More to the point, they are too much for the playwright. The techniques of Six Characters in Search of an Author are both appealing and hackneyed, and coincidentally Ms. Kron has six actors in Well. But her doddering Pirandellian device is a smokescreen that disguises the weaknesses of the play, deflating and disarming like a pre-emptive strike against criticism. Hence a character can step out of a role to dismiss Well as “fucked-up downtown bullshit”—and get away with it. The audience laughs at the playfully irreverent modesty of it all. But what if you agree with the verdict?

Ms. Kron, the popular downtown performance artist and founding member of the award-winning theater company the Five Lesbian Brothers, is sincere, but she has taken on more than a few mighty themes. Not least is the nature and mystery of theatrical illusion. But the play itself—directed by Leigh Silverman—is basically simple-minded. It announces itself and does not respond. “This play that we’re about to do deals with issues of illness and wellness,” Ms. Kron informs us at the start. “It asks the question: Why are some people sick and other people are well? Why are some people sick for years and years and other people are sick for a while but then they get better? Why is that? What is the difference between these people?”

For myself, I’m not sure that coping with allergies is too thrilling a premise for a play. Ms. Kron, though irrepressibly sunny, makes her life sound like a seminar. Her damaged mother, a former civil-rights worker who’s lying semi-comatose on the La-Z-Boy, didn’t recover from the crippling malaise that overcame her many years ago, though she has surprisingly vibrant moments. Her daughter did recover from her strange childhood allergies (and became a performance artist). But the semi-hip Ms. Kron, butch in black, never explores the issues at stake. She complains about them.

Well’s 100 intermission-less minutes are described as a “solo show with other people in it.” If so, hell is other people pretending to be children. Ms. Kron’s flashbacks to her unhappy childhood are performed by the adult cast in cartoon costumes like a noisily infantilized episode of Sesame Street. Must everything in American culture be reduced to the cute? It’s a disastrous choice for Well that trivializes very real traumas. But then, apart from the playwright’s imagined mom, the adults are portrayed as caricatures and types whose struggles with a hard, incomprehensible life seem unconvincingly stagy.

Ms. Kron is more assured as a traditional monologist. Her story of being wrapped in plastic as a child for a Fourth of July costume parade, for example, lifted the show for me. She was meant to be a geisha girl pulling a rickshaw. But her mother made the kimono out of plastic and she fainted dead away in the heat. “Oh my God,” Ms. Kron remembers her mom saying at the time, “I don’t know what I was thinking!”

And here’s the assured stand-up Ms. Kron on the pitfalls of therapy and moving away from home: “And you get some distance. And after a while you start to be able to see your family so clearly. And you think: Wow, the next time I go home I am really going to help them out. But then you go home and what you realize is that your parents live in an alternative universe where your therapy has no power.”

She has summarized in a nutshell why you can’t go home again sane. But the play isn’t nearly as good as the monologue. Or as Mom puts it as she comments wryly from her giant La-Z-Boy on the action: “She’s more used to the one-woman shows.”

“The play is not about my mother and me,” Ms. Kron keeps emphasizing with a knowing grin. Rather, it’s ironically described as “a theatrical construct” or a “multi-character theatrical exploration.” At which Mom, seen lying in a depressed doze, groans: “Oh dear Lord.”

Can you blame her? It’s a weird play. The near-narcoleptic mom—representing Ms. Kron’s real-life mom—is the star of the evening. She hijacks the play from her daughter by constantly interrupting the action from the sidelines, and we’re glad that she does. Whether by accident or by design, she’s wittier than her daughter and she’s smarter. She also acts better.

But Ms. Kron is, of course, playing herself, and she’s a limited performer with only a few notes. Jayne Houdyshell is giving us a wonderfully appealing performance as a woman with a social conscience who long ago found the pain of being alive too much. Ms. Houdyshell in her old housecoat and slippers appears schleppy, warm and intelligent. The actresses’ sense of comic timing is supreme, her unpretentiousness vivid. We want to embrace her when she wakes up and notices us—the audience—for the first time.

“Oh, hello!” she says, surprised. “Hi. How’re you doing? I’d offer you a more comfortable chair, but then where would we put the coats?”

The chairs—or orchestra seats—at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway are as uncomfortable as Jet Blue, incidentally. There’s no legroom—not like Mom’s comfy La-Z-Boy. I have little doubt that when it comes to Tony Award time, Ms. Houdyshell will be high on everyone’s list. Her utterly natural performance conveys an essential quality that Ms. Kron can only talk about. She suggests the tender mercies of a wounded soul.

Ms. Kron as herself is merely neurotic and earnest, and not unsmug. She cares about her mother, but she fails to understand her. She doesn’t “get” her. “You know what?” she says irritably to her mother after her umpteenth interruption. “Why don’t you do your own show?”

“I don’t want a show,” Mom replies a little indignantly. It was the best line of the evening. She wants to be understood, or left alone to watch ice-skating on TV. She doesn’t want to be reduced to a show. Not this one, anyway.

In every mother is a devastating critic. She describes Well lethally from the sidelines as “too small,” “limited” and “trite.”

It’s honest of Ms. Kron, at least. But I’m afraid I’m with her mom.

More to the point, they are too much for the playwright. The techniques of Six Characters in Search of an Author are both appealing and hackneyed, and coincidentally Ms. Kron has six actors in Well. But her doddering Pirandellian device is a smokescreen that disguises the weaknesses of the play, deflating and disarming like a pre-emptive strike against criticism. Hence a character can step out of a role to dismiss Well as “fucked-up downtown bullshit”—and get away with it. The audience laughs at the playfully irreverent modesty of it all. But what if you agree with the verdict?

