Cindy Adams makes the rounds. (Photo: Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center)

INT. MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY — EVENING CINDY ADAMS is standing with a friend among a crowd of hundreds, surveying the black-tie attendees at the PEN Literary Gala, who include Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, Jay McInerney, Jennifer Egan, Candace Bushnell, Joanna Coles and Peter Godwin.

Ms. Adams is wearing a splashy, graphic print jacket and a bun atop her head. A stream of partygoers greet her. She is approached by the Transom and asked how to work a room.

MS. ADAMS
The first thing you do is ignore Salman Rushdie. Because there’s no party he’s not at.
THE TRANSOM
Oh my goodness. Okay. Did he do something?
MS. ADAMS
No. He’s just everywhere.
THE TRANSOM
You’ve been doing this a while. How do you identify celebrities in a room full of writers?
MS. ADAMS
I am hoping some of these people will recognize me.
I look for a few celebrities—Molly Ringwald is schlepping around here—and whoever else I see. I will tell you, however, that these writers do not dress well.
Take a look at this lady. (Points to a woman across the room.)
You see that big behind and the big arms?

LADY #1, a slender, attractive older woman smiles and heads straight for Ms. Adams.

LADY # 1
I could not believe that Nora died two months after she gave me that prize.
I mean, didn’t she look good that day?
MS. ADAMS
She did. She would not let anybody know.
LADY # 1
We were so close. We always celebrated our birthdays together.
THE TRANSOM
Were you close with Nora Ephron, Ms. Adams?
MS. ADAMS
I didn’t go to her place for Passover, but we knew each other.
THE TRANSOM
Nora Ephron is really having a moment.
MS. ADAMS
She will last for a little while. Everybody is ‘Nora! Nora!’
Which is why Tom Hanks will win something.
(Leans in toward The Transom.) I have no idea who this lady is.

In the background, writer Susan Orlean walks past New Yorker editor David Remnick, who is standing near Salman Rushdie. LADY #2, a brunette in a sparkly white dress, leaves Mr. Rushdie's side and approaches Ms. Adams.

LADY #2
Excuse me. My dad is such a big fan of yours. He’s got a King Charles Cavalier.
He told me, years ago your dog ran out, and he grabbed it, because he's such a big dog lover.
And you wrote him a thank-you note. Do you remember him? ...In a Bentley?

MS. ADAMS
Yes! Yes, I do! He never sent me a note!
LADY #2
You never gave him a return address. You just said, "Thank you, Cindy."
MS. ADAMS
I work at the Post! He could have found me there ... Whose dress are you wearing? It’s gorgeous.
LADY #2
This dress was made for me by Roberto Cavalli years ago. It fits. I’m shocked.
MS. ADAMS
Look at that figure! I hate you. Go away from me!
LADY #2
Let me tell you. I’m 45 years old. I have a 19-year-old. I’m disciplined. I’m a vegan...
I had to tell you for the sake of my dad. He’s not a public person.
He’s a private businessman. He lives in the Galleria. He’s in Fisher Island most of the time.
MS. ADAMS
When he comes back, he can buy dinner. I will have it with him.
LADY #2
He would love that... I know that Salman is my boyfriend.
He’s a good man. I'm a woman, not a child.
I'm not gossip. I'm a mother. (Disappears into the crowd.)
THE TRANSOM
That was Salman Rushdie’s girlfriend?
MS. ADAMS
I have no idea.

Ms. Adams then takes the Transom by the scruff of our silk jacket and walks us around the room.

MS. ADAMS
Look at that lady in green. With her breasts hanging out like anybody wants to touch them!
THE TRANSOM
Do you think people do or don’t want to touch them?
MS. ADAMS
No! Nobody does. I’d rather have a bagel than touch her things. Look at this one.
The pants don’t go down to the floor, and her crotch is very visible.
She’s got a bag that nobody would wear anywhere. On Pitkin Avenue they would refuse it.
THE TRANSOM
Pitkin Avenue, where’s that?
MS. ADAMS
It’s on the Lower East Side. Do you know Delancey?
Do you know Rivington? What are you, gentile?

