Analeigh Tipton, Teresa Palmer and the elusive Dave Franco.

A snowy Friday night on the Lower East Side kicked off with a gathering of bodies looking for warmth at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema, where The Cinema Society and Artistry were hosting a screening of the hip zombie flick Warm Bodies. Although director and screenwriter Jonathan Levine managed to roll through with most of the film’s cast in tow—including Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer and lovely model/actress Analeigh Tipton—the red-carpet chatter seemed to revolve around Dave Franco, younger brother to the ubiquitous James. But where in the world was he?

Maybe a Burberry-clad and oh-so-British Mr. Hoult would have some ideas.

“Me and Dave are really good friends,” he told the Transom (after making facetious comments about Dave’s wimpiness to a rival group of reporters.) “I didn’t get a lot of scenes with him—apart from eating his brains, which is unfortunate.” Mr. Hoult assured us that Mr. Franco’s brain tasted “pretty good.”

We decided to run with the zombie theme by asking another dapper guest, Tony Danza, what his stance was on cerebral dining. Mr. Danza walked away with a look of horror.

Ms. Palmer, looking radiant in an off-white Vera Wang dress and Louboutins, was more helpful in providing apocalypse survival advice. “It’s great when you go for the head,” she instructed. “You can cut their heads off.” Her weapon of choice for such a task: a good old-fashioned hedge trimmer.

But, despite her fearless demeanor and robust zombie-killing knowledge, Ms. Palmer admitted in a smooth Aussie accent that the great white sharks at home frighten her. “I don’t even let my dogs swim in the water anymore!”

The conversation between Ms. Palmer and a gaggle of reporters began to drag, until at last it turned back to the subject of the night: the younger Mr. Franco.

Apparently even a digested brain couldn’t stop this guy. “Dave Franco asks the most original questions. Like, thought-provoking, amazing questions,” Ms. Palmer gushed. Although we had hoped for a real life example of Mr. Franco’s charm, we decided to take everyone’s word for it and maybe catch him at another movie event. Or at a university somewhere, should he follow in his older brother’s footsteps as a perpetual grad student.

Gordon-Levitt and Rogen.

In the pantheon of tastelessness designed to make you laugh at diarrhea, menstruation, masturbation, yeast infections, fellatio and worse, you can now add a stupid horror called 50/50. Artificial, irresponsible, filthy and forgettable, it knocks itself cross-eyed trying to make you roar with laughter at chemotherapy, with the nauseating Seth Rogen milking most of the yuks. But a stoner comedy about cancer? I don’t think so.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has two expressions — sleepy and catatonic — and he wears them ragged as Adam Lerner, a 27-year-old reporter for National Public Radio stationed in Seattle who sinks into an understandable depression when malignant tumors are diagnosed on his spine and he is given only a 50/50 chance of survival. His best friend is a disgusting moron who is determined to cheer up by using his terminal illness to attract girls. Can Seth Rogen play anything else? I think they write disgusting moron parts for him in case Zach Galifianakis or Jack Black are busy playing other disgusting moron roles elsewhere, and he plays them all the same way. Anyway, in one of the few lines that can be repeated in print, he says, “If you were a casino game, you’d have the best odds.” In this movie, even the doctors are stupid. Adam’s oncologist is only 24. “What are you? Doogie Howser?” he asks incredulously. Doctor: “Who?” Adam: “Doogie Howser. The teenage doctor.” Oncologist: “Does he work here?” These are the jokes, folks.

Part of this movie is about the ghastly ordeal cancer patients go through—pain, syringes, vomiting, and coughing up blood, and a cold, impersonal medical establishment that places little value on human life—and part of it is about everyone else—caregivers, family members and friends—all of whom care more about themselves than the patient. (All false generalizations for the sake of laughs, and like everything else in the movie, grossly exaggerated.) When Adam undergoes his first chemo treatment, his duplicitous girlfriend (badly overacted by Bryce Dallas Howard) waits four hours in the car because she can’t stand the interiors of hospitals. His stressed-out mother (and what, you may well ask, is Anjelica Huston doing in this blunder?) acts like a cross between Lady Macbeth and Zasu Pitts. Eventually Adam gives up and falls for his psychiatrist (Anna Kendrick) in a sex game that is pure cardboard.