Ms. Kron, the popular downtown performance artist and founding member of the award-winning theater company the Five Lesbian Brothers, is sincere, but she has taken on more than a few mighty themes. Not least is the nature and mystery of theatrical illusion. But the play itself—directed by Leigh Silverman—is basically simple-minded. It announces itself and does not respond. “This play that we’re about to do deals with issues of illness and wellness,” Ms. Kron informs us at the start. “It asks the question: Why are some people sick and other people are well? Why are some people sick for years and years and other people are sick for a while but then they get better? Why is that? What is the difference between these people?”

For myself, I’m not sure that coping with allergies is too thrilling a premise for a play. Ms. Kron, though irrepressibly sunny, makes her life sound like a seminar. Her damaged mother, a former civil-rights worker who’s lying semi-comatose on the La-Z-Boy, didn’t recover from the crippling malaise that overcame her many years ago, though she has surprisingly vibrant moments. Her daughter did recover from her strange childhood allergies (and became a performance artist). But the semi-hip Ms. Kron, butch in black, never explores the issues at stake. She complains about them.

Well’s 100 intermission-less minutes are described as a “solo show with other people in it.” If so, hell is other people pretending to be children. Ms. Kron’s flashbacks to her unhappy childhood are performed by the adult cast in cartoon costumes like a noisily infantilized episode of Sesame Street. Must everything in American culture be reduced to the cute? It’s a disastrous choice for Well that trivializes very real traumas. But then, apart from the playwright’s imagined mom, the adults are portrayed as caricatures and types whose struggles with a hard, incomprehensible life seem unconvincingly stagy.

Ms. Kron is more assured as a traditional monologist. Her story of being wrapped in plastic as a child for a Fourth of July costume parade, for example, lifted the show for me. She was meant to be a geisha girl pulling a rickshaw. But her mother made the kimono out of plastic and she fainted dead away in the heat. “Oh my God,” Ms. Kron remembers her mom saying at the time, “I don’t know what I was thinking!”

And here’s the assured stand-up Ms. Kron on the pitfalls of therapy and moving away from home: “And you get some distance. And after a while you start to be able to see your family so clearly. And you think: Wow, the next time I go home I am really going to help them out. But then you go home and what you realize is that your parents live in an alternative universe where your therapy has no power.”

She has summarized in a nutshell why you can’t go home again sane. But the play isn’t nearly as good as the monologue. Or as Mom puts it as she comments wryly from her giant La-Z-Boy on the action: “She’s more used to the one-woman shows.”

“The play is not about my mother and me,” Ms. Kron keeps emphasizing with a knowing grin. Rather, it’s ironically described as “a theatrical construct” or a “multi-character theatrical exploration.” At which Mom, seen lying in a depressed doze, groans: “Oh dear Lord.”

Can you blame her? It’s a weird play. The near-narcoleptic mom—representing Ms. Kron’s real-life mom—is the star of the evening. She hijacks the play from her daughter by constantly interrupting the action from the sidelines, and we’re glad that she does. Whether by accident or by design, she’s wittier than her daughter and she’s smarter. She also acts better.

But Ms. Kron is, of course, playing herself, and she’s a limited performer with only a few notes. Jayne Houdyshell is giving us a wonderfully appealing performance as a woman with a social conscience who long ago found the pain of being alive too much. Ms. Houdyshell in her old housecoat and slippers appears schleppy, warm and intelligent. The actresses’ sense of comic timing is supreme, her unpretentiousness vivid. We want to embrace her when she wakes up and notices us—the audience—for the first time.

“Oh, hello!” she says, surprised. “Hi. How’re you doing? I’d offer you a more comfortable chair, but then where would we put the coats?”

The chairs—or orchestra seats—at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway are as uncomfortable as Jet Blue, incidentally. There’s no legroom—not like Mom’s comfy La-Z-Boy. I have little doubt that when it comes to Tony Award time, Ms. Houdyshell will be high on everyone’s list. Her utterly natural performance conveys an essential quality that Ms. Kron can only talk about. She suggests the tender mercies of a wounded soul.

Ms. Kron as herself is merely neurotic and earnest, and not unsmug. She cares about her mother, but she fails to understand her. She doesn’t “get” her. “You know what?” she says irritably to her mother after her umpteenth interruption. “Why don’t you do your own show?”

“I don’t want a show,” Mom replies a little indignantly. It was the best line of the evening. She wants to be understood, or left alone to watch ice-skating on TV. She doesn’t want to be reduced to a show. Not this one, anyway.

In every mother is a devastating critic. She describes Well lethally from the sidelines as “too small,” “limited” and “trite.”

It’s honest of Ms. Kron, at least. But I’m afraid I’m with her mom.

According to the Bloomberg campaign, at least a portion of those flown in (commercial, not corporate, mind you) were summer interns who came back from college to volunteer in canvasing operations.

The campaign also paid for tens of thousands of dollars in Metrocards and Enterprise Rent-A-Cars to help out canvasers with more traditional transportation.

We were shepherded into big shuttle buses with big glass doors, where we sat making call after happy call on our cell phones or just staring stupidly into space—happy farm animals—as we were driven to the terminal. There, as if at a particularly festive wedding, we were greeted by a receiving line consisting of JetBlue executives wearing shiny blue ties, L.A. Chief of Police Bill Bratton (remember him?) with chest puffed out in a natty suit, and a curly-haired, diminutive gentleman in rolled-up shirtsleeves who kindly offered to help me find my husband. As he walked away, a couple of remote synapses clicked in my addled brain. “I think that was the Mayor,” I told a bearded fellow who had been sitting across the aisle from me on the plane. “No,” he said. “Really?” Yes, in spacy, decentralized Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, elected last May, commands approximately the same amount of recognition as the actress Taryn Manning—also on the flight, with her publicist, who must’ve been thrown into severe shock by what happened; how else to explain the over-24-hour delay in shoving Ms. Manning before the television cameras?

