It does sound a lot like Mr. Trillin:

Calvin Trillin composes poetry on deadline,
Drawing inspiration straight from a headline.
He likes to send up politicians in verse,
Chronicling follies that get worse and worse.

But the difficulty comes when Ms. Kakutani tries to be critical of the book. Her choice of form is a charmingly cute way to write about  a charmingly cute stocking stuffer of a book, but it invites the inevitable comparison between reviewer and author.

Poet Trillin has chronicled it all in this book,
Which you can read on paper, Kindle or Nook.
While he’s no Steve Sondheim, and has penned better books,
Rhyming on deadline isn’t as easy as it looks

"I just came from a memorial service," he said. He was drinking a glass of water to relieve himself from the unbearable heat. A stunning bald man dressed in a perfectly tailored suit approached him.

"Mr. Trillin," he said, "We haven't seen each other in a year, but thank you so much for the book about your wife. It made me cry so much."

"Thank you," he replied. Mr. Trillin turned to Media Mob and said that conversations like that don't happen that much since he doesn't leave Greenwich Village. A few feet away, Page Sixer Paula Froelich was posing for a picture solo. Mr. Trillin took a close look and a final swig from his water and escaped from the kitchen.

Upstairs, Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl was entertaining a few writers from The Sopranos and talking about their relaunched Web site, gourmet.com.. She said that she loves parties like this.

"People think to run a magazine like this you need the endless appetite," she said. "All you need is to be able to hold the eight-hour conversation."

She said she was capable of this and promised that she would be the last person standing at the party (Media Mob stayed well past the scheduled ending time of 10:30, but didn't last as long as she.)

Holding court a few feet away was the Page Six clan of Richard Johnson, Braden Keil and Ms. Froelich at a diner-style booth; Post foodie Steve Cuozzo was standing nearby with his wife.

The Posties were having an animated conversation, which at one point elicited a purring noise, like one Eartha Kitt would make (Media Mob didn't catch who was responsible for this). Sitting a few booths down was the CBS anchor Harry Smith, who explained that he rides a bike from his Upper West Side home to the Early Show studio. He said he doesn't wear a helmet, but then again, no one does.

As the night wore on, and as guests switched from red and white wine to hard liquor, the conversations were noisier.

"Doc is so fucking cool!" said the chef David Chang, recently of Momofuku. He was speaking to John Willoughby, the executive editor of Gourmet, whose nickname is apparently Doc. Doc politely listened to Mr. Chang.

"Doc is so fucking cool," he told Media Mob and Doc. "Who do you know who has the fucking nickname Doc? If I had an nickname I would want it to be fucking Doc. How cool is Doc? I'm fucking Doc! How did it happen?"

The group seemed to take the question to be rhetorical, and anyway, it was time to go.

The crowd at the Society for Ethical Culture included former New York Times colleagues—Joe Lelyveld, Marcia Chambers, Linda Amster, Paul Goldberger, Mary Breasted, Mike Leahy, Clyde Haberman and Stephanie Lane; pundits like Katrina vanden Heuvel and Eric Alterman; 60's activists like Curtis Gans, and fellow white water adventurers like Carol Bellamy, Ellen Fleysher and Victor and Sarah Kovner.

The festivities began with a slide show (set to songs by the Rock Bottom Remainders) showing the writer-activist at every age, posing with everyone from Bill Clinton to Bill Moyers. The shot of her sporting a Fox News hat got the biggest laugh from the three hundred fans who had gathered to remember her.

Maya Angelou recalled how startled she was when she first met Molly and realized she was six feet tall.

“I knew she was white,” said Ms. Angelou. “I didn’t know she was so much white!” Nevertheless, Molly immediately dubbed the two of them “twins separated at birth.”

Ms. Angelou said there was only one source of frustration: every time she tried to introduce anyone to the magnificent Molly Ivins, she discovered that they were already old friends.

New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin remembered columns that could make you “laugh out loud”: “if a certain Congressman’s IQ dropped any further he’d have to be watered twice a day,” or the one about the Texas gubernatorial candidate who was “so afraid of getting AIDS while visiting San Francisco that when he was in the shower he wore shower caps on her feet.”

Mr. Trillin said her loyalty had “no bounds and no statute of limitations ... Reporters visiting Texas on a political story got from Molly not resentment about intrusion on her turf but a jolly welcome.”

Sitting in the audience, Joe Lelyveld echoed that memory: “She was just so incredibly generous,” said the former executive editor of the Times. “When I was writing a column for the Times magazine, she sent me a letter with the names of fifty people I should meet in Texas.”

Molly was my good friend for more than 30 years. When I moved to Paris a few years ago, Molly happened to be living there for a month. It was right after 9/11, and she insisted on meeting me on the street, outside my new apartment, to help me get five huge suitcases and a bicycle up the stairs. After coffee at a nearby cafe, she issued me one sleeping pill and sent me to bed for six hours. Then I met her on the Ile de la Cité for a magnificent Paris dinner. No one had had a warmer welcome since Americans troops reached the City of Light in 1944.

John Leonard described Ivins’ work as “an amphetamine rush of Rabelais, Mark Twain, Lily Tomlin, Lenny Bruce and Jeremiah - whether she was writing about George Bush, Clarence Thomas, country music or the White Trash Hall of Fame...Politics was the normal respiration of her intelligence. She never stopped being both funny and furious...The most important words she ever wrote were these:

Ivins was a digger and a thinker; she was fearless and selfless, and she was phenomenally focused. There were only three things she cared about: journalism, activism and friendship. And the way she kept the faith made her both a model and a reproach. A model because she lived to afflict the powerful and comfort the powerless; a reproach because she kept on writing and talking and fighting for the causes we had all embraced in the 1960's, long after most us had rechanneled our energies into much more selfish pursuits. “She gave her tired friends the goose to go on after we had abandoned hope,” said Mr. Leonard.

