British designer Jenny Packham dresses the Duchess of Cambridge on a regular basis, but perhaps she wants to start attracting an edgier clientele. The collection in her runway show this Fashion Week was inspired by the femmes fatales of film noir; gowns were red, black, and gunmetal, with body-hugging silhouettes with wide sharp shoulders. Burlesque performer and tightlacer Dita Von Teese may have been recruited as an attendee in honor of the theme; she sat in the front row in cat-eye sunglasses and her usual Old Hollywood curls. This year’s Oscars nominations include a powerful group of leading ladies. Which celebs should don these gowns for the occasion and channel their inner temptress?

Ok, so we've covered local television news crews, overly-friendly staff, and, sadly, lack of cheap wine. (Although the store is stocked on Guinness for the big holiday).

But who are these crazed shoppers, anyway?

"[With] Whole Foods, Garden of Eden, Food Emporium, and now Trader Joe's, I'm excited," said Peter, a self-described "foodie," who lives at nearby Irving Place. And what got him so excited? Sliced Papaya in White Grape Juice.

"It's so cheap," shrieked Katie, who clutched one bag from Whole Foods and two from Trader Joe's. Her personal favorite: Frozen Vegetable Enchiladas.

An elderly couple visiting from Massachusetts, who "go to the one in Cambridge all the time" bought plain pizza dough to make for their grandson. They're so proud that he now lives near a Trader Joe's.

But not eveyone left in good spirits. One man was so flustered by the crowds that he refused to speak with The Real Estate.

"I've been in there for a half hour and didn't buy anything, he said. "I'm not going to stand here and talk to you."

Is the backlash already beginning?

- Mickey Ehrlich

Previous: Trader Joe's: No Chuck
Previous: Trader Joe's: Rival Gangs
Previous: Trader Joe's: The Crew
Previous: Trader Joe's: Morning Rush

Aimee and Brian getting their marriage license.

With my parents in tow, Brian and I wander in and a cheery clerk named Patty greets us: "People who get married in Dorchester County stay married!" she proclaims. "So where will it be? Oooh, the Hyatt is gorgeous. Oooh, I love your ring!" Patty runs through as though we're already old pals.

After getting all our necessary information, Patty disappears into a backroom and returns a few minutes later with the license, fancy script, colors and everything.

"Now, bride, you sign here," she says handing me a pen. She starts humming: "Hmm hmm hmm-hmm." (It's "Here Comes the Bride.") She continues serenading us while Brian scribbles his signature. My parents applaud!

Mr. Beale is the last person I would have expected to triumph as the horseless King of the Britons—or “Breetuns,” as they say—particularly as I last saw this renowned British classical actor playing Tom Stoppard’s logical-positivist professor in Jumpers. Yet are the two leading roles so different? Both the king and the professor make sense of absurd life in their own insanely logical way. When, for example, Mr. Beale’s King Arthur first enters pretending to be a horse while simultaneously pretending to ride one, he achieves the impossible with a dignity and command that seems perfectly normal to one and all.

The regal centaur’s faithful servant, Patsy, rides behind him, making the sound of clip-clop with two halves of a coconut. “Steady,” warns the king as they come to an imaginary ravine or small hedge. Mr. Beale does a thoughtful little leap. “And over we go!”

There’s something delirious about the very presence of Mr. Beale in Spamalot. The role of the king anchors the entire show. It’s good to be king. Tim Curry, Mr. Beale’s predecessor as King Arthur, made a splendidly grave and butch Arthur in reticent command. Mr. Beale has more of a sweet sincerity and inner delight. His eyes are literally twinkling at the sheer pleasure of being there. He underplays both high and low comedy brilliantly. He suggests light camp with a straight face. He possesses charm and a surprisingly assured singing voice. He listens onstage. He understands that redeeming British specialty and safety valve of stuffiness everywhere—the supreme art of being silly.

The man who was sitting one away from me at Spamalot was so convulsed with laughter throughout the giddy show, I thought he’d have a heart attack. But he didn’t know Mr. Beale. “Who is this guy?” he said at one point, looking quickly through his Playbill for a clue. And there wouldn’t be a clue in Mr. Beale’s joyful performance in the most insane show in memory that we have seen him of late play Hamlet, Uncle Vanya, Malvolio and Iago.

England is a nation of great character actors, not romantic heroes. The character actor is Everyman and, being unsnobbish, is content to play unlikely roles. (The one unfulfilled ambition Laurence Olivier had was to play Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls). “In England, acting is a heritage passed on through the ages,” wrote Mel Gussow in a perceptive New Yorker profile of Michael Gambon. “From Burbage to Garrick, from Garrick to Kean and Macready, from them to Irving, and on to Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson—and Gambon and McKellen. As is also true of great clowns, actors learn and borrow from their predecessors, who borrowed from those who came before them.”

Mr. Beale is the heir to the generation of Michael Gambon and Ian McKellen.

Cambridge University has its own amazing theater tradition, and many of the leading lights of the London stage—including Mr. Beale—were educated there. Peter Hall came out of Cambridge. So did his successors at the National, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn and Nicholas Hytner, as well as Sam Mendes, Emma Thompson, Simon McBurney of Theatre de Complicité, and Declan Donellan and Nick Ormerod of Cheek by Jowl. The Cambridge school of directors alone virtually created modern British theatre.

The undergrad Peter Hall was in turn shaped by the Marlowe Society at Cambridge, under the direction of a legendary man, George (Dadie) Rylands. The heritage was passed on when Hall handed over the leadership of the Royal Shakespeare Company to Trevor Nunn, and then continued at the National. The Marlowe torch is still carried by the former society president, Sir Ian McKellen.

Mr. Beale is the continuation of a great tradition. “Who is this guy?” my Spamalot neighbor asked excitedly. I was tempted to tell him. But I wanted him to enjoy the show. Besides, in the beginning and the end, Mr. Beale is a terrific King Arthur, and that is all ye need to know. The Mike Nichols production remains in sparkling shape since it opened on Broadway last March. Special hurrahs for Hank Azaria and the new Lady of the Lake, Lauren Kennedy. Sublime silliness still reigns.

