home to Steve Jobs' English-style spread more befitting to a prosperous academic—the black, cotton turtleneck of houses.

Or maybe Mr. Bohnett, a renowned art lover, was just won over by the apartment's proximity to the Museum of Modern Art, looking out over its sculptured garden.

kvelsey@observer.com

Qream, get the money.

Hey, ladies who love flavored liqueurs -- good news! Pharrell Williams announced that he's releasing a vanilla-flavored spirit called Qream, and launched the female-friendly beverage at a giant Beverly Hills party last weekend. He doesn't explain the creative spelling, but he does give a bit of insight into why, as of late, he's focusing on making bottles for the club instead of bangers for the club. Sigh. Day jobs, don't leave them!

Rap-Up TV has brought us the scintillating details behind Qream. Pharrell, he's a markets guy. He knows what's missing from the spread.

“I looked at the market, I looked at the holes out there and it felt like 'indulgence' and 'women' were the two things that were being neglected," he said. "When you pour a glass of cream, it's significantly less calories. It's a thinner consistency, so a woman doesnt feel like she's gained ten pounds just by thinking about drinking it."

Pharrell then describes the delectibilty of the stuff.

"It's definitely in the ice cream world, in the shake world."

Perfect for summer! And it's 95 percent lactose free. So if you're a woman who feels shunned by a market that's ignored "indulgence," this drink is for you. Lactose intolerant women who indulge, you have no excuse.

Playboy editorial director Jimmy Jellinek confirmed that Roald Dahl's classic children's novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the inspiration for the promotion in a conversation with Reuters.

"This is the first time we’ve literally swung the doors open … the average reader will go home with stories they can’t tell their wives and girlfriends but will last forever," Jellinek said.

The issues containing the "golden tickets" hit newsstands Friday. Access to Hefner's palatial Beverly Hills mansion and its stable of buxom Playmates is normally reserved for the 84-year-old publisher's high-profile friends.

- Max Abelson

The problem with hating Ms. Freudenberger, as Ms. Sittenfeld and others grudgingly admitted, was that Lucky Girls was good (although this was also another reason to hate her). In places, it was really good. The five stories in the collection were about privileged but displaced young women, battling isolation abroad while families fell apart back home. For a generation of students and young adults who gather “experiences” in foreign countries like an obscure form of currency, Ms. Freudenberger’s depictions said something about what it is—and what it is not—to be an American abroad: “Americans could go all over the world and still be Americans,” Zubin, an Indian SAT tutor, observes in one story, “they could live just the way they did at home and nobody wondered who they were, or why they were doing the things they did.”

Though set in exotic locations—Bangkok, New Delhi, Bombay—the stories in Lucky Girls did not depend on cultural dislocation for their punch. The “language gap” between Americans and their foreign hosts concerned Ms. Freudenberger primarily as a metaphor for deeper miscommunications between mothers and daughters and husbands and wives. In a characteristic instance of warring vocabularies, a New York mother, Alice, tries to discover what exactly her daughter Mandy, working with AIDS babies in Thailand, really means by the word “rape”:

“‘It was a misunderstanding,’ [Mandy] said. ‘It was a cultural thing, actually.’ And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, ‘He’s not a rapist.’

“‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but if he raped you, he is a rapist.’

“And Mandy said, ‘Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.’”

It was Ms. Freudenberger’s superb ear for family dynamics, rather than her unpretentious travel writing, that allowed readers of Lucky Girls such bracing access to the emotional lives of her characters. How perplexing, then, that in Ms. Freudenberger’s debut novel, The Dissident, her ear seems to have failed her. The novel, though concerned with themes similar to those of her previous work, indulges in stock reflections on cultural misunderstanding and generic domestic melodrama.

Part of the problem is that Ms. Freudenberger, who drew on her experiences teaching English in India and Thailand for her first collection, seems to rely in her novel preponderantly on research. Her protagonist and part-time narrator is an avant-garde Chinese artist who lands a residency in Beverly Hills, teaching studio art at St. Anselm’s School for Girls and boarding with a privileged but dysfunctional family named Travers. To tell the story of what happens to him in Los Angeles, the dissident insists, he has to tell another story, of his teenage years in a subversive Beijing artistic clique formed in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square uprisings.

This backstory is told mostly through the kind of exposition better suited to textbooks than novels. The upshot is that, in June of 1994, Chinese police raided and destroyed the enclave for political reasons, a crisis foreshadowed in the dissident’s personal life by the discovery two months earlier that his university girlfriend and his cousin were having an affair. These episodes are meant to connect—though the ties are discouragingly tenuous—to a string of events set off when a ragged Chinese student named June Wang wanders into the dissident’s honors art class at St. Anselm’s.

If Americans can live “just the way they did at home” all over the world, Ms. Freudenberger suggests that the opposite is true for the dissident, who arouses suspicion—or, worse, an overbearing sensitivity—wherever he treads. At school, a jealous student accuses him of sexual misconduct. Chez Travers, the matronly Cece overdoes her welcome and her novelist sister-in-law, Joan, digs intrusively into the dissident’s past.

