Debbie Harry, alien hater (Getty)

- Debbie Harry made a pretty cryptic comment on the elections, saying "I am thinking we have been invaded by aliens who have reduced the intelligence level of the entire fucking country to cement." Did she mean little green men or illegal immigrants from Mexico? And aren't aliens usually portrayed as being light years smarter than the average Joe the Plumber? They figured out space travel, how stupid can they be?

-Steve Honig finally quit the world's worst gig of being Lindsay Lohan's publicist. No, it wasn't the drugs that broke the camel's back, or the car accidents that broke the paparazzi's feet, or the career that's just irrecoverably broken. It was Michael Lohan who Mr. Honig couldn't tolerate. Which leads us to wonder...what does he think about Dina?

-Even if Tom Cruise is potentially leaving Scientology to win back Katie Holmes, he hasn't lost his litigious nature. He's filed lawsuits against In Touch and Life & Style for headlines implying that he abandoned his daughter Suri after Ms. Holmes left him.
- Justin Timberlake is really sorry that his friend made a wedding video featuring homeless people as a present.

- Jessica Simpson's dad is not gay, according to Jessica's Simpson's dad.

Everyone who was anyone attended the fashion show, which included glitter, disco balls, leather bomber jackets, and something that was described by the Associated Press as an "animal-print-meets-tropical-sunset tank dress," which is burning our brains with Miami fever just trying to consider what that might look like.

Here's what you missed from the show, if you weren't lucky enough to snag a seat.

(Photos via Getty)

There was nothing quiet about the party, which drew a capacity crowd (including a fur-coated Michael Musto and The King's Speech director Tom Hooper, spotted in conversation with actor Hugh Dancy). The dining room of the restaurant, a cozy and dark room with walls paneled in portraits of famous scenesters, drew among others famous blondie Debbie Harry and the outré designer Betsey Johnson (both of whose portraits hang on the wall). What's your favorite restaurant, Ms. Johnson? She laughed, a bit horrified. "Don't ask me that! I live uptown... it's embarrassing!"

We asked Ms. Harry, seated at the bar with a male companion and a stiff drink, the same question, and she started to laugh wordlessly. "I'm sorry," she mouthed, amidst her ecstatic outburst. She fiddled with her purse and tried in vain to compose herself. We tried again-what did she think of today's pop stars? Her male companion put a bucket of popcorn on his head and pulled clownish faces. It was just that kind of night!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

"Here's my quote," Ms. Poehler said. The night before she had bid farewell to Saturday Night Live during her Weekend Update segment. "It's a feel good story--it's the feel good existential one man show of the year."

We spoke about Smart Girls, her Web show with Amy Miles that celebrates "girls who are changing the world by being themselves."

"Amy's in that too!" Ms. Poehler said, swinging to the side introduce Ms. Miles, who had one arm in a sling. She waved at us with the other.

"We're so thrilled it's out there and people are watching it," Ms. Miles said, smiling. "We're excited that we put something out there that is like something I would have wanted to see at that age. And we're representing girls that we kind of were because you don't really ever see that."

"Just normal girls, just regular girls," Ms. Poehler said, shaking her head.

We asked if she wanted to tell us anything about SNL.

"No, no..." she said, laughing. "No, I'm just psyched to be here and this is a really cool trippy show and Michael is a good friend of mine, and is a transformative preformer and so I was happy to be even included. Look, if anybody asks you to do something with Debbie Harry, say yes. My 14-year-old version of myself can't believe that I got to meet Debbie Harry."

"Blondie like changed my life!" Ms. Momsen said, excitedly swaying back and forth at us. She was proudly wearing head-to-ankle vintage--a silver smock dress and gold bangles. Her shoes were something else, though--not vintage, she said, spinning around several times to find out exactly what they were. We noted that she looked a little Debbie-esque in general. She smiled.

Now: about Britney.