But what next for Simon Russell Beale? He could always take over from Ian McKellen in his annual performance as Widow Twanky in the London Christmas panto Aladdin. But perhaps Mr. Beale might want to shoot for higher things. At the very least, King Lear or Tevye the milkman.

Mr. Brantley’s Sink

Now, you know me by now. I always look on the bright side of life. Except when I’ve got a thorn in my paw. I regret to say the opening of Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire’s new play starring Cynthia Nixon at the Biltmore, left me cold.

If we begin at the heavily symbolic end, the wan husband (John Slattery) and wan wife (Ms. Nixon) are staring bleakly out at us as the curtain descends with significant slowness. It’s a portentous final moment and dramatic cliché that we must have seen a hundred times before. Life is sad, the stage picture tells us. We could guess the questions that we’re meant to ask without having seen the play. Will the two depressed figures solve their problems? Will they stay together or will they part?

It isn’t Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s subject matter of dealing with grief that I found so dispiriting, for we are used to plays whose characters are in mourning for their lives. Nor is the company of Ms. Nixon and this ensemble the problem, though Ms. Nixon’s tranquilized, perilously underplayed portrait of suffering is uncharacteristic of her usually fine work. The essential problem is this predictable, far too overpraised play of goyishe drabness.

Mr. Lindsay-Abaire, whose refreshing Fuddy Meers and Kimberly Akimbo portrayed reality through the looking glass of displaced people and comic grotesquerie, has written a conventional drama. Rabbit Hole is a small soap opera writ large.

Its plot revolves round the death of a child who was killed in a car accident and the effect the tragic loss has on the boy’s family. Daniel Sullivan’s pacing is ponderously slow, and John Lee Beatty’s set of the family home is technologically bloated. But the atmosphere of the play itself is dead. It has no dramatic spark or vitality. Grief fills empty rooms (as Shakespeare said); it does not suck the air out of them.

The playwright has made tragedy lifeless. Grief rages and destroys and raises whirlwinds. It doesn’t bicker and whine or chat. But that is what’s happening in the name of emotional understatement and coping in Rabbit Hole.

Mighty issues—Group Therapy, God, Fate, Parallel Universes—are referred to by Mr. Lindsay-Abaire with a knowing nod to intellectual heft where none is to be found. All five of his characters are no more than sketches and symbols. Ms. Nixon’s frigid Becca is a meatless role—a thin-blooded spirit and a passive agent to suffering. She’s also a bore married to a bore. Did Mr. Slattery’s maudlin Howie ever have any juice in him?

Tyne Daly is Nat. (What names!) Ms. Daly at least brings energy to the muted proceedings, and we warm to the actress rather than the tactless mother from hell she’s playing. Nat is meant to be “a character”—as blusteringly boorish women of a certain age who suffer underneath become lovable characters in sitcoms. Nat’s token scenes only confuse the issue of whether Rabbit Hole is meant to be a comedy or a tragedy.

A tragic comedy, then. Izzy (Mary Catherine Garrison) is Becca’s sulky younger sis, who’s pregnant by some jazz musician. She doesn’t deserve a baby is the issue. And there’s the hangdog teen, Jason (John Gallagher Jr.), who ran over Becca’s child in the first place. Jason wants to make sense of it all. So does Howie’s rumored lover from group therapy, whose daughter died of leukemia. Not to mention Nat’s drug addict son, who hanged himself.

For our man at The Times to rave over Rabbit Hole is one thing. For Mr. Brantley to find himself brought to tears (again), while invoking the name of the mythic Mary Tyrone in the same breath as Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s Becca, is surely another. But for the good Mr. Brantley to announce confidently that the play “belongs squarely to what were once called kitchen sink dramas” takes the strudel. Kitchen-sink drama was the name given to the British new wave of mid-1950’s plays that ushered in the age of working-class social realism. It has absolutely nothing in common with Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s middle-class America of 2006.

True, Mr. Brantley adds, “But the sink, in this instance, has been polished to a high reflective sheen.” It’s a deep contradiction in terms. The entire purpose of kitchen-sink drama was to sweep away the polished sheen. It made war with the surface emotion of the past—and with it, the safe, emotionally repressed drawing-room dramas of Rattigan, Coward, Maugham and Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole.

The restaurant was, not coincidentally, a haunt of Democratic operatives during last summer's convention.

And in other culinary news, it pains our Anglophile hearts to fully agree with Gothamist that the food at Brooklyn's Chip Shop is not so good, and that the service is much worse.

On Sunday evening, at a reception for Harvard alumni in U.S. government held in the airy main lobby of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Robert Boorstin, the senior vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress, summed up Cambridge's enthusiasm for Mr. Kerry with a noncommittal "Eh!" as he turned his hands palms up in a gesture that drove home the point. "He's not like Teddy Kennedy," said Mr. Boorstin, eyeing the bar.

It's peculiar: Teddy Kennedy doesn't have a strong Cambridge brain trust, but somehow that doesn't seem to matter. The Cambridge intelligentsia is more forgiving of Mr. Kennedy. Perhaps it's because he speaks to a part of their past that they will hold forever dear, or because he sweeps them up—entrances them, really—with his constant motion. Not so Mr. Kerry. Over the years, he has forged on, dutifully and dully, in his steady path to power-just like them. Familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt. Mr. Kerry, their local wonk with the wooden face and the logy voice, communicates the same sense of entitlement as his Massachusetts Senate colleague does, but lacks the Kennedy thrill, the visceral delight in life. Some even say that in spite of his wonkiness, Mr. Kerry lacks an identification with particular issues for them to embrace.

"He's a hometown boy. A lot of people know him, and so he's not a god," said Amy Domini, who runs a socially conscious investment firm in Cambridge and serves on the board of the Cambridge-based Progressive Government Institute. But knowing Mr. Kerry, Ms. Domini said, as she looked around the crowd at the Kennedy School reception, means "they trust him completely."