Alas, I was not quite so restrained. Indeed, after eschewing another adrenaline-fueled flight to J.F.K. in ­favor of a tearful reunion with my spouse, I made a quick decision: I was not going to allow myself to be spirited away back to normalcy, dinner and the indifferent mews of our two cats, but would rather plunge shamelessly headlong into the mosh pit of waiting news media, starting with John Broder, L.A. bureau chief of The New York Times, and quickly following up with an Aaron Brown–Anderson Cooper sandwich on CNN. Surrounded by these and other enthralled suitors, I felt like Scarlett O’Hara flouncing her petticoats at the Twelve Oaks barbecue. Fiddle-dee-dee—I was alive! The hot flash of the cameras felt like a mother’s kiss. That landing was scary, sure—but even scarier was how quickly I transmogrified into a total media whore. Yet it seemed a fitting coda to an ordeal that was amplified to the nth power because so many of us had, now famously, watched it on television. For those who have never flown JetBlue (and you really should): One of the company’s major selling points is the small televisions on the back of each passenger’s seat, which offer a selection of free channels via DirecTV satellite. I have complained about these TV’s before, mostly because of the ambient noise that emanates from the cheap plastic headphones they distribute; there is nothing like trying to sleep to the tinny sounds of your seatmate enjoying VH1’s Metal Mania. But this time, believe it or not, I was grateful to have them. Because guess what? After the initial alarm of seeing the very plane we were occupying filmed circling around LAX on MSNBC and FOX and ABC—a garish spotlight trained on the faulty nose-gear, the news of our possible plight crawling along, incredibly, in the same text zipper as Hurricane Rita—the testimony of the aviation experts summoned by the news programs proved largely reassuring. (Too bad the information that this particular landing-gear malfunction has occurred at least seven times before on Airbus flights failed to arrive at their fingertips until two days after the incident. But that wouldn’t have made for fun television, now would it?)

To answer some frequently asked questions: What was the mood in the cabin? Um, it was tense. Very tense. Though not as bad as you might think: I tallied no screams nor frenzied clicking of rosary beads. As we glided along at 5,000 feet, there were scattered tears, subdued prayers and even jokes from a few wizened, seen-it-all-before road warriors—you know the type. I was far from being able to joke, but I did remark to one of my row mates, a handsome, clean-cut man with a wife and two young daughters waiting for him at home, that at least if I perished in a fiery inferno, there would be the satisfaction of knowing that I had conclusively won an ongoing argument with my husband about whether a fear of flying is justified. “Small consolation,” he said. But he knew exactly what I meant.

Did you try to call anybody? Don’t be silly—everybody knows that using one’s cell phone in the air can interfere with pilots’ precious communication signals! In fact, I was enough of a goody two-shoes that, when I spotted a guy in front of me whipping out his mobile, I tattled to one of the flight attendants. With all due respect to a fear that was very real, I do feel there was an element of melodrama to many of the “just in case” farewell messages that some of my fellow passengers managed to record and dispatch to loved ones in the moments before our dramatic descent. They seemed rather unjustly to echo those sent by the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. True, thanks to that dreadful day, the television image of a plane circling low in a bright blue sky is now enough to make any of us suck in our breath. But there is simply no comparison between being on a vehicle that’s being used as a murder weapon by terrorists and one that a friendly, well-trained pilot is trying valiantly to land safely, with generous cooperation from the ground.

What did the flight crew tell you? The announcements from the cockpit were warm, yet crisp and businesslike. At first, slowly rising over the dusty hills of Palmdale, we thought the problem was merely landing gear that wouldn’t retract (much less of an issue, surely, than landing gear that wouldn’t extrude), or possibly even a mere signal glitch. Then a low fly-by at Long Beach Airport, during which our plane’s underbelly was inspected from the ground with binoculars (it seemed like a shockingly retro operation, like bird-watching), revealed the cockeyed nose gear. Is this the moment to admit that I had never really realized before that planes have nose gear? Somehow I had always thought that they alighted on their back feet—like birds. We were informed about the plans for an emergency landing at LAX, which is not a JetBlue hub, but whose facilities could better accommodate our wayward aircraft. “We’re going to do our best to make this a positive situation,” said pilot Scott Burke, inciting hollow laughter in the cabin, along with a few groans. The flight attendants, meanwhile, were busy being everything that you could possibly want from flight attendants. They didn’t shoo people to the back of the plane, as has been reported—it was a pretty full flight—but they did do some reshuffling of endo- and ectomorphs, and they passed the heavier bags to the aft overhead compartments, tossing them relay-style. To a woman—and they were all women—they were cheerful, jaunty and brave. With particular fondness I remember Judy, a brassy, blond, green-eyed dame who told of an impromptu emergency landing in Buffalo on ice—a far more harrowing prospect, apparently, because that crew had had little time to prepare. She then sardonically pantomimed the many microphones that would be thrust in our faces when it was all over. And how right she was. Judy, Judy, Judy!

In the closing minutes, we were instructed on how to use the rubber slides, if necessary, what to do if we smelled smoke (calmly find another method of egress), and to remove sharp objects and high heels from our person—in essence, a refresher course on those indecipherable little cards they stuff in the seatback pockets, where the paper vomit bags used to be. I quietly congratulated myself on having selected 13D, an aisle seat directly behind the emergency-exit row, and on wearing the sneakers and sweatpants that I had hitherto dismissed as inappropriate, “ugly American” flying wear, but adopted with the excuse of my six-month-old pregnancy. (This self-congratulation crumbled into mild dismay later on, when I realized that I’d been broadcast to millions wildly gesticulating in a $5 cotton gray tank top from Old Navy’s maternity department.)