"I know! Her album comes out today! I haven't gotten it yet... But it's her birthday," Ms. Momsen said almost gravely. " I am definitely a Britney fan, I've grown up with her. Music's my first passion. She was kind of one of the first people that made me want to do that."

She added: "She had that cover of 'I Love Rock and Roll' and I was so obsessed with that song that I played it out, I wore it out. And my dad told me, 'Taylor, you have to hear the original' and then I became obsessed with Joan Jett and now it's taken on this whole..." She made circular motion with her hands. Then her publicist quickly whisked her away.

The after-party for the film was a joyous excuse for drag queens and 90's-club-scene nostalgistas to gather at the Blender Theatre and relive the nights of Don Hill’s drag-rock that became known as Squeezebox!

Looking demure in a beard and blazer, Mr. Saporito, who co-directed the drag-cumentary with Zach Shaffer, seemed relieved. “That was the biggest worry, premiering in New York,” he said, “that all the people that this movie was about were going to be sitting there in the front row. And most of them are drag queens.” But they loved it!

Debbie Harry performed, as did John Cameron Mitchell, who got much of the inspiration for Hedwig and the Angry Inch from the performers and the behind-the-scenes clique at Squeezebox! and was perhaps the worst-kept secret of the evening. (“Act surprised when he comes on!” Saporito told The Observer.)

On stage, skinny tattooed boys swayed their hips in their undies. JoJo Americo of electro-disco band, The Ones, reminisced about what Squeezebox! meant to him: “Totally being retarded and getting dressed up in whatever and running around half-naked. You know, fun stuff like that. Spitting blood. Some good old defecating. Something good.”

There was none of that gross-out stuff for Michael T, the nightlife staple and producer of the Motherfucker party, who was wearing an impeccable white three-picee suit. “You forget how great things were when it’s past. Or when it’s happening!” he said. “I think [Squeezebox!] is going to be an instant New York institution in terms of, this was a piece of New York history at the tail end of the millennium.”

Hold that thought. Mistress Formika wearing a tube dress that became increasingly see-through as the night wore on, put it more succinctly: “Let’s party, bitches!”

(Ugh, we love it!)

But we will because we love her and this video of a Blondie performance at CBGB's in 1977 is classic. Who else can pull off patchwork pants?

Vibe

Ari Horowitz spent his weekend at the beach. He has a house in Waterville, and on Saturday he rented a boat for a while, called The Queen Bee, and went out with a bunch of pals.

Over on Shelter Island, Mr. Horowitz, who is the new president of Vibe magazine, bared his buff torso to the salty winds. He was clad in red surfer shorts and wraparound shades.

“If you want to meet—you wanna reach—African-American males, it’s really the only platform you can get to,” he said, leading The Transom to think for a quick second that Mr. Horowitz intended to convert the magazine into a dating service.

“We think we can do what Rolling Stone did with Vibe: make it more of a lifestyle brand,” Mr. Horowitz said. “It should be the MySpace of the hip-hop world.”

The publisher had a posse with him, a clutch of friends, all colored by the sun, that included Goldman Sachs manager Buck Ratchford, an investor in the Vibe venture.

One of the gang walked out into the water with his cellphone in his pocket. “I’m such an idiot,” he said.

“It’s great people there, too,” Mr. Horowitz said of Vibe. “We got great people. We’ll see. Really, really good people. That’s what I’m the most psyched about—the people there are really, really solid. They’ve been incredibly receptive to having me and Eric show up. My partner Eric Gerber. ’Cause they want some life. They know we’re gonna—we’re not gonna walk in there with the attitude that we know the space. We don’t. We can’t. But we’re there to support them and create an environment where they can really succeed.”

By the Tuesday following the weekend, 20 Vibe staffers would be laid off.

—Nicholas Boston

Sucker-Punched

The party had a dress code, so men wore white, blondes wore pink and brunettes wore light blue. R. J. Williams—a child actor who worked on Magnum, P.I., Punky Brewster, General Hospital and Baywatch—would soon be turning 29.