Ms. Adams nods toward a guest in a loud summery print.

MS. ADAMS (CONT.)
Look at that one.
THE TRANSOM
It’s like Lilly Pulitzer died or something.
MS. ADAMS
Very good! That’s one in a row for you.
Look at that bag. They carried those during the war!
THE TRANSOM
What are you wearing, Cindy?
MS. ADAMS
It’s old Armani. It’s $4,500 three years ago. Look at my pearls.
I don’t believe in poverty. It’s not my thing.

Dinner bells begin to chime. Guests make their way to their tables. The Transom starts to part ways with Ms. Adams. We thank her for her time.

MS. ADAMS
Just don't quote me being too vicious!

Illustration by Kyle T. Webster.

A few weeks before the premiere of The Carrie Diaries on The CW, The Observer drove to Connecticut to meet the “real Carrie Bradshaw,” who now lives by herself on a small farm with two large poodles.

Candace Bushnell is not an easy woman to find. After several wrong turns on a chilly, overcast Tuesday, we found ourselves driving up a small dirt road in the middle of nowhere (technically, Roxbury, Conn.). A sharp right, and we were in the gravel driveway of what appeared to be a steeply pitched farmhouse. In a puffy blue parka, bomber hat yanked over her ears, the slight blond figure bounded down the steps of the barn, calling away her dogs and exhorting us to park somewhere else so she could get her car out. She seemed so unnerved by our arrival that we weren’t even sure she was the woman behind the cultural juggernaut Sex and the City.

“I’m one of those people who don’t get lonely,” Ms. Bushnell, 54, told The Observer later in the afternoon. “I like being alone. I write and I read. I’m not interrupted. Friends live nearby.” She’s taken up dressage riding at a nearby stable, which houses her German Warmblood, Mr. Winters.

There was a time when Ms. Bushnell more closely resembled her famed alter-ego. Raised in Connecticut, an hour away from her current home, she arrived in New York, arms open, after selling a children’s book to Simon & Schuster at age 19.

“I would literally go up to people and say, ‘I’m a writer. Can I write something for you?’” She remembered. “I wrote for this paper called Night Magazine, which was mainly just a bunch of pictures of people at Studio 54. I would do little interviews and profiles.”

Ms. Bushnell’s darkly satirical 'Sex and the City' columns, written for this newspaper when she was in her 30s and already established, read more like the savage humor of her friends Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis than those fictional musings of Ms. Bradshaw. Still, it was easy to confuse Carrie and Candace. They both had Mr. Bigs. They had friends named Miranda and Samantha. They were smart, savvy and knew everybody. If the ’90s in New York had to take on a single voice, Bushnell-as-Bradshaw was as good an option as any.

But at some point—around the time her show became a hit, it seems—the personalities split. Ms. Bushnell retreated. Asked if it was strange to see her creation become such a cultural touchstone, the writer shrugged. “I was traveling a lot when that happened,” she said vaguely.

Carrie Bradshaw, however, never left New York (except for that one time she went to the Middle East). Her legacy lives on in anyone who has ever smoked a cigarette in a Patricia Field knockoff and blogged about guys. Her apparition hovers over every “girlfriend brunch.” Her spirit possesses every college girl who still clutches onto her identity by declaring that she is “totally a Carrie!” (Or a Samantha, depending on the time of night.) She does not age, lose her New York celebrity status or suffer the effects of a recession and a media winter.

And thanks to Candace Bushnell and HBO, we can still fantasize about being Carrie Bradshaw, even when the real Carrie Bradshaw no longer does.

Despite leaving us with the taste of its terrible big-screen sequel film in our mouths, the SATC franchise fantasy is as strong as ever. Not only in The Carrie Diaries, a high school prequel which premieres next Monday on The CW, but in HBO’s show about four women—headed by a self-obsessed writer—trying to make it New York.

Before the first season of Girls had even premiered, creator/writer/producer/actress Lena Dunham was forced to answer for the show’s Sex and the City-ness. Despite the unending, indistinguishable line of quirky detectives who live on USA, and despite HBO/AMC/Showtime’s boundless well of misanthropic and misogynistic anti-heroes (Walter White, Rick Grimes, Tony Soprano, Dexter, Don Draper, etc., etc.), it was implausible—nay, impossible!—that there could be a second popular show about women, sex and urban life.

