The Reeve kids

The children of Christopher and Dana Reeve have become stars in their own right, complete with dashing looks, a Town & Country spread, and, most importantly, a charitable cause. Matthew Reeve and Alexandra Reeve Givens are among the guests of honor at tonight’s Reeve Foundation event to benefit research into treatments and cures for paralyzing spinal cord injuries. They’re joined by Harvey Weinstein and the iron lady whom he positioned for Oscar glory last year, Meryl Streep, as well as two cast members of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. (The only thing, besides charitable largesse, that New Jersey “housewives” share with Ms. Streep? The ability to speak in an impenetrable accent.)

Cipriani Wall Street, 55 Wall Street, gala reception at 6:30pm, dinner at 7:30pm, tickets and information can be found at http://tinyurl.com/8dayNov28.

Anna Wintour, Fashion's Night Out's hostess (Patrick McMullan)

Wednesday, September 7

Reever Madness

They’re making another Superman flick with some British gent—don’t they know that for screen magnetism as well as real-life heroism, the buck stopped with Christopher Reeve? The beloved screen icon, who became an advocate for the paralyzed after a horseback-riding accident, is remembered at the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s “Night for a Cure,” a fund-raising celebration of Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Month. (It snuck up on us again!) Guests are to include W’s party-bot Stefano Tonchi (apparently unthreatened by the Fashion Week storm looming on the horizon!), that crazy, stupidly lovable Julianne Moore and little-known local musician Moby. If your summer-long yen for charitable endeavors hasn’t been satisfied, stop by.

Mondrian Soho, 9 Crosby Street, 7 p.m.; visit christopherreeve.org for tickets and information.

Thursday, September 8

A Night of Torrid Fashion

Once again, it’s the night Anna Wintour devised for the hoi polloi to have a part, however small, in Fashion Week—while the even hoi polloi-er will see their evening’s progress interrupted by crowds mobbing boutiques to degrees unseen the other 364 evenings of the year. Gucci debuts its automotive collaboration with Fiat, providing silk scarves and sunglasses so that visitors may achieve that Lindsay Lohan-striving-to-be-Sophia Loren look; the polo star (is there more than one?) Nacho Figueras hosts a party at Ralph Lauren; chic lingerie boutique Agent Provocateur shows off its glamorous and scantily-clad models; and alice + olivia stage a so-called carnival (complete with Sno-cones and cotton candy, if you’d like to break your diet). The night out is spread across the city, so choose a neighborhood upon which to concentrate (may we suggest the meatpacking district, home to 63 events?).

Gucci, 725 Fifth Avenue, 6 p.m.-10 p.m.; Ralph Lauren, 109 Prince Street, 6 p.m.-10 p.m.; Agent Provocateur, 675 Madison Avenue, 7 p.m.-9 p.m.; alice + olivia, 755 Madison Avenue, 6 p.m.-10 p.m.; visit fashionsnightout.com/fno for information.

Friday, September 9

Showtime

Fashion’s big (fiscal) week began yesterday, but the more high-flying designers tend to make late entrances. (Ralph Lauren’s not showing until the 15th!) Today’s clotheshorses are still early enough that you won’t be jaded by the couture overflow—after a while, the fancy togs stop looking like art and go into the mental pile labeled “We couldn’t wear this to Starbucks.” Today’s shows include Tommy Hilfiger (we hope his delightful rebel-rapper son, Rich Hill, is in the front row!), cutesy schmatte-shaper Cynthia Rowley, and the finalists from Project Runway. Hint: don’t go if you’re a Project Runway obsessive and don’t want the ending spoiled—or if you stopped watching the show, as we did, two years ago. This fashion show is for die-hard Tim Gunn gawkers.

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week—today’s events include Project Runway at the Theatre at Lincoln Center location, 9:30 a.m.; Tommy Hilfiger Men’s at the High Line Chelsea Market Passage, 14th Street and 10th Avenue, 5:30 p.m.; Cynthia Rowley at the Stage at Lincoln Center location, 7 p.m.; visit mbfashionweek.com for information.