SHE EXCELLED AT THE MOST important test for every pundit: she was right more often about the vital issues of our time than almost any other columnist. This is how she warned against the consequences of a Bush presidency in the introduction to one of her books:

Calvin Trillin recalled Paul Krugman’s a column immediately after Ivins’ death. Mr. Krugman cited these examples of the Texan’s extraordinary prescience:

"So,” Mr. Krugman concluded, “Molly Ivins -- who didn't mingle with the great and famous, didn't have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East -- got almost everything right. Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do? With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong.”

The most poignant moments were provided by Eden Lipson, a former Times colleague and one of Ivins’ closest friends.

“A few years ago I finally realized that it was us, the cosmopolitan New Yorkers in the media capitol, with our literary and political gossip and hermetic chattering who were, in fact, provincial,” said Ms. Lipson. “ Molly was the one who saw America large and clear, who out-reported the mainstream media from Austin, who had a balanced and ultimately optimistic view of the world. Molly’s generosity was legendary, but in addition, she was brave. She went on book tours two and half times while on chemotherapy.”

Ms. Lipson was also diagnosed with cancer last year. Before it went into remission, Ivins came to visit her at the hospital. This is what she told her friend:

“Understanding mortality is entirely personal and won’t know it until you face it. The cancer will probably kill you in the end, but moving ahead, do as much as you can . . . until you can’t.”

“And then it’s okay to let go.”

“I wasn’t exactly aware that I was writing about marriage,” he said in his rumbly alto. “I just thought of myself as writing about Alice. And that’s why some of those letters I got surprised me.”

Mr. Trillin was perched on the edge of a white armchair, talking about the unexpected phenomenon of “Alice, Off the Page,” the love ballad he wrote to his late wife—Alice—in The New Yorker last spring. Published nearly five years after her death, the essay seemed to trip some kind of secret wire in urban romantics’ hearts. For weeks following its publication, women (and, yes, men too) passed their tear-stained copies on to friends, blasted e-mail alerts to pals, even recommended it to strangers on the subway. Quite a few took to writing Mr. Trillin letters—mostly “about what they were looking forward to in a marriage,” he said.

Now, nine months later, Mr. Trillin has turned the essay into a book, a 78-page heartbreaker called About Alice, and the tears have begun to flow again: tears on the street, tears in the office, tears for an “epic romance” (as one woman called it) between two people whom most of its readers have never met.

All of which baffles its author, who insisted he had no desire to be a mascot for marriage, let alone for male enlightenment.

“Somewhere I read something like, ‘He’s in touch with his feminine side.’ And I said, ‘Jesus Christ! I hope no one I went to high school with is reading that,’” Mr. Trillin said in mock disgust. “I am not in touch with my feminine side!”

But try telling that to the women who fell in love with Mr. Trillin for his love of Alice, who have nursed serious Calvin crushes ever since they first discovered his foodie adventure book, Alice, Let’s Eat.

“Whatever my admiration for his whole body of work, the core of why I love Trillin has been the way he wrote about Alice,” wrote Salon’s Rebecca Traister in an emotional ode to both halves of the couple. “I grew up loving Alice because her husband loved her so eloquently.”

LIKE MOST ALICE ADMIRERS, Ms. Traister never met her heroine. But she knew her, or felt she knew her, because of the years she had spent reading Mr. Trillin’s wild Americana adventures in The New Yorker, and the books he seemed to exhale by the year. In story after story, Alice popped up as the sensible but indulgent straight woman, the foil against which his antics loomed large and hilarious. She was the prudent gourmet to his lovable glutton, the wise spouse to his excitable husband—and, of course, the muse.

She was also a force in her own right, a dedicated educator and vigorous writer, and as she and her husband aged, they became a lovable New York institution. When she died of heart failure—on Sept. 11, 2001, of all days—her admirers found time amid the general heartbreak and wreckage to send her husband condolence notes.

For all this, it took more than four years, and a “cautious” question from New Yorker editor David Remnick, for Mr. Trillin to think about “verbalizing” his own thoughts about her death. When he finally did, he was inspired as much by a desire to pay tribute as an urge to correct the historical record, refine the broad-strokes character he had created in his writings.

“I felt that I had written about her, as I say in the book, as a sort of sitcom character—I mean, an admirable sitcom character, but still a sitcom character, and she was an actual person,” he said. “That’s why I was doing the piece.”

Alice herself had been ambivalent about playing the sitcom mom. On at least one occasion, she likened her portrayal to that of the “dietician in sensible shoes,” and since she was neither a dietician nor a fan of the beige orthotic pump (she was, instead, a serious teacher with a flare for elegant heels), this wasn’t exactly an endorsement of the image.

And so Mr. Trillin finally set about busting her out of her dietician’s duds. He recounted the way she “seemed to glow” the night he met her,” and how, from that moment on, he’d made it his life’s mission to impress her. He extolled her “incorrigible” optimism, praised her dedication to her daughters, and generally cataloged the wisdom of her character as if she were the philosopher queen of some great undiscovered nation.

In the process, he created a portrait of Alice—and, even more than that, of husbandly devotion—that was as liable to set readers’ hearts aflutter as Joan Didion’s sinew-by-sinew autopsy of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, was to give them angina.

And readers—particularly those of the female persuasion—responded.