The party, on Saturday, July 8, began as dinner for 200. It was catered by Katana at Mr. Williams’ uncle’s house north of Sunset, on Loma Vista Drive, a tucked-away, bosky Beverly Hills stroll.

Around 10 p.m., 600 more of Mr. Williams’ less-good friends began to arrive. The tennis court served as a dance floor. The bar pushed the Young Hollywood Margarita—it has zero calories.

By 2 a.m., capacity had been reached. “It was crazy,” said an attendee. “Even huge stars were getting turned away at the door. Tom Brady, Matthew McConaughey and Lance Armstrong were all waiting to get in, when a doorman told them they couldn’t let anymore guys in without girls.” Other attendees confirmed the snubs. N.B.A. stars Kevin Garnett and Shawn Marion were also turned away at the door.

Joe Francis, the businessman of Girls Gone Wild fame, was inside, however. But he wasn’t happy with all the other guests. “He grabbed this girl by the hair and was like, ‘Get the fuck out of here. This is my best friend’s party and I don’t want you here,’” said a witness. “Then her blond friend”—the source did not recall whether she was wearing pink, as per the dress code—“punched him in the eye with her BlackBerry.”

The girl and Mr. Francis had met before. She said some pretty heavy things about him.

The Beverly Hills Police Department already had six patrol cars and several motorcycles outside. Mr. Francis fled to them. Backup arrived: a fire truck, an ambulance and a K-9 unit.

Some footage from the scene outside the party was posted on TMZ.com. In that video, Mr. Francis can be heard repeatedly making the point that the “mitigating factor is my eye” and “we’ll let it be decided in court.”

Mr. Francis then got into his sparkly blue Bentley and drove off into the night. But the damage had been done. The police shut down the party.

“He did not lay a hand on her,” a representative for Mr. Francis said. “Joe would never do something like that.” His representative also provided a witness of his own, by the name of Nicole, who insisted that the “very pretty blond girl” had come “out of nowhere and sucker-punched Joe twice in the face.”

—Spencer Morgan

Beach

At the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA) Dance at Sunset, held at the restaurant of Sunset Beach on Shelter Island on Saturday, the attendees included Vanity Fair’s Bob Colacello; artists Ross Bleckner and Eric Freeman, along with dealer Mary Boone; Kim Cattrall; banker Euan Rellie, with wife Lucy and tyke Heathcliff, architect Campion Platt; and a bronzed André Balazs, Sunset Beach’s owner.

“I was just in France,” Mr. Balazs said. “I was just visiting my father, who lives in Saint Tropez.” He is, as everyone knows, of Hungarian descent. Also in attendance that day was a lesser-publicized, if amply exposed, female product of Budapest: a dark-haired former model by the no-surname moniker of Anna Blanca.

“Oh, that dramatic black dress?” Mr. Balazs said with a rise. “No, I don’t know her. I saw her, but I don’t know her.”

Earlier, Debbie Harry had performed, setting off a minor pedestrian traffic jam along narrow Shore Road.

“They’re a bit desperate for entertainment out here,” Ms. Harry said as she prepared to be driven off in a black stretch limo. “Just kidding.”

Cygalle Dias spent the weekend zipping around Southampton in something called a “smart car,” imported from Europe. The vehicle is about the height and length of an average two-seater American car’s door. It’s meant to save gas, but it also gives the rider a vague sense of being on the Continent. So says Ms. Dias, who used the boutique car (chauffeur-driven, of course) to get her to Saturday evening’s Parrish Art Museum benefit, and later the Cain nightclub, where hopefuls waiting in front of the velvet ropes whooped their approval at the sight of the diminutive vehicle.

“I just want to take care of people,” said Ms. Dias, whose first of several “healing spas”—so many new terms to assimilate—was held on Sunday at Cain House, the freshly launched Hamptons playhouse affiliated with the nightclub of the same name.

“Is that weird?”