The past is a delicate matter for the dissident, but he quickly discovers that he has little to fear from the rest of the Travers family—they’re kept busy by their own problems. Cece and her distant husband, Gordon, are discussing a divorce. Their teenage son, Max, has been arrested for driving with a gun in his car. Their daughter, Olivia, may be anorexic. And Gordon’s estranged brother Phil—who is also Cece’s former lover—has shown up unexpectedly from New York.

If these situations sound predictable, it’s because they are. Still, when describing the Travers family life, Ms. Freudenberger displays flashes of the insight and sensitivity that distinguished her previous writing. It is no accident that the novel’s most eloquent scene occurs after the dissident has gone home: when Cece and Gordon, left alone, banter over the consequences of their imminent separation. Gordon, a professor, explains that he would like to stay in the house until the end of the school year, because it’s a “convenient commute” to his office. Cece is confident enough to translate:

“She had gotten so used to the way Gordon spoke; when he said the house was a ‘convenient commute,’ what he meant was that he loved it. What would he do, if he couldn’t go out every afternoon and check the temperature of the pool?”

One senses here a reserve of perspicacity that fails to illuminate the more diligently explored relationships in the book. Indeed, the novel slides like a magnet toward the themes that resonated most powerfully in Ms. Freudenberger’s earlier fiction—the grim details of a dissolving marriage, the emotional innuendo that lurks behind every sensible compromise.

But Ms. Freudenberger strays from these themes when she allows the dissident to take over a significant portion of her story. He’s an uninspired wordsmith for whom English is a second language: At the American consulate in Wulumuqi Nan Lu, the dissident passes guards who are “stone-faced”; his stomach “is growling” and his anxiety is “similar to stage-fright”; everyone in line is quiet like “students in an examination.” Yes, it sounds like a foreigner attempting to communicate in colloquial English, but the tax on the reader is too high.

The dissident’s trip to the visa office also furnishes a good example of Ms. Freudenberger’s penchant for research overload. As he waits in line, we learn about all the different kinds of visas the dissident could have applied for (“O” visa, “J-1 Exchange Visitor” visa, etc.). We learn that “these days” the U.S. visa section is “located in the five-star Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel complex, but at that time they were still operating out of the old consulate.” We learn that the old consulate was really a house that used to belong to the Qing finance minister. We learn that there are ginkgo trees and frogs.

The passage, like so much contemporary writing set abroad, is strangled by irrelevant information—irrelevant not because it is uninteresting (although in this case it is), but because it fails to illuminate anything significant about the character. By the end of the novel, the dissident strikes us as little more than a funnel through which pours useless detail. Ms. Freudenberger’s research yields some compelling ruminations on Chinese politics and art, but nothing that saves her protagonist from falling flat on the page. Publicity materials for the novel promise the reader will be “introduced to an influential subculture of artists living in contemporary Beijing.” This is precisely the case: The reader is introduced to “a subculture” (two subcultures, actually, if you count Beverly Hills)—but nary a human being.

Nell Freudenberger, like the traveling students she delicately satirized in Lucky Girls, seems here to subscribe to the idea that the “culture clash” represented by a Chinese dissident in Beverly Hills is significant in itself. But she never gets around to explaining why. This is disappointing, especially coming from a writer whose previous work suggested that cultural comedy would be her beginning rather than her endpoint.

Jon Baskin has written for Salon and Bookforum.

The problem with hating Ms. Freudenberger, as Ms. Sittenfeld and others grudgingly admitted, was that Lucky Girls was good (although this was also another reason to hate her). In places, it was really good. The five stories in the collection were about privileged but displaced young women, battling isolation abroad while families fell apart back home. For a generation of students and young adults who gather “experiences” in foreign countries like an obscure form of currency, Ms. Freudenberger’s depictions said something about what it is—and what it is not—to be an American abroad: “Americans could go all over the world and still be Americans,” Zubin, an Indian SAT tutor, observes in one story, “they could live just the way they did at home and nobody wondered who they were, or why they were doing the things they did.”

Though set in exotic locations—Bangkok, New Delhi, Bombay—the stories in Lucky Girls did not depend on cultural dislocation for their punch. The “language gap” between Americans and their foreign hosts concerned Ms. Freudenberger primarily as a metaphor for deeper miscommunications between mothers and daughters and husbands and wives. In a characteristic instance of warring vocabularies, a New York mother, Alice, tries to discover what exactly her daughter Mandy, working with AIDS babies in Thailand, really means by the word “rape”:

“‘It was a misunderstanding,’ [Mandy] said. ‘It was a cultural thing, actually.’ And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, ‘He’s not a rapist.’

“‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but if he raped you, he is a rapist.’

“And Mandy said, ‘Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.’”