Saturday, September 10

Big Papa

Tonight’s the final preview of Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation of The Sun Also Rises, entitled The Select, which opens tomorrow. The company  previously produced adaptations of The Great Gatsby (an eight-hour production, in which the book was read aloud, cover-to-cover) and The Sound and the Fury. In preparation for the exhilarated exhaustion we shall feel about halfway through the expatriate exegesis, we’re writing the rest of this blurb in the style of Hemingway. This will be a good show, and we will watch it. We will go to the theater and watch the actors reading and it will be good. They pretend to be in Europe and they drink and celebrate being young and strong. They are strong actors and they have studied their Hemingway. The book they read is a good book and it is not overly long. It is about men, and also women. There is a—okay, this is too exhausting. But if you’re hungry for the tale of an impotent man and a very potent lady, and you find it too early in the fall to devote yourself to actually sitting and reading the book (that’s what November’s for!), then check out the nonparody—or self-parody?—Hemingway rendition.

New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East Fourth Street, tomorrow’s opening at 7 p.m., tonight’s preview at 7 p.m.; visit elevator.org for tickets and information.

Sunday, September 11

Ten Years Hence

The National September 11 Memorial will be dedicated today. In a ceremony featuring Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo and President Barack Obama, the name-inscribed reflecting pools officially become a part of our city. The memorial, part of a site that has, in many of its particulars, been an object of contention and debate over the past decade, is to open tomorrow, putting to rest a small part of the history of local politics. Another history—that of our processing a now-10-year-old catastrophe—remains, of course, ongoing.

The National September 11 Memorial is to be dedicated today and will be open tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; access is available from the northeast corner of Albany Street and Greenwich Street with a pass, available at 911memorial.org.

Monday, September 12

Gaga-a-gogo

We’ve had enough Gaga-on-TV for a while after her simply exhausting appearance on MTV’s Video Music Awards. (Hey, we had plenty of emergency liquor left after Irene and needed to commemorate not losing cable somehow.) The lady vamped as an unstyled New Jersey dude, Joe Pesci minus the rudimentary acting ability, for the benefit of the gossip blogs that can’t stop covering the pop star! Nevertheless, we’ll drag ourselves to the television for the special Gaga by Gaultier, not for Ms. Gaga, but rather for the chance to see the iconic designer Jean Paul Gaultier (who designed Madonna’s cone bra, back when she was the pop star testing boundaries of taste and patience) in a 75-minute special. Not to mention the fact that it’s airing on teenybopper mini-network the CW, which gives rise to more cognitive dissonance than any couture-donning chanteuse could ever hope to evoke by dressing in drag. The promotions would seem to indicate that Mr. Gaultier is interviewing Ms. Gaga, and we imagine his questions for her would be rather more perceptive than hers of him. But heaven help him if he tries to put the new, butch, dressed-down Ms. Gaga into a cone bra.

Gaga by Gaultier airs from 8 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. on the CW.

Tuesday, September 13

3D Movies With 2D Critic

Two events tonight indicate the values of storytelling in very different fashions. David Denby, the contemplative, chelonian New Yorker film critic addresses the future of movies in an address titled “Do Movies Have a Future?” (We vote yes! But then, we just loved the new Planet of the Apes.) It’s going down at the New York Psychoanalytic Society—the perfect spot for Mr. Denby to plop down on a couch after the speech and talk about all the issues he plumbed in his porn-and-bad-stocks memoir American Sucker … Meanwhile, Mr. Denby’s magazine colleague Adam Gopnik joins the heterogeneous crew of Bravo hostesses Padma Lakshmi and Gail Simmons, beloved-beyond-belief chef David Chang, and predictable insult-jock Lisa Lampanelli at an evening of storytelling about food. Each storyteller is to speak on the subject for 10 minutes, without notes—just broadly, anything that comes to mind! (Anyone seeking insight into what it’s like to force oneself to gorge on reality show contestants’ half-baked soufflés will enjoy the Lakshmi-Simmons double dose, we’d imagine.)