“My apologies for the slow start this morning. I was busy crying in the bathtub while reading Calvin Trillin’s About Alice,” wrote Jessa Crispin, the editor of Bookslut.com, on Jan. 4, in a typical blog post.

No doubt, Mr. Trillin’s way with the written word had something to do with the storm of emotion. But, as the therapists say, there’s also something else going on here. The dearth of decent men who can emote, let alone write a sentence about it, might well have something to do with it. Or perhaps nostalgia—a longing for a certain tradition of marriage, to say nothing of a New York where a writer-teacher couple could afford a Grove Street townhouse without having to sell off a kid. Or perhaps a large number of ladies simply want to be adored.

Katy McColl, the lifestyle editor at Jane magazine, is what one might call the Patient Zero of the Calvin crush phenomenon. She has been a Trillin-phile for years, and in 2001, shortly after Alice’s death, she wrote a condolence letter in which she admitted to looking at her boyfriend sometimes and wondering, “But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?” (Yep, she was that girl, or so she believes.) Mr. Trillin quoted the letter in his New Yorker essay, and then in About Alice, and the comment quickly went viral, became a mantra that women would quote, Krishna-style, as the reason for their Trillin obsession.

(Interestingly, no one has posed the reverse question: Will I love him like Calvin loved Alice?)

Ms. McColl was momentarily flummoxed when she spoke to The Observer about her famous question. “Oh, gosh—how do I explain this?” she said. “My boyfriend at the time, he wanted to know why I was writing a condolence note to Calvin Trillin, because he was like, ‘You don’t even know him.’ And, I don’t know—my parents are divorced, and I think we sort of seek out couples that have the relationship that you aspire to.”

Needless to say, Ms. McColl’s relationship with that particular beau was not for the ages. But she kept up the search, and, not long after, she found a man whose rightness was confirmed not just by his habit of making her coffee in bed every morning, but also by “a sign”: Ms. McColl’s sighting of Mr. Trillin on the subway the morning after the second date.

“I told my parents I met the man I was going to marry,” she said of her reaction to the sighting—and the date. And, in fact, three and a half years later, she did marry him: “He’s very much my Calvin Trillin.”

“I’m not sure I would have known how high I could shoot for,” she added, “if I hadn’t read all the things Calvin had written about his wife.”

But the Trillin obsession isn’t just about marrying right. While some women dream of finding their own earthly Calvin, others just want him as their dad—and Alice as their mom.

For a generation raised on divorce, the Trillins—who married in 1965, just before the marriage-hopping baby boomers came of age—represent a kind of prelapsarian parental ideal. Their set-up was traditional enough to be recognizable to a kid of the 70’s or 80’s: Alice, for all her wit and strength, was very much the wife and mother, and Mr. Trillin was the charming, goofy dad. But they were also glamorous enough to be exciting—the wedding photograph on the back cover of About Alice could easily be mistaken for a sepia still from some Jacques Demy movie, with Alice playing stand-in for Catherine Deneuve. And they actually liked each other.

“They seemed like they got along so well and lived together so well,” Ms. Crispin sighed during a phone interview. “It’s just the ideal parent relationship that my parents didn’t have.”

For his part, Mr. Trillin seemed a bit uncomfortable with the whole familial-icon thing. As he sat in his living room, he listened politely to questions about his dream-husband status and would even parry with a joke from time to time. But mostly he did his best to tamp down the wide-eyed wonder that his happy marriage has inspired.

He seemed unusually reluctant, for instance, to wax confessional about his marriage, despite having just written a book about the subject. And when asked the secret to his happy relationship, he ascribed it, above all, to luck—to walking into the right party, which is how he met Alice in 1963—rather than any particular theory, philosophy or therapeutic intervention.

“It’s not a very admired notion, because people think you’re sort of kicking at the dirt and saying, ‘Oh, this is all luck.’ But it’s a huge factor in everybody’s life,” he said. “It’s luck to meet the right person, it’s luck to find something you like to do for a living, and it’s luck to be able to do it, to a great extent.”

Certainly, it was luck—or at least lucky—to find someone with whom, during 36 years of marriage, he never felt bored. “If she felt bored, she was kind enough not to say so,” he said.

As for stumbling on a mate with whom he could recall (and then only after prodding) having just one noteworthy fight—well, there’s really not even a word for that.

“It had to do with a dog being in a scene or something in a [home] movie called The Sound of Egg,” he said of the fight, which occurred during one of the summers they spent in Nova Scotia with their daughters. “And I said, ‘We have to have this or we have to have that,’ and she thought I was saying she didn’t understand humor, or something like that. And on those occasions, I used to say, ‘I’ve heard the phrase ‘hyper-sensitive Jewess.’

“But you know, that lasted for 10 minutes or something,” he said.

Such stories of marital bliss might become irritating—or at least easy to dismiss as writerly yarn-spinning—if Mr. Trillin didn’t seem to miss his wife so much all these years later. His voice had a way of getting quieter, deeper, when he found himself put upon to answer certain questions about her. And something about the hiking boots he wore seemed lonely.

Or maybe that, too, was a girl’s projection, as delusional as the desire to search for “signs” of Alice in every nook, cranny and picture frame in his house.

Mr. Trillin himself seemed to have little interest in indulging maudlin moments. When asked whether he had recovered at all from the grief of losing Alice, he replied with an optimistic, “Yeah, I’m really fortunate in having my daughters and grandchildren, and they’re obviously sort of the center of my life now.” As for the thorny question of dating, he responded that he could conceive of it, though “not in some organized way.”

“I don’t want to be fixed up with your aunt, if that’s what you mean,” he said.