It was Ms. Freudenberger’s superb ear for family dynamics, rather than her unpretentious travel writing, that allowed readers of Lucky Girls such bracing access to the emotional lives of her characters. How perplexing, then, that in Ms. Freudenberger’s debut novel, The Dissident, her ear seems to have failed her. The novel, though concerned with themes similar to those of her previous work, indulges in stock reflections on cultural misunderstanding and generic domestic melodrama.

Part of the problem is that Ms. Freudenberger, who drew on her experiences teaching English in India and Thailand for her first collection, seems to rely in her novel preponderantly on research. Her protagonist and part-time narrator is an avant-garde Chinese artist who lands a residency in Beverly Hills, teaching studio art at St. Anselm’s School for Girls and boarding with a privileged but dysfunctional family named Travers. To tell the story of what happens to him in Los Angeles, the dissident insists, he has to tell another story, of his teenage years in a subversive Beijing artistic clique formed in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square uprisings.

This backstory is told mostly through the kind of exposition better suited to textbooks than novels. The upshot is that, in June of 1994, Chinese police raided and destroyed the enclave for political reasons, a crisis foreshadowed in the dissident’s personal life by the discovery two months earlier that his university girlfriend and his cousin were having an affair. These episodes are meant to connect—though the ties are discouragingly tenuous—to a string of events set off when a ragged Chinese student named June Wang wanders into the dissident’s honors art class at St. Anselm’s.

If Americans can live “just the way they did at home” all over the world, Ms. Freudenberger suggests that the opposite is true for the dissident, who arouses suspicion—or, worse, an overbearing sensitivity—wherever he treads. At school, a jealous student accuses him of sexual misconduct. Chez Travers, the matronly Cece overdoes her welcome and her novelist sister-in-law, Joan, digs intrusively into the dissident’s past.

The past is a delicate matter for the dissident, but he quickly discovers that he has little to fear from the rest of the Travers family—they’re kept busy by their own problems. Cece and her distant husband, Gordon, are discussing a divorce. Their teenage son, Max, has been arrested for driving with a gun in his car. Their daughter, Olivia, may be anorexic. And Gordon’s estranged brother Phil—who is also Cece’s former lover—has shown up unexpectedly from New York.

If these situations sound predictable, it’s because they are. Still, when describing the Travers family life, Ms. Freudenberger displays flashes of the insight and sensitivity that distinguished her previous writing. It is no accident that the novel’s most eloquent scene occurs after the dissident has gone home: when Cece and Gordon, left alone, banter over the consequences of their imminent separation. Gordon, a professor, explains that he would like to stay in the house until the end of the school year, because it’s a “convenient commute” to his office. Cece is confident enough to translate:

“She had gotten so used to the way Gordon spoke; when he said the house was a ‘convenient commute,’ what he meant was that he loved it. What would he do, if he couldn’t go out every afternoon and check the temperature of the pool?”

One senses here a reserve of perspicacity that fails to illuminate the more diligently explored relationships in the book. Indeed, the novel slides like a magnet toward the themes that resonated most powerfully in Ms. Freudenberger’s earlier fiction—the grim details of a dissolving marriage, the emotional innuendo that lurks behind every sensible compromise.

But Ms. Freudenberger strays from these themes when she allows the dissident to take over a significant portion of her story. He’s an uninspired wordsmith for whom English is a second language: At the American consulate in Wulumuqi Nan Lu, the dissident passes guards who are “stone-faced”; his stomach “is growling” and his anxiety is “similar to stage-fright”; everyone in line is quiet like “students in an examination.” Yes, it sounds like a foreigner attempting to communicate in colloquial English, but the tax on the reader is too high.

The dissident’s trip to the visa office also furnishes a good example of Ms. Freudenberger’s penchant for research overload. As he waits in line, we learn about all the different kinds of visas the dissident could have applied for (“O” visa, “J-1 Exchange Visitor” visa, etc.). We learn that “these days” the U.S. visa section is “located in the five-star Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel complex, but at that time they were still operating out of the old consulate.” We learn that the old consulate was really a house that used to belong to the Qing finance minister. We learn that there are ginkgo trees and frogs.

The passage, like so much contemporary writing set abroad, is strangled by irrelevant information—irrelevant not because it is uninteresting (although in this case it is), but because it fails to illuminate anything significant about the character. By the end of the novel, the dissident strikes us as little more than a funnel through which pours useless detail. Ms. Freudenberger’s research yields some compelling ruminations on Chinese politics and art, but nothing that saves her protagonist from falling flat on the page. Publicity materials for the novel promise the reader will be “introduced to an influential subculture of artists living in contemporary Beijing.” This is precisely the case: The reader is introduced to “a subculture” (two subcultures, actually, if you count Beverly Hills)—but nary a human being.

Nell Freudenberger, like the traveling students she delicately satirized in Lucky Girls, seems here to subscribe to the idea that the “culture clash” represented by a Chinese dissident in Beverly Hills is significant in itself. But she never gets around to explaining why. This is disappointing, especially coming from a writer whose previous work suggested that cultural comedy would be her beginning rather than her endpoint.

Jon Baskin has written for Salon and Bookforum.