He's not J.F.K.-he's not even Teddy-but he is still the ticket back to Washington for these Cambridge intellectuals. That much was palpable at Sunday's Kennedy School reception. There, guests sipped wine and ate sushi off little crimson-lined plates, talking about vacations, kids' summer plans-everything but the reason they were there, namely that they wanted more than anything for John Kerry to win the election so they could flee the fluorescent lighting of their university holding pens and get back into the game.

If Mr. Kerry were to win, "I'd say the population [of Cambridge] would go down no more than 23 percent," wisecracked David Gergen, the director of the Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership and a former White House adviser to President Clinton, as he dashed off from the reception to the Harvard television studio to appear on Larry King Live.

Even so, the Cambridge smart set's affections for Mr. Kerry are surprisingly lukewarm, not unlike those of so many Democratic constituencies who dated other candidates before marrying Mr. Kerry. Of course, Mr. Kerry is a Yale man, and so perhaps the situation is different in New Haven. As Mr. Peretz put it, "This sounds very parochial, but there's not the intrinsic Cambridge interest in Kerry the way there was for Kennedy and Gore, simply because there's no Harvard connection." Still, it's strange that for all the years he spent as a Massachusetts career politician, this year's Democratic contender never seems to have forged particularly close ties with the Cambridge intelligentsia.

Unlike Mr. Gore, whose enthusiasm for the environment made him the darling of Cambridge scientists, "such enthusiasm as there is for Kerry is not because of any prior deep commitment that Kerry had to any issue that people identified with intellectually or politically or morally," said Mr. Peretz. "I think that Al-I'm prejudiced about him-that Al was never threatened by meeting with people who were smarter than him. He pursued those contacts to enhance himself. I don't know that Kerry has ever really done that."

As he stood in uniform near the portrait of J.F.K. at the Kennedy School reception on Sunday, Officer Michael Rea of the Harvard Police Department offered a similar view. "I have no idea of his policies," Mr. Rea said. "It's more either you hate Bush or are willing to put up with Kerry."

Indeed, it's not as if Cambridge is going to vote Republican anyway. "Canterbridgians are a very peculiar, narcissistic lot. But everybody is for him," Mr. Peretz said. "And if one raises a friendly word, however modest, about Bush, one is sent into the dunce corner: 'How could you?', etc."

"We're a little bit spoiled in Cambridge," said firebrand Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, speaking by phone from his home on Martha's Vineyard. "People my age remember Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy. Everyone remembers Clinton, and whether you love or hate him, he was the most charismatic guy in the room. Kerry is not the most charismatic guy in the room. He may be the tallest guy in the room. He used to be the best-looking guy in the room."

But Mr. Dershowitz said he's known Mr. Kerry for more than 25 years and was supporting him for President. "He's a guy I would trust with the nuclear trigger," the Harvard law professor said.

It's not that Mr. Kerry doesn't already have a brain trust in Boston, because he does. Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor in the first Clinton administration and a distinguished professor at Brandeis University, is said to be a close Kerry adviser. Richard Goodwin, the former Kennedy adviser, is said to be helping write speeches. John Sasso, the Boston political operative whose genius is best reflected in the fact that he helped Michael Dukakis, a disastrous candidate, win the Democratic nomination in 1988, is Mr. Kerry's campaign link to the Democratic National Committee. And some Kennedy School faculty members are already actively advising Mr. Kerry, chief among them Graham Allison, the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and an assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans in the first Clinton administration, and Joseph Nye, the former dean of the Kennedy School and a chairman of the National Intelligence Council under President Clinton. The two seem to be among the Harvard faculty with the closest ties to Mr. Kerry, and both said that they'd attended informal policy-discussion dinners at Mr. Kerry's house over the years.

John Holdren, a former member of President Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and, yes, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and director of the Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, is also said to be a Kerry adviser. William J. Perry, the Secretary of Defense under Mr. Clinton and a professor at Stanford, and Ashton Carter, a former undersecretary of defense under Mr. Clinton and professor at the Kennedy School, who co-directs the Preventive Defense Project, a joint Harvard-Stanford institute, is advising Mr. Kerry on Iraq and national defense.

At the Kennedy School reception, "Bush has some supporters here, but nowhere near as many supporters as Kerry has," said Dan Glickman, the outgoing director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School, the incoming president of the Motion Picture Association of America and former Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton administration, as he affably greeted guests in his yellow-and-white-striped tie. Harvard students "were clearly more impassioned for Dean," Mr. Glickman said. "After Iowa, there was more enthusiasm for Kerry."

Mr. Allison, an expert on nuclear proliferation, seems to be the one with the longest-standing rapport. "I've known John Kerry for 25 years. He's been an excellent Senator," Mr. Allison said enthusiastically as he ate sushi at the reception, hunching over a little so as not to drop any on his goldenrod-yellow tie. "I've had dinner at his house in Washington and here with groups where he's kicking around a topic. People say, 'Who's advising him about this?' Well, he's been in the Senate for 20 years. When you say 'nuclear terrorism,' he doesn't ask, 'What's nuclear? What's terrorism? Where is Pakistan?'" Discussing policy with Mr. Kerry involves "much less shaping his views than reacting to his questions." According to Mr. Allison, the Senator is wont to say, "Here's what I said—do you disagree?" Mr. Allison said he'd advised Mr. Kerry on an investigation he launched in the late 1980's into BCCI, a Middle Eastern bank that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was said to be using for money laundering, and that he helped Mr. Kerry work on a "far-sighted" policy speech the candidate delivered in West Palm Beach this spring. In it, Mr. Kerry discussed the preventable threat of nuclear terrorism. Mr. Allison, it just so happens, is the author of a forthcoming book called Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.

Mr. Nye said that he'd been "a member of a continuing conversation" with Mr. Kerry at dinners over the years and had advised him on foreign-policy issues.