Who informed the media? I have no idea, and have been unable to find out. What was the landing like? As we glided toward earth, pilot Burke said, “Flight attendants, prepare for arrival,” which set off a fresh round of hollow laughter in the cabin. Then there was mostly silence, except for the attendants’ powerful and surprising incantation of “Brace, brace, brace!” I am not a religious person, but I will admit to mumbling “Please, God,” several times through clenched teeth as the smell of scorched rubber—but, blessedly, no actual smoke—filled the aircraft. Time had an amazingly rubato quality during this whole experience; the hours of circling had gone incredibly quickly, while the final minutes seemed extremely slow. It was a much gentler, if hotter, landing than most. At the time I attributed the heat to anxiety, and the discontinuation of the pressurized air-conditioning. Later, I saw the footage of fire shooting under the plane. When we came to a solid stop and realized that we weren’t going to die, nor was the plane even going to break apart, the silence ended in a loud, collective, spontaneous Whooo! Yeaah! Kind of like when the Yankees win the pennant, except better, because no one was rooting for another team. As pilot Burke came out to give us a wave, there was another appreciative roar, and maybe even another after we were told we could take our belongings with us.

What is JetBlue providing as compensation? A refund, plus two free round-trip tickets to the destination of one’s choice, and service representatives bearing goodie bags filled with snacks, a free car service and little clucks of sympathy. The airline is classless, so forget about lifetime upgrades, but at a certain point I felt that I could demand just about anything—massages, male escorts, a lifetime supply of Terra Blues potato chips—and it would be mine. I didn’t want to take advantage.

I did, however, take advantage of the numerous opportunities for on-air time that continued to cascade my way. But who, exactly, was taking advantage? Good Morning America booked me, along with two other talkative passengers, at 3 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. I consented to this unholy hour partly because the studio where ABC tapes remotes is on Prospect Avenue, about half a mile down the hill from our house in Los Feliz. I figured I wouldn’t be getting any sleep anyway. At 2:45 a.m., the over-solicitous bookers sent a stretch limo—the kind they use at proms, with shaded windows and fake “stars” dotted on the ceiling. My sensible husband slept soundly in his bed as I tried to strap myself into the back seat, unable to find a seatbelt in the dark, shiny depths of Corinthian leather. Crystal bottles filled with cheap, amber-colored liquid rattled as the driver tried to maneuver this behemoth down our narrow hill, making elaborate 11-point turns at each curve. It felt more treacherous than the flight. At 5:45 a.m., a smaller car came to take me to CNN’s American Morning, where I reiterated the same things I’d said to Anderson and Aaron (I think we’re on a first-name basis now), much less articulately, I’m afraid, to Miles O’Brien. The passing hours had transformed them into bullet points. Catharsis via mass talk therapy had become simple exhaustion. As the day progressed, the phone kept ringing: the Fox News Channel, the A.P., NPR, USA Today, The Daily News, Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Tyra Banks Show(!), Le Parisienne and too many podunk radio stations and small local gazettes to count. I marveled at how deep the media’s penetration was, yet how pointillist. Via e-mail, I was hearing from friends I hadn’t spoken to since seventh grade, from locations as far-flung as Africa and South America, but it would take me well over a day to locate my own parents, who were visiting London with a new, tricky cell phone. Has communication ever been simultaneously so efficient and so inefficient?

I was taking a call from a jocular New Zealand disc jockey as my husband drove us back to where it all started, the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, where there was a big billboard advertising the airplane thriller Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster. It would turn out to be the weekend’s top-grossing movie. Sitting on a brand-new JetBlue Flight 292, we held hands and admired a cute picture of ourselves in the L.A. Times, then dozed as my image flickered across the tiny screens.

I make the point that Mike could lose this one; I also get an early look at that Kerry documentary that's causing all the fuss.

Jason Horowitz dives into the recriminations surrounding Eve Rachel Markewich's race for Surrogate, a.k.a, he writes, the "worst campaign in living memory."

Jess Bruder talks to Jon Corzine.

Matt Schuerman dissects the Freedom Center controversy, noting that the center isn't holding.

Less directly relevant to politics, two must-reads: Alexandra Jacobs's unexpected first-person tale of that Jet Blue flight that landed amid flames, and Tom Scocca's bowing to the inevitable and profiling Nick Denton.

JACOBS: We were watching TV. Everyone was watching their different programs and I happened to see a gentleman, a couple of rows in front of me... was tuned to, actually I'm sorry -- a rival network, MSNBC. I don't know if CNN is available on JetBlue, on Direct TV.

But anyway, he was watching it and I think that's when the panic sort of began to accumulate. Because people realized it was a national event or it was being treated as a national event on, you know, the same as the Rita storm, which I think made us scared.

COOPER: Yes, no one wants to be part of a national event.

JACOBS: Exactly right.

[...]

JACOBS: Yes. We couldn't believe the irony that we might be watching our own demise on television. That seemed a little bit post- post modern, if you will.

COOPER: You're spoken like a true New Yorker. And a true reporter, post-modern. I'm thinking you were the only one on the aircraft who was remarking on the post-modernist of it all.

JACOBS: Well.

In fact, Ms. Jacobs was so composed that she subverted the entire tricky reporter vs. accident victim paradigm.

The passengers on-board were watching television images of their own plane. It was, Ms. Jacobs told Mr. Cooper, a "postmodern" experience. As the emergency landing began, the flight attendants repeatedly chanted, "'Brace! Brace! Brace!,' she reported, like an upsetting prayer, or "like a mantra."
—Choire Sicha

Thanks in part to this bargain flight, Palm Beach is back, baby-in a way it hasn't been since its 1950's heyday. Sure, elderly "snow birds" are still walking two by two into Charley's Crab for dinner at 5:30 on the button, but now, across Ocean Boulevard, 20-year-old surfers are shaking the saltwater out of their hair and former Limelight regulars are pulling up their bikini straps. Worth Avenue no longer reeks of Old Spice, but Marc Jacobs and Issey Miyake. The swerving cars on Royal Poinciana are more likely to be tipsy twentysomethings leaving cocktail parties than bottle-blond biddies looking for their privet hedges. The so-called "Bright Young Things" are packing Club Colette, the Everglades Club and the Institute of Contemporary Art. They party at Trump's Mar-a-Lago, dine in Las Vegas–style restaurants at the chintzy new City Place, and raise their martini glasses at social benefits like the Preservation Ball.