Still, if dating is conceivable, the idea of sharing his life with anyone else, of falling in love again, is a different matter. “I guess I still think of myself as Alice’s husband,” he said quietly. “And that’s what makes it difficult.”

Perhaps it’s the cloves simmering in the hot apple cider , but sniff hard enough and there’s a definite scent of pontification in the air—which can only mean one thing: tweedy highbrow festivals! And we don’t mean the San Gennaro Feast, which thankfully packed up all its mobbed-up meat-on-a-stick a few days ago (quick note: a big thank you to The New York Times for telling all us dumb New Yorkers the proper way to pronounce “prosciutto” ). This week, dueling horn-rimmed jobs: the New York Film Festival , which attracts a particular strain of downtown hipster (the kind with the Ryan McGuinness book on his coffee table, who pretends to like underground hip-hop) who bought tickets ages ago so he can proclaim, “ Shanghai is the future of filmmaking,” versus the New Yorker Festival , from the magazine that pregnant women read on the bus . But first, tonight: hippies !

“A Reading in Defense of Democracy” unfurls at Symphony Space, hosted by WATCH (Writers and Artists for True Change) and benefiting the MoveOn P.A.C., whose mission reads, “We’ll recruit 50,000 volunteers to work in 10,000 key neighborhoods in battleground states to get 440,000 new votes for John Kerry to the polls” (please

people, no math, we beg of you). Among the readers are smooth-cheeked novelist Jonathan Safran Foer , Web-stalker Katha Pollitt and—saving the event from being a total disaster—food-lovin’ Calvin Trillin . Across town, authors Tom

Wolfe , Jamaica Kincaid and Princeton townie John McPhee pay tribute to Roger W. Straus , the esteemed founder of publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux , who passed away in May. More smarty-pants stuff at the Guggenheim, as Artforum convenes a “panel of experts” for “Pop After Pop,” a discussion of the legacy of pop art “from Warhol to today.” Who misses Fashion Week?

[“A Reading in Defense of Democracy,” Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, 7 p.m., www.moveonpac.org; Roger W. Straus celebration, the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave, 3 p.m., 92y.org; Artforum ’s “Pop After Pop: A Roundtable,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, 6 p.m., 212-475-4000.]

Thursday 30th

Sake to me! Finally, a breather event where we can drink without having to talk about Dan Rather or rising fiction stars: Today the Joy of Sake caravan, the “largest sake tasting held outside of Japan,” staggers into town and comes to a burping stop at the Puck Building, after similar stops in Honolulu and San Francisco. “If you’re interested in sake, there is nothing else like it,” said International Sake Association director Chris Pearce. “Five senior Ph.D. sake geeks came in from Japan and did a blind tasting judging on aroma, balance, taste and overall impression. The gold- and silver-medal winners are the ones on the road.” Also participating with sake-friendly dishes are local restaurants such as Bond St., wd-50, Asiate and Bouley. And besides, sake is 15 percent alcohol, compared to the measly 10 to 12 percent in your average ( read:

lame-o) wine—which must be why those Japanese guys sleep in desk drawers. “The tasting glasses are very small, so

it’s just a small amount,” warned Mr. Pearce. Harrumph—next! Further north, celebrate the publication of The

Complete Cartoons of “The New Yorker,” a doorstop anthology of the comic work seen over the magazine’s 75-year history, edited by cartoon editor Robert Makoff. “ It took about two years,” said Mr. Makoff. “What’s quite fascinating is that you time-travel back to the decade the cartoon was in. You can sense New York and the life of the times—the buildings, the ethnic groups, how the attitudes have changed—all by cartoons that were being drawn.”

[Joy of Sake, the Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street, 6 to 8:30 p.m., 888-799-7242; The Complete Cartoons of “The New Yorker” book party, the Leaf Lounge, 913 Broadway, 6 to 8 p.m., by invitation only.]

Friday 1st

September was kind of a freak show, wasn’t it? Hello, October! Beyond being known as the month of the color orange, pumpkins and German beer, October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month (which apparently is colored pink). In tribute, Target —that brilliantly marketed, cooler Kmart of the 00’s—unveils a limited-edition line of all-pink items (including cashmere scarves, umbrellas, bags and hoodies), whose profits will be donated to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

And for all those who don’t like the idea of schlepping out to the Brooklyn location, Target is setting up temporary shop for the month at 7 Times Square (which is suspiciously close to the Condé Nast Death Star — hmmmm). This evening, underutilized actress and hottie Sela Ward will be doing the cutting at the ribbon ceremony in Times Square. Next! The three-week-long film festival kicks off tonight with a French film ( naturellement), Look at Me ( Comme une Image) by Agnes Jaoui, which won the prize for best screenplay at Cannes, followed by a fancy-schmancy afterparty at Tavern on the Green. Expect movie-geek flirting outside, where the clove-smokers will be sure to congregate. Much further downtown, New Yorker editor David Remnick and his fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, host a private party at the Tribeca restaurant Pace to celebrate, well, themselves! Look for the magazine’s latest crop of scrunchy ankle boot-wearing female “short-story writers” arraying themselves like ripe plums along the open bar. Two writers who will probably not be

in attendance are Jay McInerney ( Bright Lights, Big City) and Observer alumna Candace Bushnell ( Sex and the City, Four Blondes, Trading U p), who will be hosting a book party for Abigail Vona’s memoir, Bad Girl: Confessions of a Teenage Delinquent. Bonus dirty-book excerpt, page 11: “ At that stage of the game I was a little dickophobic. ” A very different sort of literary dame is celebrated tonight on the Dorothy Parker Bathtub Gin Ball & Speakeasy Cruise (no word if there will really be bathtubs full of gin à la Annie), but any woman who said, “As only a New Yorker knows, if you can make it through the twilight, you’ll live through the night,” deserves to be recognized. Speaking of naughty dames, Sharon Stone helps hoist Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry tonight at a private screening at the Asia Society, followed by a fancy dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations. The documentary by George Butler ( Pumping Iron) is “ a film about character and leadership during a time of national crisis,” and one of your hosts for the evening will be Ben Affleck, otherwise known as the pretty-boy kiss of death for any political aspirant. Crash strategy: “I’m with Ben.”