Nearby, Ted Carr, a former member of Mr. Clinton's advance team who now directs the Progressive Government Institute, was chatting with Sam Natapoff, an exchange-rate expert who also worked in the Clinton administration, and who said he had just signed on as a Kerry speechwriter. The Progressive Government Institute's Web site says that it intended to "look at the unelected presidential appointees who make decisions that affect the lives of all of us." As he eyed a room filled with a dozen such Presidential appointees—albeit from the Clinton administration—Mr. Carr had this to say about Mr. Kerry: "Harvard should look to get along with him better."

Comedians talk about their first time and their worst time (which was one and the same for us) … and take turns signing How to Do It Standing Up , a collection of stories by comics published by the Friars Club. On hand for a panel discussion will be Curb Your Enthusiasm 's Susie Essman , who plays the potty-mouthed wife of newly-Golden-Globed Larry Kramer's pal Jeff, and Pat Cooper , who plays himself. ( Carrot Top had a conflict?) Meanwhile, in midtown, the Village People, the B-52's, Patti LaBelle and Montel Williams walk into a bar and …. No, this is not the beginning of a joke : They're hustling on over to the China Club, where, in some wise counterprogramming to the police tape of Diana Ross wobbling after being busted for drunk driving, they honor the pop diva with a big basheroo. The concert will feature the disco group Chic and others performing the songstress' greatest hits. Chic member Nile Rodgers picked up the phone and rang our bell. "Montel is going to sing!" he said giddily. "Not many people know he can sing. He's incredible!" He then told us what made him write the Chic hit, " Freak Out ": "Bernard Edwards and I wrote that song one night when we were supposed to go to Studio 54. We couldn't get in, because we weren't big enough stars at that point. There we were, in our Giorgio Armani suits on New Year's Eve, and they wouldn't let us in. So we went home, and one of us cued up a riff and, for fun, we started singing 'Aaaahhhh, f*ck off!' over and over, and Bernard looked at me and said, 'You know this is happenin' , right?' We knew they wouldn't play it on mainstream radio, so we changed it to 'Freak Off,' which just sounded corny, so it evolved into 'Freak Out.'"

[ How to Do It Standing Up book-signing, Barnes & Noble, 66th Street at Broadway, 7 p.m.; We Are Family Foundation benefit and after-party, China Club, 268 West 47th Street, 7 p.m., 397-4333.]

Thursday 30th

Poets guzzle Moët: British poetry evangelist Daisy ("I'm not the new Nigella") Goodwin clinks flutes on the Upper East Side to celebrate her latest anthology, 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life . Ms. Goodwin called us from a "telestudio" in London where actors are re-enacting poems from the book into mini-dramas for the BBC. "Poetry is sexy, but people's idea of it isn't sexy," she lamented, erotically. "They think it's All-Bran, but it's not All-Bran. It's caviar- chocolate and caviar." Tonight's cocktail reception is hosted by Ed and Nadia Sopher, whom Ms. Goodwin knew "while at university" (Cambridge). "There are poems for everyone: people on diets, people whose pets have died, people who've failed their driving tests. I failed my test 13 times in England! I passed it in the States, though. In the States, it was a breeze ." Yikes ! Does she have a favorite? "There's a very funny two-line poem called 'Money Talks,' which says: 'Money talks I can't deny. / I heard it once, it said 'goodbye'! The story of my life ." We hear that.

[ 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life , the Sopher residence, somewhere on the Upper East Side, 6:30 p.m., 207-7468.]

Friday 31st

E- NOUGH with the cold already! And the static electricity! Every time we touch our doorknob, it's like being sent to the chair. This weekend, 40-plus magazine editors get a break from the tundra when Coty Beauty bribes-excuse us, flies -them to Las Vegas for the unveiling of Celine Dion's new fragrance ( note to Ms. Dion and other Canadians : We're sensing that Ms. Dion is, err, a bit overexposed these days, as witnessed by the universal groans which greeted her profoundly annoying TV ads for Chrysler during the Golden Globes. So you might want to chill for a while, toots .) Meanwhile we hole up in our warm apartments with HBO-on-demand, avoiding doorknobs like Ben Affleck avoids good scripts. While we can't wear enough layers, they're peeling 'em off downtown at the ManhattanVintage Clothing Show . Don't miss the exhibitionof corsetsby "Corset King" Dean Sonnenberg of the Corsetiere Studio. According to sources, these are "the originals that inspired Madonna's 'virgin/harlot' look." Does Celine Dion know about this?

[Celine Dion fragrance unveiling,

398-7618, by invitation only; Manhattan Vintage Clothing Show, Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 1 p.m.,

518-434-4312.]

Saturday 1st

Now that the Upright Citizens Brigade, the city's top improv troupe, has been bounced from their Chelsea theater, is there anything worth laughing at? Maybe tonight at the Big Apple Improv Festival, where some of New York's top improvisers square off in comedic combat-kind of like the rap "battles" in 8 Mile (minus the race issue and Oscar buzz -a buzz which reduced to a hum in the face of Chicago .) We caught up with Rob Webber of the comedy troupe Johnny Lunchpail, who told us he also has "a real job in a real office in a private-equity firm." Worst part of improv? "The worst is when we ask the crowd for a suggestion, and someone screams out, 'Go home!'" Favorite part? "When you get to be inanimate objects -those are my favorite. Like if you're a refrigerator, and you get to make your face light up whenever the door opens. I mean, what's it like to be a fridge?" Ask Lara Flynn Boyle … me- OW!! Speaking of psycho ballerina outfits, in our opinion, dating is a lot like shopping at H&M: You absolutely dread going. You have to get in there early, before all the good stuff is taken. It's completely draining and yet you always go back, because the potential for finding something great is too overwhelming not to. Today, the Learning Annex gets hopped up on "Coffee Dating: Connecting Through Circulating and Percolating," finally proving, perhaps, the widely held suspicion that New Yorkers prefer drinking coffee to ever having sex again. Today, musical chairs meets elimiDATE as singles have 10-minute one-on-one coffee chats before moving on to the next prospect. At the end of the rounds, everyone hands over their "hottie lists" to a hostess, who then sets up the matching couples. Nice idea in theory, but the potential for that last-kid-picked-for-dodgeball feeling is sky-high.