Director Jonathan Levine, who proved his incompetence with two previous disasters, The Wackness and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (a sex thriller so bad it was never released), based the film on the autobiographical experiences of the film’s writer, Will Reiser. But nothing about it rings true. The gallows humor is unforgiving and the compassion is synthetic. The film reveals nothing new about advances in cancer research, addresses no issues like the drug companies that suppress alternative treatments to profit from human suffering. No, it’s just about one guy trying to get laid.

As a nice fellow coming to grips with his own mortality, Mr. Gordon-Levitt shows some tenderness that was never on view in grim movies like Brick and Inception, but his character is so passive it’s hard to get a grip of your own on any kind of reality. Seth Rogen is too vulgar and creepy to believe as anyone’s friend, but he is convincing as a dedicated believer in the medicinal value of pot smoking. My reaction to everything that happens in 50/50 was “Why don’t they just walk out?” But nobody did, so I did it for them.

rreed@observer.com

50/50

Running Time 99 minutes

Written by Will Reiser

Directed by Jonathan Levine

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick

1/4

Not the least of the problems facing people who write about movies on a weekly basis is the deadlines. You can’t say, “I think I’d rather go to the beach today.” The empty space looms at you like a computerized monster, always demanding to be filled with your words, whether you have anything to say or not. Also, they say as you get older your attention span shortens. I don’t know about that, but I can promise you as sure as Monday follows the weekend that as the world changes and filmmakers get younger, the quality of motion pictures has diminished, and I find very few movies of worthwhile value to hold my interest. Writing about movies has become a chore, not a pleasure.

And so the Fourth of July holiday now brings a whole new batch of rubbish that is not worth coming in from the barbecue to write about. You can start with a mutton-headed waste of time called The Wackness that is every bit as moronic and meaningless as its title. You see them all the time: movies that just don’t move or signify or engage. This is one of them. Set in 1994 for no reason except that’s the year the film’s incompetent writer-director, Jonathan Levine, graduated from high school, it stars a doughy wonk with a face like a Big Mac bun named Josh Peck, as a teenage drug dealer named Luke, who trades weed for sessions with a zonked-out shrink named Dr. Squires. Sad to see Ben Kingsley trashing his reputation to play this stoned therapist, who looks like a Bowery bum as he pumps a dreadlocked Lolita (Mary-Kate Olsen) in a phone booth and dispenses mush-tongued jabberwocky in a fog of marijuana. The doctor (prove it) is an old degenerate who lusts after little girls; snorts and smokes every drug he can get his hands on; and blames everything on Giuliani. I guess it’s no coincidence that 1994 is also the inaugural year of New York’s right-wing mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who declared war on graffiti, nudity in museums, and portable radios. Instead of cracking down on Times Square porno flicks, he should have dragged in junk peddlers like the pair of goony, intergenerational protagonists at the center of this empty narrative.

Never-endingly desperate for more dope, Dr. Squires follows Luke around New York in a semi-horizontal haze while passing off his stepdaughter as a cure for his patient’s sex crisis. Drug dealers usually have no problem being popular or getting laid. Luke is the exception, and the reasons are obvious. For starters, he can scarcely form complete sentences. While Dr. Squires gives him step-by-step advice on how to get into his own stepdaughter’s pants, it’s also obvious why his long-suffering wife (Famke Janssen) eventually walks out. (As though in unison, the audience asks the same question: What took her so long?) Meanwhile, Luke engages Dr. Squires as his partner, as they sell their illegal wares from an Italian ice cream wagon. If nothing else, The Wackness will make you think twice the next time you see the Good Humor Man. Dr. Squires takes his miserable wife away for an outing while her daughter takes Luke to Fire Island for some awkward, mentally challenged mattress maneuvers, but nothing ever happens. What you get is dull, colorless characters played by uninteresting actors who shrug and mutter “whatever” when an issue is raised. You also get sophomoric, self-conscious dialogue and gimmicky, speeded-up camerawork that signifies the kind of self-indulgent filmmaking that usually premieres at Sundance and always successfully manages to camouflage all attempts at any deeper “meaning.” The girl gets bored. Dr. Squires’ wife dumps him. Luke’s father loses all of his family money and moves Luke to New Jersey, where, I assume, he grows up to direct The Wackness. Like the new breed of 20-somethings with no story to tell and no idea how to tell it if they had one, Jonathan Levine is clueless, and The Wackness goes nowhere fast. It just hangs.