To the Editor

The allegedly influential people who were razzle-dazzled by Senator John McCain’s not-so-secret Regency Hotel pep talk [“Senator McCain Worked Blue on New York Stage,” Jason Horowitz, May 29] might want to pay attention to the rowdy crowd who booed and heckled him at the New School graduation ceremonies. The very last thing this country needs is another polarizing President who is incapable of forging a wide level of respect and trust. With his public calls to increase the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, Mr. McCain is wildly out of touch with the American mindset, and his rude reception by the New School graduates was well deserved. Any candidate who runs on that platform is a masochist, and any high-roller who backs that kind of candidate is a rich idiot.

Phil Hall

Manhattan

To the Editor:

That was a great article on Senator John McCain, but I can tell you this: Remember the little “mistake” in South Carolina over the flag at the capital? Mr. McCain is making the same mistake now on immigration. He and many Democrats and Republicans (even the President) are off the mark if they think the majority of Americans “want what we offer” on this subject. There is and has been a serious lack of leadership from the men and women in leadership positions within the Republican Party, which is supposed to be the party of law and order.

Mr. McCain may come close, but after being part of any immigration bill that will allow illegal immigrants to obtain the same Social Security payments or the gathering of these funds to send to Mexico, he can keep on dreaming. He will never reach the Presidential office he so desires. In fact, if the Republicans do not get back within the fold, they may well lose the House, the Senate and the Presidency. They will try to blame dirty politics, etc., but it will come down to one thing: They forgot their base and once again thought, as they have done in the past, that they were smarter than those same poor voters.

Larry Whitehurst

Mount Horeb, Wis.

Bush v. Gore, Lies v. Truth

To the Editor:

As I was reading Joe Conason’s column “Nobody’s Laughing at Al Gore’s Truths” [May 29], I was reminded of a quote by Mr. Gore: “Most people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands and all that. I draw energy from discussing ideas.” These ideas of his have been all but ignored by everyone from the government to the media to the public at large. He was basically laughed at for being intelligent in the 2000 Presidential campaign, as if intelligence was a deficit. Now look what that has gotten us: We have lived and are continuing to live a national nightmare for the past six years, even without the environment front and center, as Mr. Conason writes in his column. I am far from laughing as I remember point by point how Mr. Gore was right in that campaign; in fact, I am livid. Many did make fun of his “lockbox” in regards to Social Security, and I’m left to wonder how they feel now, since Mr. Bush seems determined to tear it apart. When Mr. Gore spoke out angrily against the Iraq War, just how many Bush voters who have now turned against this war wished they had voted for Mr. Gore in the first place? While the media touted Mr. Gore as being “wooden” and Mr. Bush as being “likeable,” seeing the President’s latest polling numbers, just how many now view Mr. Bush in that way? In the 2000 campaign, Mr. Gore did speak the truth, and as we all know now, Bush has lied on so many occasions. It is about time that America stand up for the truth, and I do hope and pray that Al Gore decides to run in the 2008 campaign and goes on to win it. He speaks without fear, and that, to me, is leadership at its finest.

Mary MacElveen

Sound Beach, N.Y.

Hillary Hoax?

To the Editor:

Great article about Hillary, Julia [“The Right Is Wrong to Embrace Hillary,” Julia Gorin, Wise Guys, May 29]!

Is it way too cynical to believe that the only reason Rupert Murdoch is cozying up to Hillary Clinton is because his empire can more easily destroy her than maybe another Democratic Presidential candidate?

Robert Schwartz

Brooklyn

To the Editor:

Thank you so much for Ms. Gorin’s piece. It is absolutely terrific and on the mark. She is just so correct! Why are Republicans so gullible? I’d like to know. I sometimes do not know what frustrates me more, the hypocrisy of the Democrats or the blindness and gullibility of the Republicans.

The only thing I know about the Republicans is that whatever their faults, they prevent the Democrats from doing further damage. That’s it. And then it seems that sometimes they don’t do this so well, either.

Farideh Tashiro

Goodyear, Ariz.

Before the Crash, He Met With Gizmondo

To the Editor:

Great story! The best I’ve read so far [“It’s Ferrari Crash! Swede’s Flame-Out Stops L.A. Cold,” Matthew DeBord, New Yorker’s Diary, May 29]. I met Carl Freer, Steve Carroll and some of the Gizmondo team in L.A. last summer, just after they’d opened their plush new Beverly Hills office. As a wireless strategy consultant, they asked me to fly down to meet to see how I could help. Unfortunately, they didn’t pick me up at the airport in the Enzo or the SLR.

One has to ask how they managed to fool so many people on both sides of the Pond. After all, they squandered a couple hundred million dollars trying to maintain an unsustainable lifestyle from virtually nonexistent revenues for a mediocre product built on a questionable business strategy. These guys could tell a pretty good story that someone not nuanced to the wireless industry or the peculiarities of the U.S. market might swallow. There were several consultants in the room, and they kept us for most of the day; then it was off to a fashionably late afternoon lunch at a tony Beverly Hills trattoria. I got the sense that meetings like this must have been a daily ritual. Was it a show for us, or were they really serious but delusional? I’ll never know, as I never heard about them again until the Ferrari Crash. Again, thanks for a really great story.