[The Big Apple Improv Festival, the Little Theater at the West Side YMCA, 5 West 63rd Street, east of Lincoln Center, 8 p.m., 353-7716; Coffee Dating, 1 p.m., 371-0280.]

Sunday 2nd

O.K., is 2003 the Year of the Sheep, or the Year of the Goat? Because we're getting conflicting answers, and our fact-checkers are starting to get grouchy . So today's the second day of the Chinese New Year, and apparently there's more to Chinatown than fake Rolies and "I § New York" baby T's. Who knew? The Chinese New Year in Chinatown tour explores the area, including Quong Yeun Shing, the oldest store in Chinatown, which now sells tchotchkes and random goods. "They even sell bus tickets to Foxwoods!" said Seth Kamil of Big Onion Walking Tours. "My favorite is the open-air market on Mott Street between Hester and Grand, above Canal. That, for me, is the epitome of Chinatown-as opposed to two blocks down, where there's a McDonald's, Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs with faux Chinese fronts," he added with smarty-pants disdain. "It's the exact same fish you buy at Citarella, except the salmon is $4 a pound instead of $16. The only time I won't buy it is in the heat of summer-I stay away from fish in general during July and August." Glad to know that, bucko. After spending the day getting lost on the Lower East Side, head to the Ziegfeld for the premiere of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (a concept we seem to have mastered all on our own), starring the always-effervescent Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey , who was last seen (or not seen, in this case) in Reign of Fire . Cue the bongos!

[Chinese New Year in Chinatown, the southwest corner of Canal and Lafayette streets, 1 p.m., 439-1090; How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days premiere, Ziegfeld Theater, 141 West 54th Street, 6 p.m., by invitation only.]

Monday 3rd

When not busy being kidnapped, those hedge-fund guys can par-tay! Tonight, Hedge Funds Care holds its annual benefit to raise money for the prevention of child abuse. "Hedge funds are one of the most philanthropic industries in the country," said the charity's founder, Rob Davis . "Most of the world doesn't realize it, because hedge-fund people tend to be quiet and not beat their chests about it." ( Thump, thump, thump .) Mr. Davis and 800 of his closest friends will carry out an (unhostile) takeover of the Marriott for a night of dinner and dancing. Expect Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and both Morgans (J.P. and Stanley), as well as sports figures like Walt Frazier. Tables start at $12,000. Note to hedge-funders: Don't forget to save some money and invest in a panic room …. Meanwhile, down the road at Cipriani, the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) is honoring Anna Wintour, Richard ("Razzle-Dazzle") Gere and Lorne Michaels at a gala hosted by bespectacled Saturday Night Live darling Tina Fey , with a list of fancy event chairs like Kenneth Cole, Oscar de la Renta, Tommy Hilfiger, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors and Ralph Lauren. Question: How will Ms. Fey resist the temptation to poke fun at Ms. Wintour? And if she does resist that temptation, how can she ever again call herself a self-respecting cast member of a show whose lineage includes John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and Chris Rock? Meanwhile, bespectacled lit-chick Joyce Carol Oates (one of the few celebrity scholars Princeton didn't poach from Harvard) presides over the 92nd Street Y, where Lan Samantha Chang ( Hunger: A Novella and Stories ), Jonathan Safran Foer ( Everything Is Illuminated ) and Barry Raine ( Where the River Bends ) will read. Ms. Chang called us from her home in Cambridge, where she teaches fiction-writing to earnest Cantabs, and talked about the nomadic life of an academic. "Oh man, I think I moved five times to four different states," she said. "I lived in New Jersey for a year and I loved it, which people think is so strange. I do love Cambridge. I also loved Iowa City-people should fly there to do their errands!" Ever commit academic masturbation (a.k.a. assign her own books) ? "No, but I'll think about it now that you said that! Maybe after they get their grades!"

[Hedge Funds Care, Marriott Marquis Hotel, 1535 Broadway at 46th Street, 5:30 p.m., 967-0322, ext. 341; amfAR gala, Cipriani, 110 East 42nd Street, 6:30 p.m., 806-1753; New Voices in Fiction and Memoir, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 8 p.m., 415-5500.]

Tuesday 4th

Male feminists (menimists) head to the 92nd Street Y to cruise Nerve.com ladies at a lecture by intellectual pin-up/academic pit bull, Camille Paglia, who tries to recapture some of her 1990's heat by setting her critical gaze upon the gals of Hollywood in contemporary culture. ( Anna Nicole, start running now. We're giving you a head start.) Meanwhile, men who like their gals in a more supine state of mind bid on the celebrity-designed platinum heart pendants on public display at Sotheby's for a "Women with Heart" charity auction. Designers include the indefatigable Christina Applegate , Gisele Bündchen (check to see if it has a Leo-induced crack down the middle), Penélope Cruz and everyone's favorite political scientist, Barbra Streisand.

[Women with Heart, Sotheby's, 1334 York Avenue between 71st and 72nd streets, 10 a.m., 606-7000; Camille Paglia: Images of Women in Hollywood, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 8 p.m., 415-5500.]

Wednesday 5th

One bad boy, two good girls: So Hunter S. Thompson has published a new book, Kingdom of Fear , which has received tepid reviews at best , so here's our advice to Mr. Fear and Loathing- why not write a diet book, as an argument that if more Americans lived as you do, they'd live longer and look pretty darn good? Tonight, he signs copies of his latest tome at Barnes & Noble Union Square. If you prefer galas to gonzo , the Museum of Television and Radio is honoring Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett, who these days look eerily alike in a "Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bridget Fonda in Single White Female " kind of a way.

[Hunter S. Thompson book-signing, Barnes & Noble/Union Square, 33 East 17th Street, 7 p.m., 253-0810; Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett Gala, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 301 Park Avenue, 6:30 p.m., by invitation only.]

