GREEN IS THE COLOR OF MY TRUE LOVE’S PRESS RELEASE:

FREE RIDE: Hiring ad agencies is for sissies when you can crowdsource your ideas for peanuts, or in Doritos’ case, deadly-orange chips. Doritos saves millions by not paying to produce their Super Bowl ads each year, instead offering peanuts to Joe Blow and his drinking buddies for creating their own 30-second salutes. With that kind of ultra-cheap national publicity, no wonder Doritos’ press release proclaims their “Crash the Super Bowl” contest to be “one of the most highly anticipated Super Bowl announcements of the year.” And other companies are getting into crowdsourcing their advertising—gleefully jumping on the budget bandwagon to exploit the creativity of the American people (who are mostly underemployed these days, after all). For example, Ford’s Lincoln division—clearly not getting enough buzz by having the same name as a major motion picture, asked Jimmy Fallon to create a 60-second Super Bowl spot based on suggestions from his seven million Twitter followers. Smart thinking, since Lincoln itself has a piddly 170,000 followers. If you have a twisted mind and mastered iMovie, A&E wants you  to submit your 15-second opening title sequence for its forthcoming series, Bates Motel, The Grand Prize winner receives a $2,500 check and a shot at making the actual sequence. Yep, that’s a mere 2,500 smackeroos to generate stories in all the TV fanboy blogs, as well as The New York Times and Boing Boing, for the announcement part of the contest and probably another round when the Grand Prize winner is announced, with no guarantee their idea will even be used. That's pocket change for more buzz than Daniel Day-Lewis's Oscar hopes.
FLACKERY INDEX: 2

WILD FOR BUCKWILD: You have to hand it to MTV–they are masters of exploiting the lowest common denominator to incite outrage, turning it into a buzz frenzy they cart to the bank. With Jersey Shore  thankfully wrapping up, MTV has found fresh meat with teenagers in the small mountain town of Sissonville, West Virginia. Without having even seen one episode of the forthcoming Buckwild (or learning a lesson from Chris Christie’s  blasting of  Jersey Shore), state senator Joe Manchin fell into MTV’s PR trap by sending an angry letter to the network president: “As a U.S. Senator, I am repulsed at this business venture, where some Americans are making money off of the poor decisions of our youth.” That tirade, sure to stoke even more curiosity from the American public, was published in The Washington Post, The Wrap, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, ABCTVNews, and even broadcast as the butt of a joke on Jimmy Kimmel Live! While most producers cringe at negative reviews, MTV execs are probably secretly hoping that this is just the start of the Buckwild bashing season. FLACKERY INDEX: 3

TAKE MY LAST NAME, PLEASE: It was just dozen or so years ago when the dot-com bubble gave us some of the most inane publicity stunts ever conceived. Remember when a small Oregon town accepted 20 computers, a free web site and some chump change to change its name to half.com for a year? Dog sock puppets in TV ads and faces tattooed with the names of dead Internet companies? Good times. Enter Jason Sadler, whose circa 1999-type human billboard stunts have enabled him to build an entire business over the past few years called iwearyourshirt.com, where companies buy daily sponsorships of t-shirts that he and several other people around the country wear. His latest trick: auctioning off his last name for one year on www.buymylastname.com, in what he decribed to Adweek as a “unique marketing opportunity.” Beginning January 1st and throughout 2013, Jason will be known as Jason HeadsetsDotCom everywhere from his driver’s license to his Facebook page, all for a winning $45,500 bid. Too bad the winning bid didn’t come from ShamelessAttentionSeeker.com
FLACKERY INDEX: 3

RESIDENT EVIL: Christmas time is when record companies package those beautiful box sets for you, average citizen, to spend  $30 or $40 on CDs you probably already own. However, the biggest box set of all arrives on Christmas day, and you’re more likely to find it in the appliance section of Sears than the music department of Best Buy. Avant garde rock group The Residents are celebrating 40 years together with their “Ultimate Box Set” that comes in a 28 cubic-foot refrigerator. It’s an “extremely limited” box set: only 10 of them have been made. Band lead singer “Randy Rose,” dressed in a creepy Santa costume, says in the twisted infomercial video that the package contains “563 songs...40 vinyl LPs, 50 CDs, and dozens of singles, EPs, DVDs, and CD-ROMs ... over 100 products in all!” Oh yes, that includes one of the band’s trademark eyeball masks. All for the low, low bargain basement price of $100,000, the same price as a Maserati Quattroporte, fitted with an eight cylinder V90° 4,691 cc. engine. You bet that got the attention of the poor music geeks at Spin, Paste, Artist Direct, the Guardian, and Pitchfork, but alas, nobody at Bloomberg, Fortune or Forbes, where they can actually afford such luxuries.
FLACKERY INDEX: 4