Whitey Bluestein

Larkspur, Calif.

We had a date to meet in the windows at Barneys on Madison Avenue. Mr. Farrell and his onscreen mother, Angelina Jolie, were scheduled for a photo op alongside the Alexander costumes. These, together with crates of shields and helmets and beaded curtains, were installed at the store in tandem with the launch of Oliver Stone's new flopic (epic + flop).

This nifty bit of cross-promotion had taken months of planning: The truckloads of props and period drag had come all the way from Macedonia. Or was it Burbank? Either way, I was not counting the cost: I would have stuck my hand in a flaming brazier for the opportunity to spend a couple of minutes with Colin behind his bejeweled arras.

First blip: Somebody forgot to tell the gorgeously enigmatic Ms. Jolie about the photo op. She was thousands of miles away, no doubt adopting more children with mullets and acquiring more spooky tattoos. Second blip: Alexander the Leprechaun suddenly announced that he could still do the photo op, but only at the Barneys Beverly Hills branch, where a similar display had been installed. (Playing hard to get, Col? I'll give your bottom a good smacking!)

I managed to restrain myself from hurling all the costumes and props into the street and handing them out to passers-by, and hopped on a plane.

During the flight, I soothed my irritation by fantasizing about the sizzling rapport which was destined to form between the Phone Booth star and myself. How could it be otherwise when we had so much in common? I am a poof, he had just finished playing two screen poofs. We're both Irish, albeit from different sides of the border. Neither of us is what you would call tall. And lastly and mostimportantly, we have both had disastrous encounters with the peroxide bottle, he more recently than I. I refer to the bleached tresses which the dedicated thespian saw fit to sport for his portrayal of Alexander the Great. (Don't blame my Colin: He was obviously talked into going for a surfer-god look by some deranged hair-burner. It wasn't his fault that he ended up looking more like Shelley Winters in Lolita. Or was it Shelley Long in Cheers?)

Los Angeles. Stock shot of plane landing. Picture the scene: There we were, I and a gaggle of the Beverly Hills Barneys window dressers, waiting for the arrival of our hero. There were sundry film crews and plenty of excitable female fans waiting on the sidewalk in front of the display window.

Everyone was thoroughly jazzed. The man whose willie we almost saw in A Home at the End of the World was about to walk through the door. The man who kissed Jared Leto (the latter plays Hephaistion, which I think means "bum chum" in ancient Macedonian) was coming to pose in our display windows.

Mr. Farrell arrived on time looking, with the exception of a dirty fingernail or two, not only well-scrubbed but unexpectedly sober. He wore a dark suit and a white shirt, slashed to the pec, revealing a manly smidgen of chest hair. The Shelley Winters do has been replaced by a deep chestnut, leonine mop.

"You are such a good sport. Thanks for doing this," I said, proffering a hand and trying not to look inside his shirt even though it was at eye level (Colin, mate, were you wearing elevator shoes? You could have told me-then I could have worn mine).

"Follow me and I'll take you into the window," I said, making an authoritative and yet hospitable gesture towards the Prada handbags.

Mr. Farrell's thick eyebrows rose in surprise and threatened to meet his hairline.

"I"M not getting IN the WINDOW!" he said, raising his voice and rounding on his entourage of publicists and handlers in a thoroughly Macedonian kind of way.

A series of agitated, embarrassed huddles then took place.

"Oh, Mary! Just shut up and get in the fucking window," said a passing customer who was observing the scene with barely contained amusement.

Nobody could quite understand why old Colin-the bloke who had just finished butching his way through the ancient world, falling off horses and breaking bones-had gone all nelly about climbing into a store window.

Maybe he was just gayed out. Maybe it was the straw that broke the Leprechaun's back.

Mr. Farrell has not spoken to me since. Our date dissolved into a blizzard of reproaches between the Warner Brothers flacks and Mr. Farrell's "people." Apparently Mr. Farrell did his photo op on the sidewalk. I did not witness it. The display boys and I went back to the studio and made a papier-mâché Colin Farrell doll. I won't tell you what we did to it.

Merry Christmas.

PS: Go and see Alexander! Though most of the highlights are on Colin's head, the movie is camp and funny and not nearly as horrible as the critics say it is.

This worries me, because I know a thing or two about agents. Trained to be as tough, unrelenting and loyal as Rott-weilers, these guys are not easily distracted. And my guy-perma-scruff, huge biceps, dark Armani body armor-is a prime example of his breed.

My concern turns to horror as I watch him lose the battle to stifle himself.

And then it bursts forth: a full cackle. He reins it into a giggle, and finally he brings it down to a small chuckle.

"I'm sorry," he says to me, "but I have to ask: What the fuck did you do to your hair?"

Good question.