rreed@observer.com

Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness, from his own screenplay, takes place in New York during the summer of 1994, when the newly inaugurated mayor, Rudy Giuliani, was beginning his now notorious crackdown on all sorts of petty crimes and even mere nuisances. His name is taken in vain several times during the course of the narrative, as if he and he alone were responsible for taking all the fun out of the Lindsay/Dinkins Fun City. Still, “fun” is spelled for the most part as D-O-P-E to the musical accompaniment of the hip-hop rants of the period. Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), the film’s high-school graduate protagonist, sells bags of marijuana from a mobile two-wheel cart advertising “Fresh & Delicious Ices,” and is never caught by Mayor Giuliani’s goonish gendarmes while he makes all his sales. But he and his shrink are arrested and briefly jailed for writing on store windows. Quelle ironie, n’est-ce pas?

The movie itself is often photographed in what seems like a hallucinogenic haze—where is Hunter Thompson now that I really need him? In a litany of failed relationships and bonding between losers, Ben Kingsley plays Luke’s drug-addled shrink, Dr. Squires. Dr. Squires treats Luke in exchange for a steady supply of marijuana. When Luke declares that he has a crush on the shrink’s luscious, way-out-of-Luke’s-league stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), Dr. Squires advises Luke to forget about her, not because she is too good for him, but because if Stephanie does show any interest in Luke, it is only because she is bored and needs some temporary summer diversion. Luke ignores his shrink’s advice and plunges into his pursuit of Stephanie with ultimately heartbreaking results.

Meanwhile, Dr. Squires is going through the last days of a failed marriage to a much younger wife (Famke Janssen), who has become tired of the shrink’s moodiness. Indeed, the fear of boredom stalks the landscape like a monstrous apparition, and all the marijuana in the world doesn’t seem to help avoid it.

One day, Luke arrives home to find his mother (Talia Balsam) and his father (David Wohl) being evicted from their Manhattan apartment and forced to relocate to the New Jersey home of his grandparents (Bob Dishy, Joanna Merlin). Unsurprisingly, Luke hates New Jersey, as he tells us repeatedly.

Fortunately, the money to pay his forthcoming college tuition is not cast into doubt because he has made a small fortune selling marijuana. This, and much else, I found a little hard to believe, but a remarkable cast supplies subtlety and balance to the mostly downward spiral of the narrative. Ms. Thirlby, particularly, seems to be a rising star with talent, after holding her own in a usually routing role as loyal girlfriend to Ellen Page’s Juno. In The Wackness she builds on that favorable first impression with a brilliant rendering of a much more perverse and potentially unsympathetic part. The rest of the cast is hardly chopped liver, either, as it somehow transports the narrative through the treacherous slough of despondency to a more hopeful destination for its unheroic protagonist.

asarris@observer.com

The Hollywood Reporter reports:

Met: Jan. 17, 1993

Engaged: May 24, 2001

Projected Wedding Date: Aug. 24, 2002

It's Uptown Girl meets Long Island Guy!

Leslie Dickstein, 29, went to Spence (one year behind Gwynnie) and Calhoun. She has caramel-colored hair, a bronzed kewpie-doll face, smart clothes and expertly sculpted brows. She graduated from Marymount College with a B.A. in photography, but not before a brief bohemian foray at N.Y.U.

This put her on a direct collision course with Jonathan Levine, 32, who grew up in Woodmere, went to the University of Vermont and then moved into a Greenwich Village studio to pursue "various artistic projects."