[“Show You Care at 7 Times Square” (it rhymes!), 7 Times Square at 42nd Street, 9 a.m., www.target.com/breastcancer;

New York Film Festival, Look at Me screening, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Broadway and West 65th Street, 8:15 p.m.; The New Yorker Festival party, Pace, 121 Hudson Street, 9 p.m., by invitation only; Bad Girl: Confessions of a Teenage Delinquent , 246 West 14th Street, 9 to 11 p.m., by invitation only; Dorothy Parker Bathtub Gin Ball & Speakeasy Cruise, Skyport Marina, at East 23rd Street, 7 to 11 p.m., www.dorothyparkernyc.com;   … Going Upriver screening, Asia Society, 725 Park Ave., 7 p.m., 212-935-1558, ext. 184.]

Saturday 2nd

Rather, Jennings and Brokaw— in one room together? This cannot be a good idea, but The New Yorker ’s Ken Auletta applied some man musk and got the three anchor steams to cozy up tonight and discuss the current campaign and network news. Lay side bets as to who is going to be the first to make Dan Rather cry over his recent CBS scandal (our money is on the pro-Palestinian Mr. Jennings). Downtown, the Rubin Museum of Art —another museum to feel guilty about not visiting—celebrates its grand opening. Housed in the building that used to be the original Barneys in the original Chelsea, the museum focuses on art from the Himalayas, and its mission is to “present, preserve and document a permanent collection that reflects the vitality, complexity and historical significance of Himalayan art.” Ten bucks says 75 percent of the city knows the new location of Barneys far better than the geographical location of the Himalayas. Don’t miss the Himalayan Dog Pageant, officiated by orchid-lovin’ Susan Orlean and food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, for pups that can “trace their lineage back to the Himalayas, including Lhasa Apsos, Afghan Hounds, Tibetan Terriers and more.” More proof that this city is going to the dogs is happening up at Central Park, where the third annual “My Dog Loves Central Park Country” Fair is taking place, which offers Doggie Limbo, Canine Good Citizenship testing and the Hike for Hounds. “It’s open to all dogs, and everyone is welcome,” said Suzanne Berman, the rep for the event. (Someone should tell those snotty Himalayan hounds.) Tonight, good luck trying to get past all the sideburn-sporting film geeks quoting Bottle Rocket and waiting to see Rushmore director Wes Anderson talk to New Yorker writer Noah Baumbach (a very fun name to say).

[“From Where We Sit: The Campaign and Network News,” Celeste Bartos Forum, the New York Public Library, 42nd Street and Fifth

Avenue, 10 a.m., www.newyorker.com; Himalayan Dog Pageant, Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, 2 p.m., www.rmanyc.org; Third Annual “My Dog Loves Central Park Country” Fair, Great Lawn, Central Park, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., www.centralparknyc.org; Wes Anderson talk, Directors Guild of America, 110 West 57th Street, 9 p.m., www.newyorker.com.]

Sunday 3rd

Watch “cool” kids wearily doing the walk of shame down Orchard Street this morning and wondering, Just what is the deal with all the pickles? The Fourth Annual New York City Pickle Day is held today on the Lower East Side, where many of our ancestors probably ate them before it turned into a pickled-hipster hoe-down. “It’s a unique event that highlights the

spirit of the neighborhood,” said rep Sideya Sherman. “We have free pickles, and I think this year we have an accordion

player.” Meep. There will be a wide selection of pickles (“from kimchi to kosher dills”). The press release reminds us that “Pickle Day is not just about cucumbers, it’s a chance to sample a number of foods preserved in brine.”

O.K.! In other gastronomic adventures, New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin will conduct a walking tour of Chinatown that concludes with dim sum. Sadly, the tic-tac-toe chicken that Mr. Trillin once immortalized is no longer playing; the good news is, he was delicious!

[Fourth Annual Pickle Day, Orchard Street between Grand and Broome, 11 a.m. to 4:30 a.m, www.lowereastsideny.com;“Come Hungry,” starting point given on tickets, 11 p.m., www.thenewyorker.com.]

Monday 4th

Grab your “Bush Sucks!” T-shirts, kids; tonight the ACLU hosts a “Freedom Concert” at Avery Fisher Hall—expect conscious rapper Mos Def, the always unpredictable Sean Penn, a couple of Gyllenhaals ( mmm, Gyllenhaals) and Paul Simon. There will be a tribute to Lenny Bruce, a lot of talk about just how much trouble our country is in, and there are rumors that locks of Al Franken’s hair will be auctioned. If that won’t cure what ails you, head to the Fraunces Tavern Museum, the oldest building in Manhattan and a museum of early American history and culture, for a benefit auction to support the education programs run through the museum. “We hope that people will come and that they will bring their fat checkbooks,” said benefit chair Susan Hefti. “This tavern was popular among George Washington and his officers. It was where people would have an ale and plot and listen to each other.” The auction includes a sculpture of an eagle for your garden (10 bucks says a German nudist snaps that up) and a “surprise gift from the New York Yankees” (we hope it’s Derek Jeter wrapped in a giant pink ribbon). Sigh.