Rather than bristle, Ms. Dunham embraced the comparisons. As she told Laura Sullivan on All Things Considered, Girls owed a lot to the series, “not only because [Sex and the City] carved the space for women,” but because “the girls this show is about probably moved to New York three-quarters because they watched a Sex and the City marathon and thought, like, ‘I want me a piece of that.’”

Since similarities were inevitably drawn even before the cameras rolled, Girls set about in its premiere episode to prove that it existed in a post-Bradshaw world. In the pilot, flaky NYU student Shoshanna Shapiro was exactly the kind of young woman Ms. Dunham had described; a SATC obsessive whose dorm room was plastered with posters for the film Sex and the City ... arguably the furthest, most consumer-warped product to come from the original Bushnell series.

With that wincingly painful lack of self-awareness that would go on to define the show’s unique tone, Shoshanna described her cousin as “a Carrie, but with some Samantha aspects and Charlotte hair. That’s like, a really good combination.” She continued, oblivious to her cousin’s (and the audience’s) dismay, “I think I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes? Sometimes my Samantha side comes out. And then when I’m at school, I definitely try to put on my Miranda hat.”

Girls wasn’t about to mock Sex and the City—the way 30 Rock once did, with Liz Lemon telling four lookalikes, “SHUT UP! That’s horrible!”—but it wasn’t above savaging the very-real stereotype of women who still walk around trying to find their identities in four characters who haven’t been on television for almost a decade.

So why are the women of Sex and the City so ingrained in the city’s cultural subconscious and stamped indelibly on its soul?

Maybe it’s an age thing. Sex and the City certainly did provide role models for young women who grew up believing that becoming a glamorous, famous writer was as easy as moving to New York and finding three friends with different hair colors. Just as plucky Mary Tyler Moore did generations before, Sex and the City proved that we all were “gonna make it after all.”

The Daily Beast’s Rebecca Dana began her career by following in Ms. Bushnell’s footsteps, becoming a society writer for The Observer directly out of college. More than once, she wrote about her mixed feelings toward the franchise.

I started watching the series as a wide-eyed Pittsburgh teenager and was quickly seduced by the whole fantasy. Carrie Bradshaw became a totem in my life, a lure to the city so powerful that I’m now embarrassed to think about it.

After growing up on a diet of SATC, is it any wonder that young women like Ms. Dana and Ms. Dunham are still reflecting and refracting a cultural zeitgeist that no longer exists?

Because there are no two ways about it: the New York of Carrie Bradshaw and the gang is gone. It was pre-recession programming, and the signs of excess wealth—the shoes, the clothes, the endless parties, cabs and brunches—were everywhere. Even if out of our immediate grasp, that lifestyle seemed within reach. Somehow, we were convinced that a woman working off of Carrie Bradshaw’s salary as a columnist (as she started out) would be able to stock a closet with Manolos in her Manhattan apartment.

But today? Forget about it. It’s impossible to give voice to your secret Carrie aspirations—or, even worse, socialite Charlotte—without immediately feeling like kind of an asshole.

With the second season of Girls premiering one day before The Carrie Diaries, it’s doubtful anyone is still comparing the dark, unredemptive, messy tone of Ms. Dunham’s creation to the chirpy, pun-obsessed world of Sex and the City. As Peter Stevenson, who edited “Sex and the City” at The Observer, told us, “Girls makes SATC look like Downton Abbey.” It was as much an iconic snapshot of New York in the ’90s as Bonfire of the Vanities and Wall Street were of the ’80s.

And that’s how we arrive at The Carrie Diaries. Stuck in its era and unable to move forward without drastically changing its protagonist’s lifestyle, the SATC franchise had to rewind. The show, based on Bushnell’s 2010 book, takes place before Bradshaw ever moved to the city and scavenges the picked-over bones of ’80s nostalgia to bring us the story of Carrie’s formative years.