To be less than entranced was deeply disappointing. I can recall as if it were yesterday being introduced at Exeter to A Shropshire Lad by the unforgettable H. Darcy Curwen. For most of the ensuing decades, until the World According to Greenspan would finally wear away the last vestiges of my capacity to sustain romantic illusion, Housman sat on the table next to the coziest, deepest armchair of my soul. Not only was it bracing verse, it had its uses in the cause of venery. Indeed, at one moment in the course of our conversation about Invention , my friend and I looked at each other with a wild, gleeful surmise and simultaneously observed how ironic it was that, considering how helpful Housman's poetry had been in getting us and thousands of other young men laid in the century following its first publication, it never got the poet himself laid.

This is a point, a sad point, that Mr. Stoppard might have chosen for his play's emotional center, in preference to showing off what he knows about Jowett, Pollard, late Victorian newspapering, etc. To paraphrase a famous line from Dickens, "he do the pedants in diff'rent voices," and he does it very well. But all this nimble skipping around the edges of a situation rich in human (and not merely epigrammatic) possibility strikes this playgoer as the dramaturgical equivalent of an expensive dry hole. It is, as John Simon observed in his New York review, "too clever by three quarters." It is why I, practically alone, it appears, found Arcadia all but unendurable. It's intoxicating stuff, but hollow somehow: a panoply of words as gaudy as an Inca feathered cape hung on an armature of not very much.

Actually, there is another play that Mr. Stoppard might have written–that he might still write–which occurred to me when I was doing a bit of Housman looking-up a few days after seeing Invention . As anyone who's seen the play or read the reviews must know, while an undergraduate at Cambridge, Housman conceived a passion for a classmate, Moses Jackson–an agony of feeling that went unresolved by completion or fulfillment. It was this longing that, in the summer of 1887, unleashed the poetic urges in the emotionally clenched Housman that led to A Shropshire Lad.

These urges would not make themselves felt again for a quarter-century, until 1922, when Housman heard that Jackson was dying in Canada of cancer. The muse kicked down the door of the Cambridge college study in which the Kennedy Professor beavered away at his studies of forgettable Roman writers and took Housman by the heart. Later that year, he would publish Last Poems ; in a prefatory note he observes (writing this in Jamaica, I am working from not-very-accurate memory) that he did not expect to be revisited by the emotional excitement of 1895, but it seems to me he was. Among the poems published in Last Poems was "Epithalamium," begun a rough quarter-century earlier to celebrate Jackson's wedding–which Housman did not attend, nor seem to have been invited to.

This means that Housman would have been writing Last Poems in Cambridge at almost the exact same time as, 80 miles to the southwest in London, T.S. Eliot would have been putting the finishing touches on The Waste Land , the work which by common agreement is the gravestone for the gut-it-up Victorian era for which Housman's verse is both celebration and elegy. What a pairing! If ever there was a made-for-Stoppard juxtaposition, wouldn't it be these two men, dry in a dry season? The invention of love and its disinvention! And the next logical step for the author of Travesties , which took its inspiration from the accident of destiny that located Lenin, Joyce and Tzara in Zurich in 1915.

(At this point, I must confess that it's a juxtaposition of the sort celebrated by Nancy and Edward Sorel in their marvelous First Encounters of a few years ago. Since I'm prey nowadays to one "senior moment" after another, it's possible I got the idea from them–but as I'm an ocean away from my library, I have no way of checking. So if I've inadvertently pinched the notion from the Sorels, I apologize.)

Whatever one feels about Mr. Stoppard's emotional hollowness, there's no denying his work is smart. Smart in the fashion of another émigré to English, Nabokov, which is also to say: sometimes exhausting, but usually worth thinking about.

This column has always plumped for "smart" as–generally–a good thing. The wonder of Dame Edna was that it was so smart, especially in its touches, in Barry Humphries' little throwaway asides. Gilbert & Sullivan is smart; at one point in Invention , Oscar Wilde comes in the character of Bunthorne in G&S's Patience , and the patter aria he sings from that operetta is more on point than, and every bit as clever as, any of the millennial verbal confectionery that comes before or after. Smart–in a word.

The contest between smart and dumb these days is riveting for us spectators, and conflicting for people caught in the middle. One of the problems Tina Brown's Talk is faced with arises from what I see as a basic internal conflict: It's a pretty smart magazine, editorially, that's trying to sell itself to advertisers who want dumb. The former think contents, the latter think cover, so you end up with Heather Graham's cleavage, so to speak, shilling for some intelligent, interesting stories–which only leads to audience confusion, an 18 percent newsstand sell-through and a really vicious business cycle.

Even when it misses the mark, smart is O.K. Dumb is not. The other night I found myself thinking, "Broadway audiences must be the stupidest in the world." Prompting this reflection was something called Stones in His Pocket , which I had allowed myself to be dragged to in flagrant spite of an injunction delivered years ago by my late father. At all costs, he abjured me, avoid anything that hints of Irish whimsy.

By and large, I have–and with a broadened definition that includes Riverdance and anything written by the brothers McCourt (although I did read the page in Malachy's A Monk Swimming that mentions me). Excluded, obviously, are Yeats, Joyce, Tullamore Dew, the prose of my colleague Terry Golway and the great Irish golf courses. Anyway, there I sat, watching two medium-talented Irish gentlemen pretend, not very convincingly, to be the different characters in a sort of Celtic amalgam of Sweet Liberty and that David Mamet movie about the movie crew disrupting a small Vermont town, listening in disbelief as the audience pounded its palms into hamburger with riotous delight. For this theatergoer, as an entertainment value, Stones is something you'd pay, oh, $4 to see in a church basement if a relative were in the cast. Dumb.

Watching it, I wondered if maybe I've lived too long. There was a time it seemed we asked more of art. If something came on as smart, we wanted it to be really smart. If its pretensions were scaled somewhat lower, we wanted it at least not to suggest that we–its audience–were idiots.