One night he walked into the Lion's Den bar on Sullivan Street, where Ms. Dickstein was slumming with a few of her girlfriends, and, well, sha- zam. "I thought she was the most beautiful person I'd ever seen," he said. "She's completely stylish. Everything about her-her makeup, her clothing, her hair-everything was just so arranged. Everything was neat and matched ."

Meanwhile, the just-so Ms. Dickstein found herself drawn to Mr. Levine's disheveled look: dark, mussed hair, wayward eyebrows. He's the kind of guy who wears T-shirts that look like they've been tucked in by his mother against his will. "He had a lot of energy about him," she said.

They struck up a conversation about Barry Manilow (she likes "Copacabana," his folks have "Manilow mania") and exchanged numbers. She called first. On their first date, they saw the cannibalistic movie Alive and then went for sushi.

"We were really young at the time, so it wasn't like we were thinking in terms of marriage," says Ms. Dickstein. "But as we got older and were still together, we still felt the same way about each other."

They moved into a one-bedroom on the Upper East Side.

Mr. Levine, the publisher of Fridge Magazine , which covers "urban lifestyle" matters like hip-hop music and snowboarding, likes to entertain his lover with silly songs and jokes. "He's very clever in a funny, sweet way," she said.

"She's the most honest person I've ever met," said Mr. Levine, "the most direct and to-the-point person. She doesn't understand the concept of beating around the bush."

This was apparent to him on her 28th birthday, when he met her at the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park, gave her a Louis Vuitton change purse containing an emerald-cut diamond with baguettes on a platinum band (total: three carats) … and then just sat there mutely as their Labrador mix, Sophie, loped around their heels.

"I was like, 'Is there something you're trying to ask me?'" said Ms. Levine.

She plans to wear Carolina Herrera to their wedding at the Metropolitan Club. There will be 240 guests, including the dog, and one of those big, elaborate sugary cakes from Payard Patisserie.

Ms. Levine, a freelance graphic designer, is making the invitations for the rehearsal dinner at Shun Lee Palace. If broccoli is on the menu, they'll know what to do: She thinks the heads are icky and bushy, and he hates the stems. "It's perfect!" he said. "You'll eat my bottoms, and I'll eat your tops!"

Lauren Gottlieb and Brent Stehmer

Met: February 2000

Engaged: Jan. 12, 2002

Projected Wedding Date: Sept. 6, 2003

Brent Stehmer, an equity trader, was at Lush in Tribeca one night when he spotted a pair of pointy-toed red snakeskin mules illuminated by the lights under the bar. He sauntered over to the blue-eyed, long-legged redhead wearing them. "I like your shoes," he said, "and by the way, I'm not gay."

Lauren Gottlieb peered up from her Jameson and Coke and met his gaze with some skepticism. It had been a bad date year. There was the guy who used the word "kudos" before their dinner date (she told him it wasn't going to work out and vamoosed before they were seated) and lots of what she called "dirty-artist types."

But this guy was clean-cut, dark and muscular. So after that time-honored Tribeca icebreaker-chatting about all the obnoxious celebrities she'd met as a publicist at Miramax-Ms. Gottlieb scribbled her home, work and cell-phone numbers on a cocktail napkin. "I just felt comfortable," she said.

Mr. Stehmer, a gourmet with a penchant for ordering Grand Marniers after dinner, raised her comfort level still further when he cooked her chicken piccata and cream puffs on their second date. Further along in their relationship, when she was hospitalized with a potentially fatal allergic reaction to an antibiotic, he was there to hold her hand every time the nurses took blood.

"Brent is like ice cream: Everyone likes him," said Ms. Gottlieb adoringly. "He'd say, 'I'll call on Sunday,' and he would. There was never any of that anxiety of 'Oh my God , he's not going to call me!' He does what he says he's going to do. He's honest and loving and caring."