Socialite Sale Johnson has a house there overlooking two golf courses and a pond. "It's a totally refreshing, regenerating kind of thing," she said. "It's a recharging of your batteries." She said Palm Beach was a nice respite from Manhattan nightclubs-which are "filled with people from Long Island and New Jersey" on the weekends-and the new money of Miami's South Beach. She'll go to the latter "if there's something special like with Jay-Z, because Jay-Z's a friend of mine," she said, "but usually I just stay in Palm Beach."

Psychiatrist-socialite Samantha Boardman agreed. "The generation that was originally going to Miami has been stolen away by Palm Beach. Maybe Miami's aging," she said. "The perception of Palm Beach as a retirement community-as God's waiting room-is gone. Now it's fun and young, with couples like the junior Fanjuls and Donahues living there full-time. It used to be the butt of everyone's joke to be wheeled around down there with the old ladies whipping out their fur coats when it's 70 degrees." Now, she said, there has been an influx of new money into the area, with "huge houses and fleets of private planes."

Jeffrey Podolsky, the New York editor of Tatler magazine and a convert to the pleasures of Palm Beach, cited "two major weddings"-publicist Liz Cohen's and Marjorie Gubelmann's-as tipping points of the last year's youth movement. "As much as Palm Beach is still the bastion of big money, old and new, some of the young beautiful things have given a face-lift to the town," he said. "Now they're in the forefront of a new society that Palm Beach needs."

Ms. de Woody said when she moved to West Palm four years ago, all of her friends were "shocked," but this year it's getting really popular.

"It's kind of like the Hamptons," she said. "People are seeing all the parties going on this year. There's a lot of money this year, and a lot of events going on." She mentioned several New Year's parties and Dennis Basso's birthday at Club Colette.

Of course, there are grumblers.

"You just have grotesque people clogging the roads," said Dirk Wittenborn, producer of the documentary Born Rich . "I saw a guy driving this vintage Aston Martin, and I see he has a giant Havana cigar, and he lit it, and he tried to flip his sun visor but caught his cigar on the visor and burned it. Palm Beach is perfect for that."

He said it was characteristic of how "all the old WASP resorts now have new rich people."

The reasons for the surge of interest in Palm Beach among New Yorkers are at least partly financial. After all, as Martha Stewart has taught us, being rich is no excuse for being a spendthrift. When Bloomberg raised the real-estate tax 18.5 percent at the end of 2002, Palm Beach became even more attractive for its lack of a state personal-income tax, and more and more young people decided to take advantage. By becoming a resident of Florida-which you can do spending roughly half your time there-a 35-year-old investment banker's income could increase by a double-digit percentage. And he'll get more bang for his buck: A mansion on Ocean Boulevard broadcasts wealth much more effectively than an apartment in the Time Warner Center that no one will ever notice.

Newcomers must first navigate the financial and social implications of being "on the island" versus "off the island." Owning a house on the island of Palm Beach still has more Old World cachet than having property in West Palm. But with West Palm expanding by the day, and with more land available, new-money New Yorkers are beginning to notice. Business 2.0 just ranked West Palm among the best places for high-paying job growth in the country.

And jetting down in a private plane or paying $800 on American is no longer the hip way to get to Palm Beach. JetBlue (average round trip: $250) has become a "winter Jitney" of sorts for the high-society set. JetBlue spokesman Gareth Edmondson-Jones said that in just the past year, passenger numbers have increased by 35 percent. The airline started with two flights a day between J.F.K. and West Palm and now has 11. Delta's discount airline, Song, is another option for low-cost flights there.

At two and a half hours, the flight takes no longer than the Hampton Jitney's trek along the Long Island Expressway. But instead of cell-phone squawkers and share-house frat boys, Neue Galerie committee members mingle with Wellington polo players, and Manhattan art dealers air-kiss Wall Street power players. "It's like the equivalent of when people knew each other on the Concorde to London." Mr. Podolsky said.

"I take pride in it," Ms. Boardman declared of the cheapie airline. "There's a sense of fun in traveling. Everyone's in the same class, eating Terra Blue chips and looking forward to their daiquiris. It's like they're all on their way to the clubhouse!"

And the JetBlue terminal at J.F.K. has become a clubhouse cafeteria of sorts, with Town and Country and Quest magazines prominently stocked at the Hudson News kiosk, flanked by palm trees. In the middle of the terminal, well-manicured hands pull Hermès wallets out of their pastel Jelly Kellys to pay for smoked-salmon cream-cheese maki at Deep Blue Sushi. Forty-year-old women smile through collagen-enhanced lips at the cheery ticket-checkers. They strut down the walkway to the airplane, past jazzy paintings of women stepping out of JetBlue jets and into a tropical setting where dashing men in suits photograph them as if they were old movie starlets.

At the beginning of a morning flight on Feb. 27, the pilot introduced one of the attractive young stewardesses.

"Abby, our resident celebrity, will be walking up and down the aisle giving out headsets," he said in a Mr. Moviefone–esque voice. "She was on ER last night. She played a cadaver. She was also on Sex and the City , but we won't be telling you what she did in that!"

Abby blushed as she walked past the rows of seats in a form-fitting navy suit, a navy polka-dot scarf tied pertly around her neck.