Ah well, so it goes. Let me close by wishing myself a happy birthday. The day this is published, I will turn 65. A big birthday, one from which a man looks back. In my mind's eye, I see that Exeter classroom and Darcy Curwen, looking for all the world like Major Hoople, reading out loud from A Shropshire Lad , and then I ponder all the eyes I've gazed longingly into, all the times I've felt compelled to recite "On Wenlock Edge, the wood's in trouble / His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves …" and I recognize sadly that those moments are gone, that they're mere paving stones in the roads that cut through the Land of Lost Content, "the happy highways where I went / And cannot come again." Somehow, looking at one's shiny new Medicare card doesn't cause the heart to turn over the same way.

I also know some women who tell you all the wondrous accomplishments of their offspring and omit from their conversation the anxieties, the less-than-perfect reports, the blemishes on records, the common wounds of parenting that wear away the heart muscle and turn brain cells to milk curd. This puffing up makes other women sorry, wince, turn green at the gills and is one of our petty social sins that must lie somewhere in the footnotes of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not bruit about the accomplishments of thy children." Nevertheless, I can't contain myself. Last week I attended the Harvard Law School graduation of one of my daughters.

The sheriff of Cambridge called the meeting to order. We were sitting in the hot sun and had been waiting for an hour and a half as the graduates filed into the yard-so many black robes, bag pipes and English hymns; mothers in African dresses with reds and greens and silver stripes; a Japanese woman in the row ahead of ours with a flowered robe and a belt with a flap of folding fabric at the spine that prevented her from leaning back in her chair; a few rows forward another mom and dad, she with spiky purple hair and he in a black T-shirt with a biker tattoo on his arm; preppie dads in bow ties; and mothers like me, smiling shyly at one another, holding our cameras on our laps. In our section (Section 8!), we were all parents of any-minute-to-be lawyers. There was the usual speech in Latin. There were the expected Anglican hymns. There was the presentation of the graduates of one school after another by the deans. There was a proper way this thing was done and the very properness, the force of tradition, the might of the buildings around us, the power of the words and the huge numbers of souls gathered there moved me like a storm over the ocean. I admit, behind my sunglasses, there were tears in my eyes. When the dean said that he was presenting the lawyers for their degrees in "the favoring presence" of the gathering, I assented. I was the very essence of a favoring presence.

When their turn came to cheer themselves the divinity school graduates raised little halos, the business school graduates raised hundred-dollar bills, the law school students waved silver plastic sharks by their tails. My heart beat so fast I searched the corners of the crowd for a waiting ambulance. Sighting none, I ordered my offending organ to slow down. A graduate of the School of Public Health gave a speech. She was from Nigeria. She had survived a war. Her father had told her always to defend the defenseless, and she had dedicated her life to doing just that. I was moved by her words. Actually I was moved by just about everything, so tender was my state. I was restored to my normal critical stance when a graduate male talked about giving up the Harvard handshake for embracing friends and learning to hug one another. Ah, what have we feminists wrought? The graduate address is no longer about conquering the world or changing it but about human touching-E.S.T. victorious, pop visions floating like sugar plums in the hallways of the academy. Ugh. At least this particular young man is unlikely to drop the H-bomb on civilian populations.

Then we had lunch at tables in the law school yard in front of the library. I took picture after picture of my graduate with her flowers, with her father, with her friends. The dean of Harvard Law School, Robert Clark, spoke of "the wise restraints that make us free." Whoever said that lawyers were not poets? There was some talk of Justice, of democracy depending on the rule of law, and I believe that. I know that lawyers are not heroes in our culture. Still, I am a believer. We attempt the rule of reason, creating a society that can protect its citizens in all their dealings (even their wheelings and dealings). Reason-as it dances, as it swings, as it turns inside out-is as beautiful a phenomenon as rainbows and snowfalls and birds in flight. Reason is power, and I am delighted my child has it in her grasp, and I am delighted that the education she received has shaped that power into a useful tool. What exactly she does with it is her own business. I am the admirer, the home country from which this explorer set out. I am content. I am proud to have known this Harvard Law School graduate when she was just a newborn with a tuft of black hair on her small, not yet bone-hard head.

Added to my pleasure was the constant spinning, throughout the ceremony, of my father in his grave. He was a lawyer who had said only ugly women wanted to be lawyers. He had said that we didn't have the mind for it, that it was unnatural. The gold tassel on my daughter's cap waved like a thumb in his eye. Spin on, Daddy, the deed is done. I know this is not nice of me. I should let bygones be bygones and be more gracious in this vicarious victory. But if I were that nice I would have to let go of all the grudges, the malicious thoughts they give rise to, forget the pinpricks of a lifetime-and what then? I would be a lump of sugar to feed to the horses. I would be a pancake on the table of life. Pass the syrup.

I told my daughter that she had made me happy. She said, "No, I didn't. I just mitigated your sense of tragedy." Oh. Now this is true enough. I am one of those who habitually anticipate the worst, who live with other sorrows that should be pushed aside but can't always. I am one of those who are more blue than rosy. I am of the immediate post-Holocaust, A-bomb-in-my-sky generation. I do not believe in the goodness of man or the salvation of the soul. Somewhere in my head Albert Camus is always crashing into a tree and someone with a machete is ever lurking in my garden. My daughter has observed me fairly. I cannot say that fairness is what one wants in one's daughter's observations, but there it is. And the truth is, her graduation mitigates-oh how much it mitigates, how very mitigated I feel.

Oh, Evil Eye, blink just this once.

There are many ways to love The Great Gatsby , and sometimes I feel I've run through them all: avid worship of the rich, romantic prose; cool appreciation for the lean structure; awe at the enduring power of the Gatsby myth, now synonymous with the promise and corruption of the American Dream. In graduate school, I concocted an elaborate interpretation of the novel based on the writing of a French literary theorist (René Girard); and later I began and quickly abandoned a novel that was unabashed, unrelieved homage to Gatsby . More recently, in deference to Moby-Dick , I stopped saying that Gatsby is the greatest American novel–I called it instead the most perfect American novel.