APOCALYPSE COW: It’s the end of the world as we know it—let’s eat! If the revelations about the Mayan calendar’s end come true on December 21, there’s no better time to throw what may the world’s last publicity stunt. If you’re going to have a special last meal on that fateful day, T.G.I. Friday wants you to have it with them. Bring your loved ones to one of the many dining locations holding a special “Last Friday” celebration with Mayan Magaritas, and a special menu featuring pretzels, rib-eye steaks and whiskey cakes (“Go out with a full stomach”). Not to be outdone exploiting end times for fun and profit, Carl’s Jr. posted a photo of its mega-deadly 12x12x12 Burger on its Facebook page, assuring diners that “If it's not the end of the world, then it's definitely the end of your hunger.” Of course, there’s no guarantee the food at these places won’t kill you before the floods and earthquakes arrive. For brilliantly exploiting doomsday as a promotional vehicle, we unwaveringly give our highest honors to these two dining chains and encourage them to play Europe’s “The Final Countdown” just before all hell breaks loose.
FLACKERY INDEX: 4

The really surprising thing is how such an old-fashioned genre as a comedy-thriller (with Serious Undertones, but not enough to frighten the horses) gets produced in the first place. Stage thrillers went out of date about half a century ago, except in England, where they still have butlers. But how the most accomplished Mr. Langella got himself into the campy mess of Match is another story. He must have liked his role, which is big.

It's very big, actually-a near monologue for long stretches of yammering about this and that. Tobi is an adorable, aging choreographer and dance teacher at Juilliard living alone in a dumpy-yet cozy!-apartment too far uptown. We know he's an adorable showbiz fruitcake because, when we first see him, he's knitting with limp wrists .

Imagine Harvey Fierstein without the frock. But let the author of Match , Stephen Belber, describe Tobi. "Tobi is a wonderfully eclectic mix of femininity and machismo-avoiding 'androgyny' as he swings manically between the two," he writes incomprehensibly in the script. "Were it not for the affectations of his slightly sing-song, Swiss-French-accented voice, you might take him for the son of a Maine pig farmer he really is."

Well, there's no arguing with that. As a matter of fact, it was almost my first thought. As Tobi minced around the stage in his baggy shorts with his wonderfully eclectic mix of femininity and machismo, reminiscing in his slightly sing-song Swiss-French-accented way about his days of wine and fromage in Monte Carlo, I couldn't help thinking there's something about this man that reminds me of the son of a Maine pig farmer.

Has the world gone totally insane, you ask? Kindly turn to page 192 for the answer.

Anyway, Tobi fusses a lot-too much, really-over a bowl of potato chips and another bowl of Doritos. He can't make up his mind about them. He's nervy . He's expecting guests. So he cuts his fingernails meticulously with a nail clipper-which the audience found as side-splittingly funny as the knitting and the business with the Doritos. Then, if you please, he carefully places the cuttings into a glass vase. Eeeuww! The vase is full of his clippings from les temps perdu . To be honest, the nail business put me off Tobi a lot. But, obviously, we were meant to see him as "a character," and the audience, thrilled to have another gay pet in its midst, found his fetish charmingly bizarre. But then the intercom buzzed loudly.

Warnin g : Match is not only meant to be a comedy, but a thriller. In order to avoid giving away a spine-tingling moment, those of you who are rushing to see it should resist reading on.

Hello, there! Enter Mike and Lisa from Seattle. Mike is surly and curiously explosive, but Lisa isn't. Lisa is friendly and wan. They're a youngish married couple who have come to interview the overexcited Tobi about his ballet career. Lisa says she's researching a book about the history of classical dance. But all is not as it seems.