Like all the worst ideas, it came to me as a revelation and went against my most fervently held beliefs. I did it anyway. Just after my 35th birthday, before I was to fly to Los Angeles for a series of pitch meetings, I decided to get the gray out. I didn't actually phrase it that way to myself. I pretended that dyeing my hair was no different than adding some heavy boots to the wardrobe. It had nothing to do with the fact that my prematurely gray hair might begin to mark me as an older screenwriter, even though I had broken into the movie business only five years earlier.

My plan was made all the more odd by the fact that there is no place where I feel more uncomfortable than I do sitting in a beauty parlor, wrapped in a thin satin kimono.

Yet that's exactly where I was mere hours after making my decision: huddled over Elle magazine and trying not to make funny noises when shifting my position on the leatherette couch.

If I didn't know that I was in trouble from the look the receptionist gave me when I said "cut and color," I should have known the moment I met Jimmi* the stylist.

Jimmi's exterior was so well-preserved that the only way to divine his age would have been to cut him open and count the rings. He was Asian and employed a hipster patois that sounded as if he had pieced it together by reading Sammy Hagar and Gene Simmons interviews from the mid-70's.

Jimmi explained that although my appointment was with him, he wasn't the colorist. He was overseeing the job-or in his words, "making sure you look killer, man." Maddy*, a 19-year-old who'd modeled herself after Pink but ended up a dead-ringer for Cyndi Lauper, was the one actually brushing the jet-black lead acetate into my scalp.

As Maddy wrapped sections of my hair in small pieces of tinfoil, the salon's radio played "Can't Get There from Here" by R.E.M. Michael Stipe's voice took me back to college. When I was 19, there was almost nothing that my friends and I found more pathetic than the misguided attempts grown men made to cover up their follicular inadequacies. "That'll never be us," we thought. We couldn't imagine a day when we'd compromise ourselves for our careers. Walking into Jimmi's salon hadn't felt like compromise, but suddenly I knew that it was.

Maddy soon left me alone so that the dye could "marry the hair." I blasted through all the Cosmopolitans that were stacked near me. I read Allure , W and Mademoiselle . I read everything I could so that I didn't have to think about what I was having done to myself. Eventually there was only one magazine left; I could either read Jane or try to reconcile who I was with what I was doing.

I looked up at my reflection in the mirror.

The man I saw staring back at me had black goop on his forehead and a lost expression in his eyes. In short, he looked like three-quarters of the working screenwriters in the business.

I stared until Maddy came back. She rinsed out the extra color, dried my hair and sent me to Jimmi's chair to have it cut.

"You are movie writer, yes?" he asked as he used a straight razor on my bangs. I nodded.

"Then I give you artistic look." He switched to a pair of scissors that looked like pinking shears and began cutting in a frenzied manner. "I love the artist. I love the rocka-roll, and I love the movies. Gangster movies, crime films, you know?"

Again, I nodded.

"I know all of the movies. Tell me what movies you do."

Before I could answer, he continued: "I love Goodfellas , The Godfather , Donnie Brasco . Which one you do?"

" Rounders ," I answered.

Pause. "I do not know that one."

He finished. I paid for the work, left the salon and headed for home. As I entered my building, my doorman asked me if I'd lost weight, but he was just covering up for the fact that he was staring. My wife, Amy, met me at the elevator and shook her head. My daughter burst into tears.

That night, I left on the last flight for L.A. As the passengers around me drifted off, I found it impossible to sleep. It wasn't just because Jimmi had never heard of my movie. Before, I'd always prided myself on being a New York filmmaker-independent, uncompromising, all the rest. But now, sitting there with a head of faux black hair, I didn't know who I was.

An image came to mind: It was of my first trip to L.A., after Rounders had been sold to Miramax. I was full of confidence, didn't give a shit about my appearance and treated the studio execs as if they were lucky to meet me. It worked. At the end of the trip, Levien and I left L.A. with script deals at two studios.

Since then, though, something had changed. Gradually, over time, I had become attached to the success, begun to let myself need it. And as soon as that happened, fear snuck in. I started second-guessing my ideas a little, started taking studio notes a little more seriously, started reading the trades. And eventually, I starting worrying about how I looked.

"Damn," I thought in the darkness of the plane cabin. "I've gone Hollywood."

I lifted the window shade next to me and gazed out into the black sky. Los Angeles was still three hours away, but I could picture how it would look upon our arrival. Lit up in the night, it would glisten. But during the day, the smog would lay heavy over the city, limiting vision and making my head hurt.

The next morning was the meeting at Nate 'n Al's.

One week later, I was home and the phone rang. It was my agent. "The pitch sold," he told me.

"Great," I said. I hung up the phone, walked around the corner to my neighborhood barber and sat down in his chair.

"Shave it off," I said.

"All of it?"

"Yeah, all of it."

*The name has been changed.