The “origin story” idea doesn’t really work. The show so clumsily belabors its ’80s milieu that episodes have more pop-culture references than a VH1 flashback. (Space Invaders! Madonna! Interview magazine!) And woof, the early-Bradshaw metaphors: “It’s then that I had the realization that I had just lost my innocence, my virginity. And not to the guy I had hoped, but a different man. Manhattan.”

It’s not a bad show—its premiere showed promising chemistry, and AnnaSophia Robb does a serviceable pre-Sex-Bradshaw. But maybe actress Freema Agyeman, who spoke on the red carpet during the New York Television Festival, said it best: “The best part is the fun costumes!”

“I know some people think it’s a cynical move,” showrunner Amy B. Harris told The Observer by phone. “‘Oh it’s a franchise, you’re just trying to wring some more money out if it.’ But this is a time of my life I feel so strongly about, it was my life. My hope is that women will want to go back to their experience.”
Ms. Harris recognized the irony of The Carrie Diaries now competing with a show like Girls for an audience. “Lena told me Girls wouldn’t exist without SATC,” she said. “I’m totally prepared for the comparison, but I would be lying to say it wasn’t a concern. I hope people will stay with [The Carrie Diaries] because they feel like its their own.”

Ms. Bushnell herself might not be among them. “I really relate to Girls,” she told us. “I feel like it’s what my 20s were like.”

A common theme in The Carrie Diaries and Summer and the City (Ms. Bushnell’s sequel-to-the-prequel novel) as well as the author’s own self-narrative is the conviction that one could come to New York and make it as a famous writer. Not out of sheer willpower or hard work, but because of destiny.

“I do think there’s something in people’s DNA,” Ms. Bushnell pondered while we made some coffee and settled in. “The decision to leave your small town and leave your city, that’s a certain type of person.”

By way of explanation, Ms. Bushnell asked us to consider the lowly ant: most of them, she said, lived and worked in the colony. “But the colony would die if there weren’t ants that ventured outside their little box,” she said. “The human population would either die or be living in a dark age if some people—the right ones—didn’t move to big metropolitan areas and bring us all culture.”

This is not the story, of course, provided in the TV show The Carrie Diaries. If anything, that “certain type of person” that Ms. Bushnell described was Lena Dunham’s stubborn Hannah Horvath, who moves to Brooklyn from Michigan and founders in underemployment. Much like Ms. Bushnell, Hannah has minimally tried her hands in other types of work, but is convinced that her path is that of a writer. Specifically, one who only writes about her own life. She’s “a voice! Of a generation!”

Too bad Carrie Bradshaw has already claimed the title as the voice of every generation. About as far away from a banquette at Moomba as one can get, Ms. Bushnell acknowledged the grip her creation still holds on American culture. “Of course they’re saying Girls is like Sex and the City,” she said dryly. “It’s a TV show involving women.”

- Rob Lowe, Stephen Colbert, and the cast of Modern Family will be filling in for Robin Roberts on Good Morning America this week while the ABC host undergoes a bone marrow transplant. Hey, we'd take a soggy piece of bread over last week's substitute, Jessica Simpson.

- Would you like to go bowling with Paul Rudd, Rashida Jones, Denis O'Hare, John Oliver, and not one but two stars of a Law&Order franchise? Of course you do. We don't even need to mention that the whole thing's for charity. You were already sold.

- Candace Bushnell keeps having to resettle the same old lawsuit with former manager (and alleged Stanford inspiration) Clifford Streit. She keeps giving him money for his part in helping her get Sex and the City on HBO, and he keeps telling her its not enough. She should just stop and ask herself, WWCBD?

-Alec Baldwin's dream Portlandia role: "A meat salesman with all kinds of charts and graphs of the loins and the sections of the pig and the cow and the organs." Just no pig, please...we're keeping kosher this week.

Oh, please, honey. I don't want one townhouse. I want TWO. (Courtesy of Daily News)

The human embodiment of our very own Carrie Bradshaw might be moving to Brooklyn. Oh, how the times have changed since the writer lived in her rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side in 1994.