Rosario Dawson was the hostess of the event. Deep-tissue massages were performed on party-weary weekenders before their late-afternoon drive back to Manhattan. Ms. Dawson was accompanied by her mother, Isabelle, with whom she’d partied until nearly 2 a.m. the night before at Cain—the club, not the house—and her uncle Gus Vasquez, a comic-book artist. Ms. Dawson herself is the model for a crime-fighting heroine in a new comic book named O.C.T.: Occult Crimes Taskforce.

“If you had a superpower, what would it be?” she said. “Could you fly, could you space-travel, could you talk to animals, could you have healing touch, could you read people’s minds, could you be invisible?

“My boyfriend for sure would want to fly,” she said. Ms. Dawson lives with the actor Jason Lewis, who played Smith Jerrod on Sex and the City. Mention of him turned her mind from sci-fi.

“I love it when I meet some chick who comes up and she says, ‘I love your boyfriend!’ I’m like, ‘Thanks—me, too! Back off!”

—N.B.

On August 5, Robin Shulman wondered whether you can trust a punk club over 30. (We've been wondering whether you can trust one under five. Warsaw, anyone?)

Just yesterday, music critic Jon Pareles posed the question: is it worth keeping CBGB's alive, despite being a shell of its once radical self?

"The club has been some kind of symbol for decades. The question is whether that symbolism can transcend real estate and real noise. A transplanted CBGB's would be irrevocably changed, and an artificially preserved one could be just as dicey."

Indeed, the Bowery does seem to be going the way of St. Mark's Place, if a little classier. The Real Estate remembers a decade ago when East Village kids loitered outside Coney Island High, instead of Chipotle Mexican Grill. And you walked very briskly down Rivington Street en route to ABC No Rio.

Last week, CBGB's owner Hilly Kristal won an important legal victory over payment of back rent, though still faces eviction at the end of this month. And the benefit shows featuring reunited, aging punk rockers continue on.

However, with considerably less fanfare, another downtown landmark is soon closing due to rising rents.

In September, the doors will shut on Keith Haring's Pop Shop; the Soho boutique has been selling the late artist's works since 1986.

Even if CBGB's and Pop Shop close, you can still buy the bootleg shirts on St. Marks Place and head down to the Mars Bar for some 80's New York reminiscing.

- Michael Calderone

How short and quick life is, especially today: That's the main thing I've taken away from all of this end-of-epoch navel-gazing. Life probably seemed longer back when it only lasted 50 years but didn't have modern gizmology to goose it along. A day lit by candles and torches would be a much longer day than a day brightened by Oprah and the Internet.

Even with all this reflection, some of it dark, I'm actually pretty chipper as we kiss 1999 goodbye. But the millennium does force you to do some math, and no matter how you crunch the numbers, if you are of a certain age, you realize that you're leaving half your earthly allotment in the old millennium, with but half–you hope–to be run in the new.

Something happened on a Friday morning last summer that sent me back a couple of decades, and made me feel simultaneously younger and older than I really am. I thought about this at the time, and have been turning it over in recent weeks. I was transported back to 1980, at about 2 in the morning–a Tuesday, a Wednesday. My friend Mike and I were having a beer at Max's Kansas City. I remember looking at the pictures of Debbie Harry on the staircase wall and wondering if I could have handled it if she had been our waitress. She famously had been a waitress at Max's.

As I remember it, the pictures of Ms. Harry on the wall were black and whites; she had shades on and looked very dangerous. Mike and I joked about that for a bit, then decided to call it a night. It was midweek, after all. Work tomorrow.

Then, about five or six years ago–a lifetime since that night in Max's–my wife Luci and I went to a Jazz Passengers show at some hall on the Upper West Side. The Passengers' most recent disk, with a bunch of guest vocalists, was a nice stew of songs, some arty, some avant-garde. Deborah Harry was one of the singers on the recording, and she did a wonderful job on a couple of numbers. She would be singing with the band this night at the concert.