More proof that Manhattan-with more than 100 Starbucks, guys with thumb rings, swampy summer sunshine and bottle-blond publicists wielding German S.U.V.'s-is becoming just a more humid version of Los Angeles: This morning, fashion designers Bonnie Cashin, Oscar de la Renta, Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, James Galanos, Charles James, Donna Karan, Anne Klein and Pauline Trigère are inducted into the Fashion Walk of Fame, where their names will be embedded in plaques on Seventh Avenue alongside last year's inductees, which include Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. "Oscar's P.R. office is yet to confirm, but he's said that he will be there," promised a flack. Well, if there's one thing we've learned in this life, it's that you can always count on a "de la" to keep his word.

[Bryant Park Hotel, 40 West 40th Street, 9:30 a.m., by invitation only, 764-9600, ext. 243.]

How to market a book by a young Ivy League author whose prose thoroughly confuses you? Compare him to Thomas Pynchon, cross your fingers and hope for the best, baby! Today, HarperCollins-which recently coughed up James Wolcott's The Catsitters (spotted being read by an earnest young lady, mouth slightly agape, on the F train)-throws a party in the East Village for a first novel, The Savage Girl, by Alex Shakar (Yale '90), whom the publisher claims is "in the vein of Thomas Pynchon." Bonus dirty excerpt! "'I am a lion,' she whispers, and licks his ear with the tip of her tongue as he enters her. He grunts and growls … a little boastfully, but a little needfully, too, and she likes the sound of it, and she grunts, too, at first half in mockery but soon uncontrollably as their thrusting grows desperate, grunting and growling like lions …." O.K., here's Option B for this evening: Strap on your Chelsea best (clamdiggers, Velcro sneakers, ironically acid-washed denim jacket) for a "Summer Party and Art Auction" at Mary ("Boom-Boom") Boone's gallery benefiting the High Line, a rusting rail structure on the Hudson that has become the sudden, inexplicable darling of Manhattan's downtown society ….

[The Savage Girl book party, Musical Box, 219 Avenue B, 6:30 p.m., by invitation only, 207-7470; High Line auction, Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, 6 p.m., V.I.P. dinner to follow, penthouse at the Park, 118 10th Avenue, 279-1623.]

Thursday 19th

Esquire goes to war: Retailers depressed by the season's rampant markdowns are cheering themselves up with a little drinks party at Saks in honor of an exhibit called Uniform: Order and Disorder, currently showing at P.S. 1., co-sponsored by Esquire magazine. "It is about art and pop culture, uniforms and the military, from movies to computer games-everything!" said Esquire fashion creative director Stefano Tonchi in a throaty Florentine accent. "Like camouflage prints are everywhere, from like bikinis on the beach to cargo pants …. It's military in a time of not war, that's the point, military outside the battlefield …. It's going to be fun!" Expect Esquire flunky A.J. Jacobs to make an entrance in his customary tight trousers and dashiki. Then pour a drink in Esquire honcho David Granger's lap-payback for Esquire's current Maxim-like, jauntily misogynist "How Women Age" issue, which actually contains the lines, "For almost every man, it seems to come as a surprise: That day you first realize her smile is etching fine lines at the corners of her mouth …. Or when you spy that little shape shift in her breasts."

[611 Fifth Avenue, seventh floor, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 800-770-0703.]

Jewelapalooza! Avoid Central Park tonight at all costs, because Alaskan "rock poetess" Jewel-who has not sung, or yodeled, in the city for three years-belts out a free concert, sponsored by a shampoo manufacturer. Cleavage-baring pop tartlet Willa Ford will open, then four aspiring singer-songwriters in their early 20's-all, coincidentally, with really good hair-will compete for a "demo" recording contract with Atlantic Records. Ms. Ford, a lissome 20 (below), called from Tampa, Fla., and told us she's not one of those Destiny's Child divas with a stage mother. "My mom is my road manager whenever I'm touring, but she can't sew worth crap," she said. How is Ms. Ford dealing with the pressures of impending superstardom? "My stomach hurts." Sandra Bernhard, Kimora Lee Simmons and Kathy Najimy will judge the lyrics by the four would-be songstresses. Bonus excerpt, from 22-year-old Libbie Schrader, about a woman who misses her monthly visitor: "When you're one, two, three, four / Five days late / You've got to worry / Worry and wait / 'Cause there's nothing in heaven or hell / To move it along in a hurry / It's blurring your fate." Our stomach hurts. (Question: If Janis Joplin were alive today, would she be a Frizz-Ease spokesmodel?)

[Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, tickets at www.provoice.com, 8 p.m.]

Friday 20th

Juliapalooza? Julia Roberts dons a fat suit for America's Sweethearts, where she plays Catherine Zeta-Jones' less glamorous assistant. (Is it just us, or does anyone else find something vaguely offensive about rail-thin actresses such as Ms. Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow giddily plopping on fat suits and portraying overweight women?) Speaking of offensive-but in a good way-the film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which was the best transsexual rock musical on or off Broadway, opens today starring the show's creator and original star, John Cameron Mitchell. Meanwhile, an oblivious Williamsburg hosts an all-woman art exhibit, 21st Suffragettes. "I went to an event a few months ago in the Piers which was all these contemporary art galleries, and they had some work by women, but I was disappointed by the lack of women artists," said curator Jill McDermid, 35. "I also didn't like all these images of women naked and in their underwear. "Isn't tonight just going to be a bunch of confused, ambisexual Williamsburg men in black-rimmed glasses, thumb rings and synthetic shirts scamming on the chicks? "Oh, sure! That would be O.K. with me in a way. I don't mind-I'm looking!"