It turns out that none of them have had sex in a century. But let's not go into that now. The sex is just a tease. The important thing is that we soon learn that Mike is a violently homophobic cop.

But Lisa isn't. Lisa presses on, interviewing the by now understandably skeptical Tobi on a tape recorder. (A previous play by Mr. Belber happens to be called Tape , but I'm sorry to say I missed it.) Here's the twist: mad Mike is obsessed about whether Tobi, of all people, had a brief fling with a dancer named Gloria in Cuba in 1959.

Why is the night with Gloria different from all other nights? It sure doesn't have much to do with the history of classical dance. It so happens that Mike is the fatherless son of Gloria. Aha! But we're not meant to know that yet. Meanwhile, outraged Tobi passionately denies the affair, as well he might. But Mike has secretly bought along a DNA sample kit. As the curtain descends dramatically on Act I, he attacks Tobi with a swab.

It was a tense intermission, I can tell you! Is swishy Tobi the father of homophobe Mike? Will the stolen swab test be a match? How will Tobi and Mike react if it is? And what's your opinion of Condoleezza Rice? So many questions, so little time. True, we long ago knew that Mike was the lost son of two-way Tobi. But Lisa didn't.

Lisa doesn't know what day it is. Poor Lisa. At one desperate point, when Mike is presumably hanging around anxiously at the swab laboratory, Tobi tries to tempt Lisa out of her wan misery with an offer of cunnilingus. I'm very relieved to report that she resisted. I mean, where would it have got her, eh? And where would it have left gay-bashing Mike, who was recently suspended from the police force for excessive violence?

In any case, mad Mike isn't really a homophobic thug. He turns out to be a sweetheart now that he's found Pops. He doesn't even know the result of the swab test yet. But he no longer cares. Tobi admits his guilty secret and even that, many years ago, he paid for an ice-hockey scholarship for Mike to go to college. Ice hockey is the poor man's ballet. Match then ends happily ever after, with weepy confessions all round.

But wait! There's a Brian de Palma cliffhanger! Just as Tobi and his proud new son and daughter-in-law are about to leave for a celebratory piece of cake at an all-night diner, a hand comes out of the floorboards and strangles the three of them. I'm kidding! It's a joke. What happens is, the phone rings with the delayed results from the swab test!

"The forensics guy," Mike explains to the others, covering the mouthpiece. " … Really? … O.K. … O.K. Well, I really appreciate it, Jim. Right. I owe you one … O.K. … Bye."

A long, extremely tense silence follows.

"Is everything O.K.?" Tobi asks anxiously.

"Yeah … I guess," Mike replies ambiguously. "What do you think?"

"I think everything's O.K."

"O.K. then … Everything's O.K. It's a match. Just like we thought."

Ray Liotta is Mike, Jane Adams is Lisa, Mr. Langella is a ham, the moon is blue, and Match was directed by Nicholas Martin.

Memento Mori

I would like to pay a brief tribute to a friend of mine-and, more to the point, a loving friend of theater-who died on March 18. Theater folk usually keep their distance from critics (who can blame them?). Joan Cullman didn't! She was vice chairman of Lincoln Center Theater as well as an independent producer, and she was one of the New Yorkers who made me welcome when I first came here from England.

For one memorable thing, she was dazzlingly beautiful. She looked like a glamorous 20's flapper with her bob of hair and warm, generous smile. She was ageless. I was always convinced that she must be one of the few truly happy people on earth. She loved to laugh so much that I can hear her now. But if a show of hers received bad reviews, you never heard the end of it.

She read this paper, and if I couldn't be positive about a new production at her beloved Lincoln Center, I used to call her the night before publication to tip her off. "Uh-oh," she'd say as soon as she heard my voice.

She was incapable of holding a grudge. "Well, I know you're going to like one of our shows soon," she said to me one time. "It's by Tom Stoppard!"

Her husband of many happy years, Joe, liked to pretend he didn't see the point of theater. "What's the point of it?" he'd tease her. "Can anyone tell me?" And Joan would sigh, "Oh, Joe. You know you loved Anything Goes ." And then he'd sing, "I get no kick from champagne" in a terrible, rumbling, rousing voice, and she'd laugh with delight until it seemed the tears would roll.