[Fraunces Tavern Museum Benefit, 54 Pearl Street, 6 p.m., 212-969-8138; ACLU Freedom Concert, Avery Fisher Hall,

Columbus Avenue and 65th Street, 212-721-6500, www.aclu.org.]

Tuesday 5th

If you see society types dressed in a way that can only be described as “circus chic,” do not be afraid : It will more than likely just be guests of the Alzheimer’s Association Rita Hayworth Gala, entitled “Beauty Under the Big Top.” The

evening, according to the brightly colored invitation, was “inspired by the 1964 film Circus World ” starring Hayworth, who died of Alzheimer’s, and John Wayne, who didn’t. The invite advises that “The Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria will be transformed by the splendor and magnificence of the circus, replete with fantastic performers, amazing spectacles and a special anything-can-happen bit of magic.” Yikes! Chairing the event are big, big, big names like Muffie Potter Aston (yet another fun name to say) and ex– Bosom Buddy Donna Dixon Aykroyd; getting extra air kisses are Princess Yasmin Aga Khan (hard name to say), Ms. Hayworth’s daughter as well as the founder of the gala, and Mrs. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a.k.a. Maria Shriver. Heading downtown, find a bunch of women unafraid to discuss orgasms at Cosmo ’s “50 Hottest Bachelors” party, celebrating the magazine’s annual “Men” issue, down at Strata near Chelsea (where there are many, many hot bachelors indeed).

[Beauty Under the Top, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 301 Park Avenue, 6:30 p.m., 212-843-1712; 50 Hottest Bachelors of 2004, Strata,

915 Broadway at 21st Street, 7:30 to 10:30 p.m., by invitation only.]

Wednesday 6th

There’s plenty to do tonight, but seriously? Do yourself a favor and watch UPN’s America’s Next Top Model , the only show we know that had a premiere episode with beer-throwing cat fights, girls in bikinis, tears and Tyra (“ Miss Tyra if you’re nasty”) Banks . Best. Show. Ever. Go Eva the Diva!

[ America’s Next Top Model , UPN, 8 p.m.]

If you're a young Ivy Leaguer who was always the "class clown," maybe toiling now for Modernhumorist.com and looking for a job that actually pays money, crash Comedy Central's 10th Anniversary party tonight. Crash strategy : be male ; three days of face stubble ; ironic corduroy blazer . Whose rumps to smooch: the cable network's big talents, such as thinking Democratic woman's sex object Jon Stewart and thinking Republican woman's sex object Ben Stein, who could use a little affection after bombing recently in D.C . There will surely also be some yuksters swaddled in South Park parkas . If you're a woman or, as Comedy Central big cheeses would put it, a " production assistant" go as Jerri from Strangers with Candy to protest the show's inexplicable cancellation, then wind up cornered by some guy in a black T-shirt and a bit too much hair product who will later call you on his cell phone when you're trying to sleep .

[Guastavino's, 59th Street and First Avenue, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 713-7104.]

Me and Julia: We're still puzzling out how someone like Julia Roberts perfectly pleasant woman, great complexion, lotsa hair, but really not only suckered the entire New York media machinery into believing that this was her "moment, " but also walked away with the nation's top acting award, which she accepted with a speech positively staggering in its narcissism, self-celebration and faux spontaneity . Tonight, two actual actresses, Stockard Channing and Lili Taylor (Ms. Roberts' co-star in her last watchable role, Mystic Pizza) accept the grim fate of those who lack the cookie-cutter good looks and shiny teeth of Ms. Roberts: reading from DoubleTake Magazine at Symphony Space! More high-low culture downtown at a benefit for Eos Orchestra with a guest appearance by Parsons Dance Company founder David Parsons, who will perform on a trampoline. (Sounds a bit like The Man Show .) Who's on the committee: kitsch queen Julie Andrews , Andrew Cuomo (possibly the angriest man in politics, if not the entire world ) and Isaac Mizrahi, whose fallow designing talents the Oscars could have sorely used this year. (By the way, we're taking bets on how much longer Hilary Swank keeps poor Chad Lowe around .)

[Reading, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, 8 p.m., 864-5400; Benefit, Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, cocktails 7 p.m., dinner and performances to follow, 691-6415.]

Thursday 5th

You scratch our back Melissa de la Cruz pounds out a column called Cat's Meow for an online magazine; now it's a book, and today she launches it at a ladies' lunch. The jacket copy contains the phrase "a Holly Golightly for the new millennium," which is normally enough to make any sane person throw a book across the room then again, our own Simon Doonan did call Ms. de la Cruz "the Jackie Collins of the ' Moomba' generation." (By coincidence, we hear that the once-obnoxious Moomba has been humbled to the point where it is now holding readings!) Bonus excerpt: "Maybe the reason I turn twenty-five every year is that I feel like I'm stuck in a holding pattern. Because while I've done almost everything and been almost everywhere and I know almost everybody in New York, I'm nowhere on the New York Observer 's yearly sociopopularity index." Maybe next year, dollface.

[Chinoiserie, 365 Park Avenue South, 12:30 p.m., by invitation only, 698-4665.]

Blast off! Former President William Jefferson Clinton (funny how he's never called by his full name anymore, except in, umm, legal documents and such ) stood up and gave a big, stinky Razorback hog-yell when he heard Blast! perform. Today, this 60-member Bloomington, Ind., troupe of twentysomething percussionists and brass players - Riverdance meets Stomp plus baton twirling arrives on Broadway. Send your out-of-town "frienemies."