[Movies, 777-FILM; 21st Suffragettes, various galleries, opening party, the Stinger, 241 Grand Street, Brooklyn, 9 p.m.]

Saturday 21st

If you're getting married-and who, when you really get down to it, isn't?-but trying to do it in that "I'm not really getting married" way (good luck, sister), they're down to the dregs at Wearkstatt's couture bridal sale in Soho-50 to 90 percent below retail, which means it's time to splurge on a major headpiece. If you've gone that extra mile and are pregnant, today is the penultimate day of a Liz Lange warehouse blowout. Unencumbered lasses, meanwhile, content themselves with some nice silk sweaters from Henri Bendel.

[Wearkstatt, 33 Greene Street, 11 a.m., 334-9494; Liz Lange, 958 Lexington Avenue, 10 a.m., 717-9030; Henri Bendel, 712 Fifth Avenue, 10 a.m., 1-800-HBENDEL.]

Sunday 22nd

Botox birthday boys! Happy, happy birthday to a whole marquee of showbiz fellas: Albert Brooks turns a cuddly 54; Willem Dafoe a lithe, leathery 46; Danny Glover is a trustworthy 55; Eagle Don Henley gets to be 54; John Leguizamo (funny) and David Spade (funny but kinda spooky) are both 37; and Alex Trebek (cuddly, lithe, leathery, trustworthy, funny and spooky) is 61! Also, the aforementioned Oscar de la Renta becomes a suspiciously smooth 69. But every single celebrity, starting with Ed ("Who's Your Daddy?") McMahon, is out in arid Beverly Hills at the big 93rd-birthday bash for Milton Berle (very, very funny, and a real horndog!), hosted by Whoopi Goldberg (plucky).

[Hollywood Gala Salute to Milton Berle, Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills, California, 310-473-3265.]

Monday 23rd

Where's Roddy McDowall? After Ben Affleck's Pearl Harbor went phff-ft, there's just one last chance for a big summer blockbuster: Tim Burton directs Planet of the Apes, starring Mark Walhberg, Tim Roth, Estella Warren (suspicious resemblance to Willa Ford, above) and Helena Bonham Carter, in a break from her usual Merchant-Ivory mutton-sleeve roles, as a very pretty ape. Publicist Peggy Siegal tries with all her might to pull it together in the face of business partner Lizzie Grubman's going ape a few weeks back, and oversees the premiere tonight at the Ziegfeld. Crash strategy: loincloths or Mercedes S.U.V. Watch for lots of men in their early 30's standing around in summer sandals (mistake) scratching themselves and complaining that the movie "completely betrays the original."

[Screening, Ziegfeld Theater, 141 West 54th Street, 8 p.m., party to follow, Roseland, 239 West 52nd Street, by invitation only, 966-5000.]

Tuesday 24th

Chekhov-mates! You want wattage? The still-chugging Shakespeare in the Park franchise sucks in underrated John Goodman, Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden, cool-actor-of-the-moment Philip Seymour Hoffman, gracefully aging Kevin Kline, frisky Natalie Portman, Meryl ("A dingo stole my babay") Streep and kooky Christopher Walken for Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, reworked by Tom Stoppard and directed by Mike Nichols. As long as Mr. Walken does a little bit of his soft shoe, we'll be happy! Watch for Ms. Portman's Harvard buddies-pale, nubile young ladies with unfurrowed brows, in New York for the summer on Paris Review internships-chatting up New Yorker editors in hopes of joining the new breed of what you could call "New Yorker centerfolds." Meanwhile, a slightly older version of these ladies strap on their strappy sandals along with socialites Samantha Boardman and Nadja Swarovski for a "Starlit Summer Night" benefit for the Museum of the City of New York.

[The Seagull, Delacorte Theater, enter at Fifth Avenue at 79th Street, 8 p.m., 539-8750; Starlit Summer Night, 1220 Fifth Avenue, 6 p.m, 534-1672, ext. 246.]

Wednesday 25th

Madonnarama? Whip up all the white-trash chic you can muster as Madonna comes to Madison Square Garden for five concerts-except, unlike Jewel, it ain't free! Yes, even the singer's famous friends have got to fork up to see Mrs. Guy Ritchie belt out "Borderline" as she performs her weird, highly choreographed hip-thrusting routine-and we can't contain ourselves thinking about what this marvelously talented lady will try next! Will she dance on the hood of a car? Will she writhe on the floor? Will she wear one of those little mikes attached to her head? Will she bare her 42-year-old midriff? Is she becoming Cher? Is she becoming Charles Nelson Reilly?

[Madison Square Garden, 8 p.m., try eBay!]