Now, the Observer has chased Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, her husband, around town tracking their real estate decisions. (It wasn't that hard; the Observer created her mind.) The real estate desk might have even blown her cover with 88 CPW, but it appeared that she never really left the West Village.

Perhaps fleeing out of the scope of our all-seeing real estate eyes, the couple is reported to be closing on two townhouses on State Street in Brooklyn Heights, the Daily News noted. The two townhouses will be combined to create a 7,000 square foot "urban mansion." The current asking price is $18.995 million, precisely what the famous couple paid for their West Village townhouse a little less than a year ago.

There are still some outstanding remarks, however:

“They loved the West Village but wanted something more private, laid-back and discreet,” says a source familiar with negotiations.

She wrote about her sexcapades for years and now she wants privacy?! Blasphemy!

“The price difference between the West Village and Brooklyn Heights is sometimes two, three, four times the amount. That’s why even big names are deciding to live here. It’s an easier financial commitment.”

If only she actually had the rent-controlled apartment on the UES.

But wait a minute – Candace Bushnell never wrote about moving to Brooklyn in any of the columns. This isn't allowed!

mewing@observer.com

AnnaSophia Robb, who simply has to wonder. (Getty Images)

Hope she's practicing looking pensive while typing--the actress AnnaSophia Robb, most recently of the film Soul Surfer, has been picked as the young Carrie Bradshaw in the CW pilot The Carrie Diaries, based on Candace Bushnell's young-adult Sex and the City prequel, reports TV Guide. We really were rooting for Elizabeth Olsen.

The Bradshaw Redemption

While the Sex and the City prequel film is still up in the air, rumors today abound that the CW will be coming to rescue young Americans from having to think about relationships in anything other than metaphors about chocolate. Think: a TV adaptation of The Carrie Diaries, Candace Bushnell's teen tale of the iconic Bradshaw during her senior year of high school. Obviously, this show will be produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, they of Gossip Girl and The O.C. fame. Who knows the inner-workings of rich teenagers better than those two.

And yet...we have reservations. The Carrie Diaries have become hit books for the misguided YA set who, when they aren’t dreaming about making out with vampires, plot their future marriage to Chris Noth’s eyebrows. But we can't help but remember the ill-fated Valley Girls:  Schwartz and Savage's attempt to create an origin story for Gossip Girl's resident old person, Lily van der Woodsen.

We can just imagine Schwartz and Savage using the discarded designer nouns from Valley Girl and just replacing them, Mad Libs-style, for The Carrie Diaries. To give you an example, we've taken some choice quotes from Candace's original "Sex and the City" column and slightly reworked them to fit into the network's model of what 80s teen culture looked like.

Sex and the City: June 26, 1995
"Bad things can happen to city women when they come back from visiting their newly-married-with-children friends in the suburbs. First, on the train back, one feels a yearning for those green yards, waxed Acuras and adorable children. Then, revulsion sets in, pure disgust at the lack of interesting people, artists, musicians. Instead, you get all those Stepford Wives, and their sniveling brats and fake wood paneling. Gimme shelter—in Bowery Bar."

The Carrie Diaries – Episode 2
"Bad things can happen to city women when they come back from visiting their friends with newly-remarried moms in the suburbs. First, on the train back, one feels a yearning for perms, waxed Lotus Esprits and jelly bracelets. Then, revulsion sets in, pure disgust at the lack of interesting people, artists, musicians, and all the other weird kids from Saint Ann's. Instead, you get all those step-dads, off-brand Valium, and fake IDs that say you were born in 1984. Gimme shelter—at Tunnel."

Sex and the City: Sometime before 1996
“I moved into a friend’s apartment,” said Bunny, “and about two weeks later I met Dudley at Chester’s—that East Side bar for young swells. Within five minutes of meeting him, I was annoyed. He was wearing spectator shoes, a trilby hat and a Ralph Lauren suit...He tells bad jokes, makes fun of my pony-skin designer shoes. ‘I’m a cow, moo, wear me,’ he said. ‘Excuse me, but I believe you’re the big beef,’ I said. I was embarrassed to be seen talking to him."