[Broadway Theater, Broadway at 53rd Street, 7 p.m., 239-6200.]

Friday 6th

Highbrow Stagg party: The Art Directors Club tries to swipe a little of the Whitney Museum's "edgy" glam with its own biennial, an exhibit called Young Guns , featuring erotic photographer Ellen Stagg, who has had pictures published in Nerve, CosmoGirl and Jane. (Surely the increasingly-soft-porn-looking Harper's Bazaar will be next?) Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Arts Exchange tries to siphon off a little of the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "controversy" at its 10th Anniversary Gala: One wacky pair will perform an acrobatic duet inspired by lava and glaciers; Jen Mitas will perform a physically intense piece about a hot-dog seller who turns into a hot dog . Sorry, folks ya gotta do better than that if you want to piss off the Mayor. Who's on the committee: Senators Clinton and Schumer. Mr. Schumer wins "best performance" category hands-down by telling Mrs. Clinton he feels just terrible about the shellacking she's been receiving in the media .

[Art Directors Club, 106 West 29th Street, 10 a.m., 643-1440; BAX, 421 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m., 718-832-0018.]

Saturday 7th

Conference call! Here's another one for the "frienemies": Leah Gray and Marianne Forti are singing about the trials of dating at the Hotel Delmonico tonight in their incarnation as Two Chicks and a Casio. "It's kind of like Phoebe from Friends meets Wayne and Garth, " is how Ms. Forti described their act. Said Ms. Gray: "I've pretty much covered the gamut in my dating life I've been dumped, I've dumped, I've been stood up. I'm continuing the research. Some guys have really wanted to be in the show, and some are a little intimidated. Some are completely oblivious. " Ms. Forti said she is married, "but usually in our act I just play like I'm not. My husband loves it. We don't write songs about him. All he cares about is buying a boat ." Men!

[59th Street at Park Avenue, 9 p.m., 355-2500.]

Sunday 8th

If you're one of those people who have a secret fondness for bland 80's rock the kind you may have lost your virginity to (if you were lucky, it was to something more gritty, such as Def Leppard! ) trek out to New Brunswick tonight, where Canadian crooner Bryan Adams is playing.

[State Theatre, New Brunswick, 8 p.m., 800-766-6048 for tickets, directions.]

Monday 9th

Trillin and chillin': a bit more middle-age spread and fewer "independent" actresses ! The Authors Guild (we almost typed "Guilt") throws its annual benefit, hosted by Calvin Trillin ; crotchety Roger Straus will be honored and ageless wonder Madeleine L'Engle ( A Wrinkle in Time ) will speak. In the crowd: Ken ' n' Binky, plus perfect mom Anna Quindlen and frazzled mom Wendy Wasserstein. Your co-chairs include dirty-book writer Judy Blume and adventure-writer Jon Krakauer, the guy to blame for doughy Manhattan men in Patagonia fleece .

[Metropolitan Club, 1 East 60th Street, cocktails 6:30 p.m., dinner and program to follow, 725-7707.]

Ultrasuede-er? Yesterday was Passover; today, people recover from their Seder hangovers . But what about their Ultrasuede hangovers? Personally, we can think of no fabric more creepy (well, maybe vinyl) than this spot-treatable substance reminiscent of Lorna Luft at Studio 54 . But maybe that's our problem. "It's often been misunderstood because of cheaper, non-authentic versions there were so many other companies manufacturing it, it lost its cachet!" said fashion publicist Sally Spencer, in an interesting bid to lend authenticity to something that is itself a synthetic. (Expect WWD feature within the week.) Tonight, they toast the resilient textile at the showroom. Later, singer Lenny Kravitz, the human equivalent of Ultrasuede , joins tawny Gina Gershon at the Tunnel for Destination: Groove's AIDS benefit.

[Ultrasuede, 1450 Broadway, 15th floor, 5 p.m., by invitation only, 840-0888; Destination: Groove, Tunnel, 220 12th Avenue, 8 p.m., 917-405-0415.]

Tuesday 10th

Hawke a loogie: If you call yourself "literary," if you're the absolute antithesis of the Comedy Central crowd of April 4 (that is, pale female worried about your receding hairline but secretly convinced that you're a "gymnast" between the sheets ), ring up a fellow who owns a tweed blazer with elbow patches and get out some anti-panic-attack medication for tonight's benefit for "urban storytelling" organization the Moth at the shabby-chic Angel Orensanz Foundation, home to last year's peppy Lingua Franca 10th-anniversary basheroo. The benefit committee is such a confusion of social signifiers as to be a veritable Brown University semiotics-thesis-in-the-making: Brooke Hayward Duchin and A.M. Homes? Tiny Joyce Maynard and tubby Stanley Crouch? John Berendt and Thomas Beller? Ethan Hawke and Times fashion writer Ginia Bellafante? We can't make sense of it, but perhaps you can. What it'll cost you: $125, or $350 if you want a cocktail and believe us, baby, you're gonna need it to face the dancing, storytelling and improv by the always-startling Jonathan Ames and the inevitable George Plimpton . Further adding to the incongruity, sponsors include Playboy.com and the Art Bridge Association. What they're auctioning off: a Sex and the City walk-on , a "top literary agent manuscript evaluation " and a boxing lessonboxing being the sport the literary elite write about to demonstrate their connection to the more"primal" aspects of life .

[Angel Orensanz Foundation, 172 Norfolk Street, 6:30 p.m., 292-0907.]