Mr. Stehmer, 30, proposed to his "schnooky" using baby talk in the living room of their Brooklyn Heights one-bedroom ("She'd kill me if I did something cliché or a public spectacle," he said), using a cherry-flavored ring pop he'd purchased at Duane Reade. Ms. Gottlieb, 27, started eating the pop, but then decided to store it for safekeeping in a Ziploc baggie. It was eventually replaced with something even tastier: a brilliant-cut diamond with pear-shaped side stones from his family's jeweler in Connecticut.

They will wed at the Tribeca Rooftop, an event space on Desbrosses Street with panoramic views.

Sherri Strauss and Neil Marks

Met: April 11, 2000

Engaged: March 28, 2001

Projected Wedding Date: Oct. 13, 2002

Somewhere, on some TV channel, there's a game show made for Sherri Strauss, a 1980's pop-culture trivia freak who can handily rattle off the name of Ally Sheedy's character in The Breakfast Club , the car Ferris Bueller drives, and the dates of the episodes that George Clooney played Jo's boyfriend on The Facts of Life (for the rest of us: Allison Reynolds; Ferrari; the '85 to '87 seasons).

One night, Ms. Strauss was enjoying a chai with her bearded boyfriend, Neil Marks, outside the Gray Dog's Coffee place on Carmine Street when he handed her a parchment scroll printed with, among other things, lyrics from pop-standard songs and movie catch-phrases (stuff like "She'll have the linguine with clam sauce and I'll have the same" from Fast Times at Ridgemont High ). When she reached the bottom of the scroll, however, she found a line she didn't know: "Sherri, will you marry me?"

She looked up to find him down on one knee, holding a 1.75-carat solitaire in a platinum setting. In a kissing frenzy, she toppled him onto the sidewalk in front of the café.

Mr. Marks, 29, is a pop-culture geek in his own right, who works in advertising at Comedy Central (he helped with that incessant Crank Yankers campaign). One night he scored a ticket to the screening of an English movie called East Is East , happened to sit down next to Ms. Strauss, and asked her to watch his bag so he could get popcorn. "I remember thinking how odd it was that he asked a complete stranger to watch his valuables," said Ms. Strauss, 31, a traffic manager at LM&P Advertising. "When he returned he thanked me, and I looked up to see this incredibly handsome and sexy man sitting next to me. I just could not stop looking at him."

After the movie, the hazel-eyed redhead exhibited a Molly Ringwald–like spunk and asked her seatmate on a date to go see Gossip , starring Dawson Creek 's Joshua Jackson. But Mr. Marks found her choice too fluffy. "Mediocrity is the devil," he said. They wound up seeing Steal This Movie .

"Our love for film, music and general pop culture made for an easy getting-to-know-you period," said Ms. Strauss, who grew up on Staten Island with big hair and lots of kohl eyeliner (the pair now commutes from Hoboken, N.J.). "He made me mix tapes, and I helped him relive his childhood with my vast-and useless-knowledge of 80's trivia."

Mr. Marks wasn't quite as excited as Ms. Strauss about the announcement that Nick at Nite was going to start airing reruns of The Cosby Show , but he did eventually suck it up and incorporate her Duran Duran and Billy Joel albums into the collection of 1,500 high-quality CD's. Lest their wedding be like an outtake from The Wedding Singer , they're hiring the saxophonist from Steely Dan.

They both enjoy South Park , which should help them weather marriage's occasional dull spots.

You can reach the Love beat via email at engagements@observer.com

Chubbiness, according to the Centers for Disease Control, now affects 40 percent of the population, as opposed to 25 percent in 1981. Based on current trends, Dr. John Foreyt of the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas has predicted that by the year 2230, every American will be clinically obese. If you find this statistic too horribly depressing, leaven it with the knowledge that the increasing population growth (or girth) is paralleled by an equal–and, some would say, paradoxical–rise in obsessive cosmetic vanity. Teeth-whitening, for example, is fast becoming a national obsession.

Gone are the days when snaggle-toothed or bedentured fans marveled contentedly at the silver-screen smiles of Ava Gardner or Trini López. Now everyone feels entitled to that 'N Sync smile–and thanks to Manhattan celeb-dentist Dr. Jonathan Levine (who has worked on Peter Gallagher, Eva Herzigova and Naomi Campbell), everyone–even you!–can have it.