"Anyway, she'll be walking up and down the aisles with headsets, and she'll be tickled pink to give you one. Abby's also an excellent pillow giver-outer. She's good at blankets, too, but that's Debbie's job."

Thirty-year-old women smirked in their shearlings and single men in baseball caps craned their necks, but not a single blue-hair could be seen shaking her wattle. Later, the other stewardesses, Molly and Debbie, passed out the Terra Blue chips, chocolate-chip biscotti, Doritos and Animal Crackers. "It's easy, the service is great, and the cost of the flight is the amount you'd spend at a club one night in New York," Ms. Johnson said.

Despite the avowed eager ness of the Palm Beach jet set to get away from the scene up north, savvy businesses back home know better. WithsuchrestaurantsasCafé Boulud, Chez Jean-Pierre and Cucina Dell'Arte opening, young people in Palm Beach have more New Yorky places to go.

Lining the upper level of City Place-a cross between a Las Vegas mega-mall and Disney World-are trendy new restaurants, notably Tsunami, an Asian-flavored offshoot of East Hampton's NV Tsunami. Like many Hamptons nightspots, Tsunami functions as a restaurant by day and a dance club by night. And Resort, the 2003 summer "It" spot in Amagansett, is opening an outlet in West Palm in the spring.

At night, Palm Beach's restaurants are impromptu parties unto themselves. On Friday, Feb. 27, about a dozen prominent New York partygoers sat around a table at Bice, another restaurant with a New York counterpart. Young socialites Celerie Kemble, Lulu de Kwiatkowski, Katherine Cohen, Fernanda Niven and Boykin Curry had flown into town earlier that day and descended en masse upon the traditional eatery. Later, they went to Cucina Dell'Arte, the new hip Italian restaurant that becomes a hopping bar after 10 p.m. on weekends, where Forbes heir Miguel Forbes stood at the bar in khakis and a red sweater, chatting up two blondes.

Eighties music blared from a static-ridden sound system, but no one seemed to mind. As the night progressed, more and more men in their 30's and 40's wearing starched polo shirts piled around the wooden bar. Some ordered tropical drinks while others knocked back beers.

And when the sun rose on their hangovers, they worked through the pain and the dehydration with a few rounds of upscale golf. The first thing you notice about Donald Trump's new nearly 200-acre golf course, Trump International, which sits about two miles from Palm Beach International Airport, is the massive, gaudy crystal-and-gold-leaf chandeliers that line the halls of the clubhouse. The 240 members each paid a $300,000 initiation fee and will pay yearly fees of $15,000. Mr. Trump plans to expand the club by adding another nine holes to the course and approximately 100 members to the club.

Two million cubic yards of dirt were moved to build Mr. Trump's golf club, and an entire farm of royal palm trees was reportedly planted on the grounds. The course was designed by Jim Fazio, brother of Tom Fazio, one of the most prolific course designers in the nation. The men's and women's locker rooms have pine and mahogany lockers with engraved nameplates. The former has its own dining room and billiards table; the latter, a card room with flowing pink drapes. The head golf pro, Lee Rinker, knows all the members by name, and on Feb. 27, he waved to former Miami Dolphins quarterback Bob Griese as the gridiron great was leaving.

Golfing is one draw; horseback-riding is another. On the riding circuit, equestrians from New York fly down every weekend to compete at Wellington in the show ring or on the polo field. Ms. Johnson flies to Florida with her teenage daughter Daisy, who is a competitive rider, on a regular basis. Standing outside the show ring at the Wellington horse show, Mama Johnson described a recent dinner she attended at Jane Holzer's Palm Beach home.

"She's, I think, one of the more fun people here," Ms. Johnson said. "Last time, it was a very mixed group of people-from Jim Palmer to Gabriel Byrne to Ashley and Rusty Holzer to Mark Badgley of Badgley Mischka."

Ms. Johnson also hobnobs with the horse-showing crowd, which includes entertainment celebrities like Bruce Springsteen, Lorraine Bracco and Glenn Close, whose children ride.

"They rent here every weekend," she said.

On Saturday around 3 p.m., while the horsy set was hitting the saddle, Range Rovers and Mercedes started rolling down Dixie Highway, the shopping strip known for its antiques, and extremely popular despite its depressing strip-mall-laundromat ambiance. Two new restaurants have opened there, Rhythm Café and the Tea House, both of which have a funky décor-artsy without the fartsy. It's a place where shoppers come to play the name game as much as to browse the bamboo book shelves.

Back on the island, young women in white pants, silk halter-tops and matching Birkin bags peeked into such stately Worth Avenue stores as Isabel's and Kassatly's. With their bright contrasting colors-one promenader braved a peacock-blue sweater paired with tangerine Capri pants-the denizens of Worth Avenue looked like they had taken a Ralph Lauren or Hermès display case a bit too much to heart. They were wearing all the clothes that usually end up on the sale rack in New York-the outfits even Muffie Potter Aston might put in the back of her Southampton closet. Many of the men were dressed like little dollies, with plaid shorts matching their pink (or salmon) shirts, little neckties and peekaboo handkerchiefs. They can wear bow ties at 3 in the afternoon, whether they're 6 or 60.

Lilly Pulitzer's new line, complete with hot pants, miniskirts and tankinis, caters to the new Palm Beach bimbo, and even Steven Stolman, famous for his tablecloth-patterned Jackie O. dresses, has targeted a lower age range with his dresses' diving décolletage. "Now, instead of Belgian shoes with no socks, it's Diamante sandals and wearing Indian-inspired funky Allegra Hicks costumes," Mr. Podolsky said.

Since the 1920's, Palm Beach, however snobby, has had its reputation for harboring eccentrics. Terry Allen Kramer comes to mind. So does the late Listerine heiress Sue Whitmore.