Wednesday 11th

Spend today searching for that elusive I.R.S. extension form or, if you're a downsized dot-commoner , frantically trying to track down those lost W-2's and mulling over your next career move . Hey, remember when screenwriting was the hot new profession? Relive the early 90's at the Polo Ralph Lauren Columbia University Film Festival , the would-be Radcliffe Publishing Course of filmmaking that launched the career of Kimberly ( Boys Don't Cry ) Peirce ; tonight is New Screenwriters Night (think a complicated admixture of the Comedy Central and Moth party attendees swathed in big, cream, cable-knit sweaters with hoods)! And begin planning crash strategy now for the private party on April 19 honoring The Observer 's own film eminence, Andrew Sarris .

[McGraw-Hill Theater, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, 7 p.m., 854-5579.]

When did we lose the 1990's? I'm not niggling about the change of millennium and all that. I'm talking about the decade-that- almost-was, that quaint and earnest America of, say, the first winter of the Clinton Presidency. Remember? We were all going to be Head Start volunteers, wear flannel shirts and drink lots of good, dark coffee. And then, collectively, we took a look around and said, "Oh, screw it. We'll take the gigante mocha frappuccino."

And now here we are, eight years and a new century later, wiping the froth from our chins, not the least bit queasy from a long national binge-fest that-we might as well admit it-makes the Roaring Twenties or the Mauve Decade look positively beige by comparison.

Too bad all the best nicknames for the era were already used up. (We went ahead and wasted "The Me Decade" on the 70's ? What were we thinking ?) So (in a nod, perhaps, to the recycling spirit of 1993) The New Yorker has decided to borrow an old one, and has dubbed the time we live in "The New Gilded Age."

In his introduction to this latest anthology ( The New Yorker has been spewing them out-a gag reflex brought on by leg-acy anxieties?), David Remnick doesn't hedge his bets, casts no worried glances at the downward spikes of the Nasdaq. He goes bravely with the present tense, all the way. "This New Gilded Age, this American moment of prosper-ity, satisfaction, and self-satisfaction, is rife with … contradictions," he writes. " The New Yorker has tried in the past few years to capture something of this age-its leading figures, its manners, its mechanisms, its politics, its ironies."

The earliest piece in this collection (James Stewart's profile of a commercially struggling literary novelist) was published on June 27, 1994. The latest (Calvin Trillin's profile of two young Wall Streeters convicted of insider trading) appeared on July 10, 2000. Most of them, actually, date from the last year and a half or so. And yet … is it just me, or do I detect, even in the Trillin piece, a tinge of quaint nostalgia, a slight fading to sepia at the edges of the page? Could this book itself be a sign that the New Gilded Age is already history?

O.K., O.K., don't call your broker quite yet. Maybe it's just that the various authors have so effectively gathered together the telltale artifacts of our times, dusted them off, set them under tastefully directed pinpoint lighting and invited us to ponder them from beyond the glass. The New Gilded Age feels like a collection not just in the literary sense but in the museum one, a blockbuster Met retrospective on some past moment of imperial, millennial splendor. (Think of the current Year One exhibition.) The articles' dominant genres are, themselves, like vases whose arcane shapes attest to the rites and habits of their makers: celebrity profile, personal confession, cultural self-examination.

You can almost hear Mr. Remnick intoning through the Acoustiguide: "Who were their gods, their emperors? What did they wear? What did they eat?" It's all here, set out for us vitrine by vitrine. And some of the most memorable pieces are, in fact, considerations of specific artifacts, like Adam Gopnik's brilliant little 1998 essay (which I somehow missed when it appeared in the magazine) on our newly redesigned and counterfeit-protected paper money: "It's Camden Yards money-see, just as good as the old place, sonny, with all the old-fashioned charm you're used to. Have another hot dog. And underneath-the part of the stadium shown only to Rupert Murdoch-in the security control center, the cables run out to the surveillance cameras that … wink at you beneath their reassuring nineteenth-century façade."

The articles are grouped into four themed sections: "The Barons" (although that's a misnomer, since these are really portraits of our Great Khans, our Holy Roman Emperors: Alan Greenspan, Bill Gates, Martha Stewart), "The Web," "The Age," "The Life." Certain obsessions keep popping up in all of them, though. Like New York real estate. Old money versus new. Home furnishings. And food. Here, for example-recorded for posterity-is what you had for dinner in 1997 if you were a small-time Morgan Stanley employee being set up on an insider- trading sting: "chicken fingers and fried clam strips and spicy French fries and Southwest potato skins and something called Buffalo calamari." Here's what you had for dinner in 1999 at an ultra-trendy restaurant outside Washington, D.C.: "potato cornets layered in salmon, caviar, and crème fraîche … veal sweetbreads braised in port with mushrooms and huckleberries."

The obsessions of the New Gilded Age are, in other words, pretty much the same obsessions that the old Gilded Age had. In fact, it's worth remembering that the phrase itself originally came from the title of a book, an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. The novel's not much read these days outside of graduate seminars, and understandably so: It's a boilerplate job, with very little of the period color that its title seems to promise. If you want to get the flavor of late-19th-century America, you'd be better off turning-as several writers in The New Yorker anthology do-to Henry James or William Dean Howells.

The New Gilded Age may not offer anything quite like James or Howells in full flood, but it does make it clear that-setting aside for a moment where the rest of the country is headed-the past few years have been binge years for The New Yorker . It's possible to cast a skeptical glance at the magazine's newfound fascination with Microsoft stock and Manolo Blahniks, but still admire its reporters' diligent, wide-ranging work in vividly capturing the spirit of our times.

Adam Goodheart is a member of the editorial board of The American Scholar.