The Carrie Diaries: Episode 3
"I’m sleeping over at a friend’s apartment,” said Bunny, “and about two weeks later I met Dudley at Limelight—that Chelsea spot for young kids who liked the Peter Murphy post-Bauhaus scene. Within five minutes of meeting him, I was annoyed. He was wearing Perry Ellis racers, Ray-Bans and a Z-Cavaricci sweater...He tells bad jokes, makes fun of my pony-skin designer shoes. ‘I’m a cow, moo, wear me,’ he said. ‘Excuse me, but where’s the beef?’ I said. I was embarrassed to be seen talking to him."

Sex and the City: March 25th, 1996
"There are things worse than being 35, single and female in New York. Like: being 25, single and female in New York.

It’s a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It’s about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong clothes, having the wrong roommate, saying the wrong thing, being ignored, getting fired, not being taken seriously and generally being treated like shit."

The Carrie Diaries – Episode 4

"There are things worse than being 18, single and female in New York. Like: being 16, single and female in New York.

Sophomore year is something few seniors would want to repeat. It’s about going to second base (under shirt, above bra) with the wrong homeroom teacher, having the wrong parents, being ignored, watching your homeroom teacher get fired, not being taken seriously and generally being treated like shit."

Too bad this show is too late to cash into the 80s nostalgia vibe...maybe if Carrie had grown up in the late 90s, they could run Diaries to compete with Degrassi time-slots on Teen Nick.

Either way, Michael Patrick King, the Sex and the City creative force who directed both movies, is otherwise occupied with the upcoming premiere of CBS's 2 Broke Girls, about two young women struggling to make their way in the hostile city. Sounds like an unofficial Sex and the City prequel, in spirit at least!

UPDATE: Ms. Parker's rep tells us that "The Daily Mail's story"--which cites an unnamed source--"is false." Ms. Parker's TV ventures remain limited to new creative endeavors like the Bravo reality show Work of Art.

ddaddario@observer.com

Mr. McInerney recalled early memories of Ms. Bushnell, back before her Observer column made her rich and famous: "She was always the funniest person in the room! I couldn't predict for sure that was going to lead to international fame. I used to take her home at 3 a.m. and carry her up the stairs to her walk-up apartment!"

And what of Ms. Bushnell's new tome? "I don't think it was really written for me," he said, then backpedaled. "I'll read it, but it's a young adult novel!" He might want to, as a youthful version of a Sex character supposedly based on Mr. McInerney appears in the book. "I'm flattered to be a source of inspiration for someone as astonishing as Candace," he proclaimed, going on to lament those who take issue with being a source of literary inspiration. "I can't tell you how many people have dined out on saying that I've based this character on them and then somehow bitching about how I didn't get it right. Frankly," Mr. McInerney poked the Transom in the chest, "I think most journalism is more full of shit than fiction is."

Asked how his life at The Wall Street Journal as a wine columnist is working out, Mr. McInerney laughed: "Beats having a real job!"

At one point, a distinctive smell wafted by. "The pot-smoking section's on the other side of the balcony if you want to check it out," Mr. McInerney noted helpfully.

Alexandra Kotur learned this the hard way. When the ex–Vogue style director was prepping her departure for Town & Country (to be replaced by Observer contributing writer Chloe Malle) she sent an email to more than 500 close friends to let them know. Normally in such cases, bcc is the proper form. That way, everyone gets the message without their contact information falling into the wrong hands.

Ours, for instance.

Ms. Kotur used cc instead. Her email was promptly forwarded to the Transom, and we opened it to discover a who’s who of fashionistas, socialites and political players, with whom we simply cannot wait to start corresponding.

“Typically, I do choose to blind copy my contacts with mass emails,” Ms. Kotur told us, over email. “Chalk it up to human error.”

Her folly, our fun. We learn, for instance, that while Lauren Bush has a gmail address, her cousin Barbara maintains an antiquated AOL account. Also: Candace Bushnell still goes by “evilminkster”?

Daphne, Hugo, Peggy and Sebastian Guinness all make the cut, as do Bree, Gigi, Avi and Tinsley Mortimer. There’s also a court’s worth of royals, including Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia and Prince Pavlos and Princess Marie Chantal of Greece.