“Do Movies Have a Future?” The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, 247 East 82nd Street, 8:15 p.m., R.S.V.P. recommended for limited space; email admdir@nypsi.org for RSVP or information; The Moth, Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street, 6:30 p.m. doors open, 7:30 p.m. stories begin; visit themoth.org for tickets and information.

Wednesday, September 14

Museum of Modern Rock

We know we said we’d had enough of Lady Gaga, but we meant only that we couldn’t bear to listen to her speak about her theories of art and gender anymore. However, her conscription into a gallery show of pop-music-themed art—as the subject of a portrait by Bonnie Engelbardt Lautenberg, wife of New Jersey’s Senator Frank Lautenberg—allows her to do what pop stars do best: act as a muse. Tonight’s opening of RH Gallery’s “Melodymania” exhibit showcases artwork about pop music—including a new portrait of Nirvana rocker Kurt Cobain by Mark Seliger, a cleverly titled print called Violins/Violence by Bruce Nauman and a photograph by Matthew Barney inspired by Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. (O.K., in that last one the tie to popular music may be a bit conceptual.) Other musical muses channeled by the visual artists on display at RH Gallery include Ennio Morricone and Joy Division—the first time those two have been landed in the same place since our iPod! The concept of pop-inspired art may seem a bit gimmicky to non-radio-listeners—but it’s at least in tune (get it?) with musicians’ tendencies to view themselves as artists and artists’ tendencies to tap into the more venal aspects of our cultural mosaic for inspiration.

Opens today (reception Sept. 13 at 7 p.m.), RH Gallery, 137 Duane Street; visit rhgallery.com for information.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Ms. Givens, for her part, has a powerful reason to stay in the city during the summer: she's a full-time, practicing associate attorney at the esteemed Cravath, Swain and Moore firm. Her brother, Matthew Reeve, has also been keeping busy: he's in a three-year graduate program at NYU, which he'll be leaving with dual Master's degrees in film and business, and which includes an intense summer session. "I just realized, I can't take any credit for this event in any way!" Mr. Reeve exclaimed. (A companion affectionately corrected him: "That's not true at all.")

When we asked Mr. Reeve what he'd been reading, he rattled off some very dry-sounding textbooks: The Independent Producer's Survival Guide; Basic Statistical Ideas for Managers. ("Great cure for insomnia," he offered.) Mr. Reeve is well-rounded, though; he said he'd also been reading Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning. "He was a former chess champion who then gave up professional chess and started tai chi," Mr. Reeve explained.

Speaking of memoirs, we also chatted with Francesco Clark, founder of the Clark's Botanicals skincare line, who's just released his own. Walking Papers, which details both the spinal-cord injury that left Mr. Clark wheelchair-bound and his painful, remarkable recovery process, arrived on American shelves June 3, and will launch in Russia, China and the United Kingdom in three weeks. The characteristically cheerful and polite Mr. Clark described his ordeal as, all things considered, a positive thing. "I'm getting better — I'm using my wrists now. I'm involved in a research study at MIT, a robotic research study," he said. "I don't know, I forget about my injury... life has to move on. And so my summer feels like your summer."

Apart from actor Hayden Christensen, the event drew mostly gorgeous media types: we spotted Louise Roe, erstwhile Olivia Palermo competition on The City and current host of The CW's makeover show Plain Jane, along with Allure editrix Linda Wells and men-about-town Peter Davis and Kristian Laliberte. But it was Paper's Mickey Boardman we couldn't help approaching; we were drawn to his jewelry. Over a lime-green polo shirt, Mr. Boardman wore an eye-catching, oversized green bib necklace.

Fenton, maybe?, we speculated internally, before Mr. Boardman beat us to the punch. "Joan Rivers for QVC!" he announced proudly. "My mom sent them to me. This color story is 'peacock.' I also have them in pink."