Life was always better, always good, in Joan's company.

So while we may, let us delight in loving;

No love is ever long enough.

Rue or Babalu? Why not both ? For the second year running, we missed out on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting- no big whoop , since it was about 70 degrees out and the sight of Destiny's Child in fur-trimmed hot pants just doesn't make us feel very Christmas-like, and also it seems like anytime we go outside these days there are all these people talking way too loudly -as if they're all cable-TV hosts … Anyway, another tree gets lit tonight as deeply tanned actor George Hamilton and Rue McClanahan (currently starring in The Women -or as some are calling it, The Vagina Dialogues ) flip the switch on a 25-foot-tall white spruce in Duffy Square on Broadway. We found Ms. McClanahan in the Murray Hill duplex she shares with her husband of three years, Morrow Wilson, and a semi-Siamese cat named Bianca . How did she meet her husband? "I was rehearsing a play, and he was helping the producer and the director, and I saw him the third day of rehearsal and that was it for me-and you know he fell in love that very day? And two weeks later he proposed, and we got married Christmas Day of that year, 1997. I had two houses in Los Angeles and a house in Lake Arrowhead that I had to sell; I also had six dogs, but the one cat came with us and she's very happy- a very talkative cat, just a delightful companion. She eats roses-she loves rose petals." How's The Women going? "I have a brand-new costume, I'm glad to say. I'm not wearing that pink monstrosity that made me look like Mae West on a bad day ; I finally talked Isaac [Mizrahi] into building me a beautiful silver two-piece floor-length sheath." Watch Rue and George illuminate the tree, then crash The New Yorker holiday party a couple of blocks away at Babalu ("Boom-chicka-boom," says the Zagat guide) and watch as paunchy male editors instruct their camisole-wearing, lissome editorial assistants on the proper way to pronounce " Nabokov ."

[Broadway holiday tree-lighting, Duffy Square, Broadway and 46th Street, 5:15 p.m., 221-0885; New Yorker holiday party, Babalu, 327 West 44th Street, we're not sure exactly when, 286-5400.]

By the way, is anyone else besides us tired of men with "fringe-y" haircuts …? Just asking. Anyway, we think we have something figured out about what to do if you can't afford a big, splashy premiere for your movie: throw a "private" dinner and make d*mned sure Page Six knows about it-tonight's nosh at Ada, for example, features the cast of a French flick called Brotherhood of the Wolf . "O.K., it's crazy," said a publicist through a mouthful of Cool Ranch Doritos. "It's set during the reign of King Louis XV? And it's right before the French Revolution? And it's based on this true story of something ravaging the French countryside, killing predominantly women and children-like scores of them. They think it's a wolf, but it's something like really big and scary, so they kill the biggest wolf and parade it around Paris, but the killings are still going on, so it spins out of control. It's a $30 million film that looks like a $100 million film." Just pass the Doritos, hon ….

[208 East 58th Street, 8 p.m., by invitation only, 869-7233.]

Thursday 13th

It's just not gonna stop, baby ! The holiday juggernaut continues ! First, a passel of women in black leather blazers with faux-earnest expressions hits the New York Women in Film and Television holiday luncheon- Cynthia Nixon, who also stars in The Women , is M.C.-ing. Then there's a free ornament-making workshop (pine, acorns, twigs) in Central Park-after which, if you're highbrow, you can hit a reading of Joseph Brodsky's Nativity Poems (with Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Derek Walcott ) at the Guggenheim Museum. If you're lowbrow, go to Madison Square Garden and see if troubled diva Mariah Carey -just back from wowing the troops in Kosovo!-manages to show up at the Jingle Ball Concert. (We'll save our secret theory about how Ms. Carey has been driven mad by Jennifer Lopez's success for another time.)

[New York Women in Film and Television gala holiday luncheon, Grand Ballroom, New York Hilton and Towers, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, 11:30 a.m., 838-6033; Ornament-making workshop, Charles A. Dana Discovery Center and Lenox Avenue Playground, Fifth Avenue and 110th Street, 4:30 p.m., 310-6636; Joseph Brodsky reading, Peter B. Lewis Theater, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, 6:30 p.m., 645-3346; Jingle Ball, Madison Square Garden, 8 p.m., 307-7171.]