A few more choice names from the Kotur Club: Camilla Al-Fayad, Dennis Basso, Manolo Blahnik, Emma Bloomberg, Tory Burch, Francisco Costa, Dree Hemingway, Carolina Herrera, Valerie Jarrett, Luke Janklow, Caroline Kennedy, Michael Kors, Diane Kruger, Robert Gibbs, Stephanie LaCava, Dylan Lauren, Sandra Lee, Baz Lurhmann, Steven Meisel, Margherita Missoni, Wendi Murdoch, Stavros Niarchos, Narciso Rodriguez and Rachel Roy.

Now, they wait for the spam.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

The party was in honor of Riverkeeper's initiative for cleaning up the Hudson River, and despite the fact that Bill Clinton, Sting and Trudie Styler were supposed to be there, they didn't turn up for the cocktail hour-maybe because the waiters were passing around glasses of fresh, clean water instead of something stronger. Singer Rufus Wainwright dodged The Observer. "I just need some water," he said, and headed straight for the bar, which had a full liquor selection.

We had a longer chat with Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton, who led The Observer to the bar, where he grabbed an orange-juice-and-sparkling-water concoction and snagged a few peanuts. Mr. Lipton had been in the news lately for his appearance on Charlie Sheen's speaking tour. The whole thing had been a surprise to Mr. Lipton, who'd just planned to be an audience member at the New York show: "Charlie tried to go on while the crowd was booing, and he whispered in my ear, 'Ask me just one.' Neither he nor I had planned it." The one question had been "What's your favorite curse word?" "I figured that was appropriate." How was the after-party, at Southern Hospitality? "We were there until 2:30 a.m. Best soul food I've ever had."

Mr. Lipton, wearing a pinstriped suit and gold patterned tie, is ready to move past Mr. Sheen-he's looking forward to the change in the season! "Springtime to me means my wife and I go to the Hamptons," he said. "My study, at my home, faces the gardens, and the magnolias are out, two of our flowering fruit trees, and I think, 'Honest to goodness, it's spring!'"

Not everyone is as lucky as Mr. Lipton. Author and former Observer writer Candace Bushnell expressed a wish that there were more hours in the day to enjoy the weather! "I'd like to go bike riding. It's my fantasy! At least sometimes I take my dog to the dog run," she said. Looking a bit resigned, her husband, Charles Askegard, ceded his seat next to Ms. Bushnell so that she could fill us in on her spring plans.

How does she balance her book contracts-which she told The Observer include two forthcoming young-adult novels and two books for grown-ups? "I have a lot of ideas! I feel like I have too many ideas," Ms. Bushnell said, gesticulating wildly and nearly tipping over her glass of Champagne (no water here!) onto the fish needlepoint. "I wish I could write for more hours, but after six or eight hours, you got to get up!" In blue sequined Nicole Miller, Ms. Bushnell finally made her exit. "I have to have my fantasy bike ride!"

We bumped into the very outdoorsy Joan Hornig, co-chair of the event and jeweler to the stars. "We kayak-or rather, we double-kayak," she said, gesturing to her husband, the financier George Hornig. "He does the paddling, I do the relaxing!" What was she wearing? "What? You mean, like, Spanx?" When informed we were asking after the brand on her back, not her lingerie, she replied, "I don't know the clothes! They just came out of my closet!" As her husband looked on, she pulled her striking gray hair out of the way and pulled down the back of her dress for The Observer to peer at. Double R ... "Oh, Rachel Roy!"

Finally, we arrived at the man with a sense of the party's purpose. Paul Gallay, the official Riverkeeper, passed on several appealing hors d'oeuvres as we spoke-a clear sign of his seriousness of purpose. His title indicates that he's the man responsible for keeping the Hudson clean and for reporting any legal breaches. He's been on the job nine months, "and I'm still wet behind the ears," he said, making or missing a pun. Did he still bother going fishing, exploring, biking along the river, given that his job was to guard it? "Give me a busman's holiday any day," he said. Looking out onto the Hudson as the sun set, we couldn't disagree.