She looked great. She paraded out with a little dog in tow. She was zaftig; I never thought I'd say Debbie Harry, or even Deborah, was zaftig, but she was zaftig. Well, so what. I was zaftig, too, or the male equivalent. You get zaftig. It happens.

She sang wonderfully, and the crowd adored her. The evening felt very much on key: Deborah, stretching, was singing this advanced, difficult music, and still hanging gracefully in the New York scene.

Young Jeff Buckley, Tim's son, sang that night, too. He was a stunningly good-looking kid, and a charismatic performer. I was sure at that moment that Jeff was on the cusp of whatever Debbie Harry had once had, and that he would be the planet's biggest thing in the new millennium, but of course he's dead now. He drowned–what? a year ago? Two?

About eight months ago at the office, I got Blondie's new disk in the mail at work. On the album cover, Deborah was a combination of the old Blondie singer and the Jazz Passengers' chanteuse: the downcast eyes and the pout, but attractive crinkles and, interestingly, some hair allowed to turn brown.

That was a nice touch, I thought. I tossed the disk aside, but after lunch took it out of its case and put it in the computer on my desk. I jacked it up as much as is possible around our place, and shut the door. It was Blondie updated for the new millennium, and since, for a pop band, Blondie was always at least a bit ahead of its time, it made some kind of sense. It seemed modern and adult. It wasn't embarrassing, like those horny-guy things the Rolling Stones keep putting out.

So last summer, I was walking north on Fifth Avenue on a Friday morning, as I do every weekday morning. I turned left on 48th Street, heading for the office. A third of the way down the block, the sound started building. It was 8:45 A.M. and Deborah Harry was singing "Call Me" on a bright, sunny day. The reborn Blondie was playing the Today show's concert series.

They sounded terrific; looked good, too. The guys had kept their hair. Deborah had clearly trimmed a few pounds and in her cat-eye sunglasses she almost (not quite) looked dangerous again. She was limbering up her arena moves, hands above the head a whole lot. The band took a break after "Call Me," then sang a song from the new disk. It sounded like it could've followed "Call Me" in any perfectly acceptable album sequence, and sounded right up to date.

The crowd was interesting. Three girls had a "We Love Blondie" sign, and I thought: Really? Then there were some families, folks my age but from out of town, with toddlers, or infants en Snuggli . Then there were … us. Most of us were dressed down for Friday, but some of us had suits and ties. All of us carried briefcases. Many of us had kids at home; all of us had homes. All of us had late Tuesday beers in our past, and vague, hopeful plans for the future. All of us had, somewhere on our shelves at home, old Blondie L.P.'s and cassettes, a copy of the group's greatest hits. All of us guys had memories of Debbie that didn't scare us anymore, but that made us smile.

She sang "Heart of Glass," and started to do that swaying of hers. I was proud of her up there.

The Today show was over, but Blondie was generous enough to stick around for one more song. A lot of the kids started leaving; with the TV cameras off, the morning had lost its meaning. Deborah sang "Rapture" and I wondered if any of the departing teens realized just how important that song was, once upon a time. No matter. I, for one, was sticking around, and so was the woman on my left and the man on my right, briefcase straps slung over their shoulders. We tapped our toes and waited for Debb … Deborah's rap. She brought it off, then tossed around that now-brown-and-blonde mane of hers. Great stuff.

The band finished "Rapture" with a proper thump, and then Deborah said, "Thank you. Have a nice day." Have a nice day.

I walked the block and a half to work, knowing I'd walk back this way in eight hours, heading for Grand Central, for Westchester. I hoped to beat it out early and get home by the time my daughter Caroline was finishing her nap. She could help Daddy water the plants.

It's December now and those plants–perennials–are sleeping. When they awake we'll have a new year, new century, new millennium on our hands.

Meantime, on New Year's Eve, a quiet one spent at home with my wife and daughter Caroline, I'll probably give the greatest hits collection a spin. It'll make me feel young or old or–probably–both.