Friday 14th

If you're like us and have finally had it with one-man drag-queen shows that bitterly bemoan the holidays, you'll sincerely appreciate the Greenwich Village Singers' Christmas celebration tonight, which includes a fervent rendition of Anton Bruckner's Mass in E minor! It's that or the eternal dilemma of New York moviegoing: big budget, big stars, shiny and over-promoted (Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky ) versus small budget, medium-star, "colorful" and over-promoted (Ben Stiller in The Royal Tenenbaums ) ; or just throw up your hands and go to the Film Forum-but then you run the risk of bumping into that guy in your office who is like 80 percent a cool guy, but the other 20 percent is irritating beyond belief ….

[Greenwich Village Singers, St. Joseph's Church, 371 Sixth Avenue, 8 p.m., 642-8176; movies, 777-FILM.]

Saturday 15th

Save New York's museums! Head to "safe" Brooklyn , still valiantly trying to be the new Nolita , and spend a measly $125 for the Brooklyn Museum of Art's holiday party-dinner, dancing and a possible sighting of Manhattan's cuddliest couple, Travel & Leisure correspondent Tom Beller and Strand-tote-bag-toting actress Parker Posey.

[Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, 7 p.m., 718-789-2493.]

Sunday 16th

Miramaxed out! More proof that Sunday is now the new Monday, which was supposedly the new Thursday, which replaced Friday …. The new Meg Ryan movie, Kate & Leopold , has its premiere and a big squishy after-party today! Who says we aren't a " showbiz insider"? The plot: A lonely 21st-century executive , played by Ms. Ryan, gets together with a 19th-century bachelor, played by Hugh Jackman -anachronistic high jinks ensue. (Lately, since we've been "cocooning," we've had the occasion to review Ms. Ryan's entire oeuvre on TBS and USA, and all we can say is-that gal sure is perky !)

[Beekman Theater, 65th Street and Second Avenue, 7 p.m., party to follow, Guastavino's, 59th Street and First Avenue, by invitation only, 869-7233.]

Monday 17th

So what if Balthazar is now just a nice place to get a café au lait in the morning? It's still the brasserie to beat! Tonight another contender, Les Halles Downtown , opens its doors- part way -with a private opening party at its John Street location. Think Brasserie Les Halles with a raw bar- slurp ! You remember rangy executive chef Anthony Bourdain from his enlightening if rather gross book, Kitchen Confidential . We called him, and he told us what we've always suspected: Americans don't eat enough organ meat. "We're squeamish about silly things," he said. "We're a prosperous nation, and we don't have the same tradition of hooves and snouts and offal-and that's the good stuff . We try to sneak in as many offal dishes on, you know, shoulders and shanks and things like that." As for his own culinary adventures, which he chronicles in his new book, A Cook's Tour : "I didn't set out to eat nothing but shock food … but when you hear that you could eat a live, still-beating cobra heart in Saigon, it's something that you don't want to miss." That makes one of us, fella.

[15 John Street, 6:30 p.m., by invitation only, 244-0622.]

Tuesday 18th

Deck the halls with boughs of Molly … Ringwald! The lip-biting actress -who gave " quirky" girls in vintage clothes some hope in the mid-1980's before she ruined herself by marrying a French fellow and becoming gamine -takes over from Gina Gershon as Sally Bowles in the cast of Cabaret today. We hear Judd Nelson is next in line ….

[ Cabaret , 254 West 54th Street, 8 p.m., 239-6200.]

Wednesday 19th

If you failed to crash the big New Yorker Babalupalooza a week ago , well, don't just sit there, woman-pick yourself up, lace on the sensible shoes, and head over to the big Harper's holiday party in Soho -or is it Nolita?-and make sure to coax cranky editor Lewis Lapham under the mistletoe! (This is not to be confused with the Harper's Bazaar shindig , silly … for that you'd need snappy shoes, a British passport and a secret password .) … (Our problem is, we're deep enough to know we're shallow, and we hate ourselves for it.)

[Rialto, 265 Elizabeth Street, 6:30 p.m., by invitation only, 420-5744.]