"It has always been a sunny place for shady people, with a darker underbelly, and now the darker underbelly is very appealing," Ms. Boardman said. "Southampton and Lyford Cay is so much more of a homogenous group. In Palm Beach, there is sort of this acceptance of difference. You'll have these old farts' houses and these brand-new, hideous monstrosities right next to each other. In New York, they would never see each other."

She seemed to think about this for a second before she added, "I mean, it's not that different-it's not like the Avon lady is knocking on your door!"

But the efforts of these preservationists have infuriated some of the city's business leaders, who see the plan for the new Jet Blue terminal as an important project that will solidify the discount airline's presence in the city and will help modernize J.F.K. airport.

At the center of the fight is the T.W.A. terminal, a soaring, modernist monument to air travel and to 1960's nostalgia that has remained empty for nearly two years. Jet Blue, in collaboration with the Port Authority, wants to build a $1 billion, state-of-the-art terminal just behind the old T.W.A. structure, a plan with broad support among New York business executives, who see it as a key to the city's future as an international business center.

But the Municipal Art Society, a century-old civic group, has been waging a furious lobbying campaign against the plan. They say that the new terminal will, in effect, ground Mr. Saarinen's architectural flight of fancy.

Although the proposed new terminal would leave the T.W.A. structure largely intact, the plan has upset preservationists because the old T.W.A. building would no longer function as a terminal. The new building would encircle the old one, obscuring the T.W.A. terminal's view of the runways from its famous floor-to-ceiling windows-a feature that, in the view of preservationists, helps give the older terminal its aesthetic lift.

"By eliminating use of the terminal, you're condemning the building to a slow death," said Kent Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society. "This is one of the really significant buildings in the country, if not in the world, and it deserves a very thoughtful examination of its future."

The battle has intensified in recent weeks, because the Federal Aviation Administration is expected to issue a decision on the proposal as early as the first week of September. Both sides are aggressively making their feelings known to the F.A.A., and with the agency's decision fast approaching, passions are running high. The T.W.A. terminal's defenders have taken to comparing the plan to "cutting the arms off a baby," while the plan's proponents have been slamming the preservationists as architectural purists who are letting nostalgia stand in the way of growth and progress.

Business leaders argue that Jet Blue's expansion will spur growth in the struggling airline industry and facilitate cheap and easy transportation in and out of the city.

"The fact that the Municipal Art Society can delay a project like this with a marginal argument about historic preservation is one of the things that hampers our economy," said Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, a group of business executives. "The city's future depends on its role as a center of international travel. What they are seeking is impractical and unreasonable."

In many ways, this fight is really an intergenerational clash between two visions of air travel, pitting nostalgia for a more glamorous era of jet travel against the 21st-century consumer's demand for cheap, no-frills flights.

Modern Monument

The T.W.A. terminal, which opened in the early 1960s, was a place where people went to watch planes take off and land, a monument to modernity where they sipped cocktails and contemplated the miracle of flight. It stands as an icon to the jet age, a throwback to a time when air travel embodied luxury, optimism and the newfound freedoms conferred by postwar advances in technology.

By contrast, the driving idea behind Jet Blue, which keeps prices down by stripping away luxuries, is that flying is a practical necessity of modern life and thus should be cheap and accessible. The rapid growth of Jet Blue-it began in 2000 with one plane at Kennedy and has since become the largest domestic carrier at J.F.K.-seems to suggest that people are embracing this less-than-glamorous view of air travel.

The proposal by the Port Authority and Jet Blue calls for construction of a vast new terminal that abuts the T.W.A. structure. It would have 26 gates and 1.5 million square feet-five times the size of the T.W.A. structure. The new terminal would be connected to the old one by two connector tubes that once linked the T.W.A. terminal to its gates. The old terminal would be converted to an as-yet-undetermined combination of shops, offices and conference centers. If approved by the F.A.A. in September, the new terminal will be open in 2007.

Jet Blue executives, who expect to fund around $400 million of the new proposal, maintain that a new terminal is the only way they can accommodate their future growth. They say they already have ordered a fleet of new planes and hope to be flying more than 200 flights out of J.F.K. each day by the end of the decade. Jet Blue currently flies out of another, separate terminal at Kennedy, unlike most domestic airlines, which fly out of LaGuardia Airport.

"We need a new terminal if we're going to continue to grow in New York," said David Neeleman, the founder and chief executive of Jet Blue. "We recognize that there's a lot of sensitivity in New York because of the tearing down of the old Penn Station. But no one's saying the T.W.A. terminal needs to be torn down, and we need a new facility that can handle our growing volume."

As part of an effort to get the F.A.A. to decline the new plan, the Municipal Art Society, with the help of noted airport architects, recently developed an alternative scheme that it maintains would save the structure's architectural sanctity. This plan calls for Jet Blue to move into the old structure and use it as a terminal. The society's proposal calls for excavating underneath the terminal to update baggage-handling and security systems. And to accommodate Jet Blue's growing fleet, the alternate plan would allow for the construction of a new, more modern gate system, which passengers would access through the old structure's two standing connector tubes.

But engineers at both the Port Authority and Jet Blue maintain that the society's alternative is impractical and unworkable. They say that there's no way the connector tubes can accommodate Jet Blue's flow of passengers, and add that the old terminal's system of runways is too cramped and outmoded to handle the rapid coming and going of Jet Blue's planes. They also reject the idea of digging under the old structure.

"You can't dig under the T.W.A. terminal," said Bill Dakota, the director of aviation for the Port Authority. "The water table at Kennedy is too high for that."

In the view of Port Authority and Jet Blue executives, the new terminal represents the best way of balancing the needs of a 21st-century airport with the desire to preserve a relic of a vanished aviation era.