And now here's Trimalchio , the novel as it was when F. Scott Fitzgerald sent it off to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in October of 1924 (the title, an allusion to Petronius' Satyricon , is one of several, including Trimalchio in West Egg , proposed by the indecisive author). This early version is Gatsby before the final fitting: That gorgeous pink rag of a suit is baggy in places; in that soft, rich heap of beautiful shirts, some have collars that are too loose and sleeves a touch too long. Without the benefit of the final stitching and unstitching, Trimalchio sometimes sags. There are startling weak moments when we catch Fitzgerald indulging himself, or supplying the reader with flat-footed explanations, or simply losing the rhythm of a key scene. The flawless first chapters are already in place, and also the famous, high-flying ending. Memorable lines are missing, and the plot unfolds more stiffly–but mostly it's our beloved Gatsby . The poor fit–the rumpled look–can't disguise the muscle of a masterpiece.

Two letters from Max Perkins to Fitzgerald are included in the Cambridge University edition of Trimalchio ; they are enthusiastic and intelligent, tactful and to the point. Perkins urged Fitzgerald to help the reader's eye focus on Gatsby; he wondered whether the blank mystery of Gatsby's wealth shouldn't be partly illuminated, if only with "the suggestion of an explanation"; and he proposed that a little of Gatsby's hidden past be disclosed before the crack-up, before the gush of confession in the penultimate chapter.

Fitzgerald took Perkins' suggestions and worked a series of small, beautiful miracles. Want to see Gatsby more clearly? His smile, entirely absent from Trimalchio , flashes unforgettably in Gatsby : "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it … It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor."

The author did more than merely follow his editor's advice: He tinkered almost everywhere. Already on the second page he made a deft, poetic substitution, changing "the abortive sorrows and unjustified elations of men" to "the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men"–I like the echo of abortive sorrows in shortwinded , and how that brief flutter of air does its sorry best to lift elations .

In The Crack-Up there's a letter Fitzgerald sent to his friend John Peale Bishop soon after the publication of The Great Gatsby ; in the letter, Fitzgerald writes modestly about his ability to edit his own work: "I'm afraid I haven't quite reached the ruthless artistry which would let me cut out an exquisite bit that had no place in the context. I can cut out the almost exquisite, the adequate, even the brilliant–but a true accuracy is … still in the offing." To me it seems that he cut from Trimalchio with thrilling precision. His pruning made a huge difference: Gatsby became a marvel of compression, its lavish prose exactly controlled.

Two contiguous examples. Gatsby shows up at Nick's weather-beaten bungalow in his gorgeous car (weeks later, with Daisy behind the wheel, this same automobile will kill Myrtle Wilson; newspapers will call it the "death car"). In the final version, the two-sentence description of Gatsby's vehicle is at once lush and tight: "It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and super-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town." In Trimalchio , those two sentences are separated by a line of dialogue. Gatsby makes a vulgar boast: "'Handsomest car in New York,' he informed me. 'I know it's pretty gay, but what's the use of riding around in a big hearse?'" This doesn't jibe with Gatsby's habit of forming "elegant sentences" or his strained attempt at "correctness"; the bragging is redundant and batters too brutally our sympathy for Nick's prodigal neighbor; and the hearse (heavy foreshadowing of the "holocaust" to come) is redundant, too: Nick and Gatsby pass another hearse, this one "heaped with blooms," on their way into Manhattan.

In the early version, once they're on their way, Gatsby asks Nick a bald question: "Have you ever had what's known as an affaire de coeur?" This sounds the wrong note: Gatsby should have no interest, even faked, in the love life of others, and he shouldn't be trotting out French phrases. Nick's answer disappoints, so Gatsby tries again: "I'll have to begin in a different way. Let me ask you this: What's your opinion of me anyhow?" In the revised version, the same scene begins with just the right jolt: "'Look here, old sport,' he broke out surprisingly, 'what's your opinion of me, anyhow?"

On the whole, the Gatsby of Gatsby talks less–and is more often "surprising." In Trimalchio he tells Nick, "'I might be a great man if I could forget that once I lost Daisy. But my career has got to be like this–' He drew a slanting line from the lawn to the stars." It was only later that Fitzgerald invented for him the mind-boggling pronouncement about Daisy perhaps loving her husband when they were first married: "'In any case,' he said, 'it was just personal.'" Most of what Fitzgerald cut from the novel isn't bad at all–some of it's even "exquisite." But what he added (without any prompting from Perkins) is priceless.

The Cambridge edition of Trimalchio is for scholars and Fitzgerald fanatics: Only if you know the finished text very well is it rewarding to read an early version. And unfortunately, the Cambridge edition will likely disappoint its target audience. It begins with an astounding bit of carelessness, a short chronology that gets two dates wrong (both are clearly typographical errors, but in a scholarly edition that's worse than shoddy). And the introduction is breezy and vague about the scope of the changes Fitzgerald made. The editor, James L.W. West III, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University who has also produced "original" versions of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt , doesn't offer, for example, to compare the word count of Trimalchio and The Great Gatsby .

But at least Trimalchio has shown me a new way to love Gatsby . In my teens I identified with the characters: In heady, hopeful moments I was Gatsby, though mostly I was Nick–"within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life"– and on a few sodden occasions, I was Owl-eyes, the drunk who admires the "absolutely real" books in Gatsby's library, the only guest at the rain-soaked funeral. Now I play the part of Scott Fitzgerald. Or anyway I audition: I comb the finished text as though I'd just been sent galley proofs; I look for further cuts, a change here, a fix there–"a true accuracy." (As though I could succeed where Fitzgerald thought he'd failed!) Like the Dutch sailor who beholds the fresh green breast of the new world, I'm compelled into a vast aesthetic contemplation: I dream of The Great Gatsby as it might have been, greater still–

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Adam Begley is books editor of The New York Observer.