"No airline has expressed an interest in moving into the T.W.A. terminal as it is now," Mr. Dakota said. "Instead of the terminal sitting empty, neglected and tired, the new plan will make it the subject of a massive effort to restore its former luster and preserve it as an architectural masterwork for the future."

I thought I'd learned how to beat jet lag a dozen years ago from bicoastal movie producer Scott Rudin, who, between being interviewed and making contradictory bargaining phone calls ("We have to pay him that, he's Vincent D'Onofrio!" … "Who the fuck is Vincent D'Onofrio?") touted his method: take the 4 p.m. out of L.A., arrive in New York at midnight and go right to sleep.

Of course, such rigor is a lot easier when you're self-employed and flying first-class. In the past year, working in Burbank at entry-level TV money with two kids back in Manhattan and mounting debt, I frequently flew in JetBlue steerage and, to avoid missing even more work, took enough red-eyes to make me a Visine poster boy.

But the worst thing I lost in the red-eye commute-and in working in showbiz, where you have to read the trades, scripts, memos, spend hours online researching, and watch a lot of TV and movies-was my ability to read novels to completion. This was particularly frustrating, as I'd recently bounced back from years of new-parent illiteracy, the phase when all you're reading is The Runaway Bunny or What to Expect When You're Singing Baby Beluga on Two Hours' Sleep and you fake your way through dinner-party conversations about what you believe are obscure current events which you later learn have been on the front page of The Times for weeks.

When the TV season ended, there was supposed to be a month off, and I was looking forward to 30 straight days without getting on an airplane. Two days into it, my job unexpectedly ended, and I had to fly back several times to job-hunt; for a variety of reasons, I'm not leaving L.A. just yet, but I have at least been able to schedule a more humane bicoastal passage.

And freed from having to catch up on sleep or homework, instead of feeling compelled to check in on what "everyone" was reading (like The Lovely Bones and The Corrections ) or what I had never read in college (Faulkner), I returned to Philip Roth, whom I hadn't read past Portnoy's Complaint . Dauntingly, each one was better than the last- The Counterlife , The Human Stain , Sabbath's Theater (or, as a friend called it, Men Behaving Badly ). These were keepers, books I would want to return to for inspiration. I started buying used Roth hardcovers via the Internet, which were as cheap as new paperbacks. On a recent JetBlue jaunt, I settled into my seat, turned off the DirecTV screen taunting me a foot away from my face (how many times can you really watch True Lies on A&E?) and got cracking on Operation Shylock: A Confession .

I was thoroughly enjoying myself until I hit page 55, when I was jarred by a penciled note in the margin. I leafed ahead and discovered to my horror that a previous owner had underlined, annotated, asterisked, circled and exclamation-pointed with abandon. Not every page, but enough to be incredibly distracting.

My first response was annoyance at the bookseller, who hadn't noted (nor, likely, even noticed) this literary graffiti. I took out a pencil and began erasing furiously. But as I started reading only for notes, the reporter in me started to get curious. Who was this person?

The careful handwriting looked feminine; the fact that every Yiddish word had been underlined with a question mark in the margin led me to believe she was not Jewish. (She didn't get Roth's admittedly cringeworthy pun, "There's no business like Shoah business.")

She stopped to marvel several times that she was reading the book in August 1993, the very week when the decision was handed down in the trial Roth had used throughout Shylock , that of Ivan Demjanjuk, the U.S. citizen accused of being the Nazi concentration-camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

I too might have marveled at such a coincidence, but would I have taken the time to scribble such musings to myself in the margins? This was more than just a college student dog-earing passages for a possible pop quiz. What motivated her to stop reading and pick up her pencil? Who did she think would be reading this?

This question lingered as I paged through her notes. Though she had highlighted many compelling passages, her notes often expressed frustration with Roth's style: "PROLIX," cried one, "de trop" another. And, most memorably: "Please, Mr. Roth-one sentence!"

How weird: to be so pissed at a book's wordiness as to lodge a written complaint, yet so formal as to address the author as "Mr." Did she think some day Roth himself might come across her copy?

It was a bizarre twist on an idea Roth loves to play with-the novelist as a character, the implication of the reader in the story. This random stranger had become inextricably enmeshed in my experience of the book. Though I removed several of her question marks and quibbles, I soon set aside my eraser; some of her highlightings were indeed passages I would like to return to.

But wait. Before I returned to Roth's words, something else struck me. After she'd devoted so much time to annotating her copy, marveling at her personal relationship with it, how had it ended up in my hands? Had she gotten to the end and flung it across the room? Deaccessioned it when she moved? Had she married an anti-Semite who demanded she dump all her Roth books? Or just become a devotee of Updike? Had she broken up with someone who had tried to turn her on to Roth (in vain?), or gotten so broke she needed to sell it? Or had she died, and her grieving husband/partner/sister/parents couldn't bear to keep the copy around with all these reminders of her (studiousness/obtuseness/penmanship/etc.)?

Reading Operation Shylock had became a wholly schizoid experience: finding out what happened to Roth the character/author (and his dopplegänger, another Philip Roth who was running around pretending to be him and stirring up Zionists), while also trying to learn what had happened to the previous owner. Did she like how it ended? Did the accumulated Yiddish prove too alienating?

Halfway through the book, my plane landed in Long Beach. I got my bags, picked up a rental car and got home, only to find that somewhere along the way I had lost the book. I called JetBlue and the car rental desk, to no avail.

I was devastated. At first I couldn't bear to read any Roth, so I read something else ( Three Junes , highly recommended). Finally I ordered another copy. I'm sure I'll finish it, but I will never know how the "other" story ended-the one of this woman's relationship to the book, to Roth, to Jewish colloquialisms. And where is she now, a decade later?

I realize now that whenever I say I'm reading a book that's so good I don't want it to end, that isn't really true. You want closure-even if it isn't the ending you hoped for when you started.