A leader in the teeth-whitening community for over a decade, Dr. Levine learned from the master, Adrian Jurim, the guy who perfected porcelain veneers–or Lee press-on teeth, as I like to call them. Since the mid-80's, Dr. Levine has worked tirelessly to come up with a teeth-whitening procedure that would do away with high-maintenance veneers and render obsolete those leaky bleaching trays and fierce argon lights. And now, he has found it.

The magical treatment starts with a short preconditioning procedure: this consists of you biting down on a tray of 3 percent peroxide for 15 minutes. A xenon arc lamp is then aimed at your heinously stained gnashers, while a mixture of peroxide plus "special catalysts and desensitizers" is repeatedly applied thereupon. The arc lamp activates the free oxygen in the mixture over the next hour, during which time a fresh mixture is applied, providing a constant flow of whitening agents to the teeth. In less than two hours, you will walk out of Dr. Levine's newest Esthetic Whitening Center (there are nine others in Manhattan) at Fifth Avenue and 73rd Street (734-6111) with your teeth "up to fourteen shades whiter"–or so claims his publicist, whose teeth were remarkably lovely.

Celeb-assonant Dr. Levine says that "a high percentage of my female clients ask for a big flashy Julia Roberts, while, increasingly, men demand a Tom Cruise." This initially surprised him, since "Tom's midline is nearly half a tooth off. He has an off-color incisor and a clearly visible cap," he said. "Maybe after Regis hit the big-time, guys started to appreciate the value of having a few imperfections."

According to Dr. Levine, most dingy-toothed first-timers will, regardless of age, "gravitate to the toilet-bowl white end of the spectrum." But tall, handsome Dr. Levine likes to guide his patients towards an "age-appropriate" shade. He will ask you to pick from a bizarre-looking teeth-encrusted color-card; shades fall into roughly two categories: "straight-way perfect" or "clean, healthy, natural." If you are a fun-loving, dirty old codger with a deep tan, don't let Dr. Levine talk you into "clean, healthy, natural" if you really want what the doc calls a "mouthful of Chiclets." It's part of your brand identity.

The whole procedure normally costs $1,200, but it could run you up to $1,500 if you have what he calls "intrinsic staining," i.e., the tell-tale signs of a dissolute life.

If you come across an old Vogue from 1970 at the flea market, flip it open and see if you can spot Marina Schiano. If there's a leggy brunette straddling a Mayan pyramid looking like a Latina Lady Bunny, wearing 15 hairpieces, top-and-bottom false eyelashes and nothing else, it's probably Ms. Schiano.

Since her time as one of Diana Vreeland's favorite models, Marina has been through many incarnations. In the 1970's she was, according to the late Alexander Liberman, "the alter-ego of Yves Saint Laurent"; in the late 1980's, she helped Tina Brown make celebrities groovy again (thanks?) in her role as Vanity Fair 's creative style director. In her latest, and most spectacular, incarnation–jewelry designer–she just happens to have designed the most important accessory of the early 21st century: the oversized ring.

"Tinsy, wintsy, weeny, wimpy, weensy jewelry–ugh!" vents heavily accented Marina, who finds small bijoux to be as unacceptable as I do. "Women think discreet jewelry is elegant. It's not. And all it shows is an horribile lack of daring." Large jewelry, according to La Schiano, communicates "senses of awarenesses–certain auras of exoticisms."

Worn by the likes of Nell Campbell, Serena Altschul, Tracey Ullman, Elton John, Alba Clemente, Mandy Moore and many more, her massive rings are a paradox of pure architectural restraint and unbridled grandiosity. Testicle-sized Brazilian stones–amethyst, beryl, sky-blue topaz, citrine, ruby, imperial topaz and various crystals are mounted in brutalist, bunker-like settings of silver and gold. Prices range from $375 to $4,495 at Barneys (660 Madison Avenue).

When you buy one of her rings, you are getting far more than just the accessory du jour; you are also snagging a bit of gravely-voiced Marina herself–and she's not chopped liver.

If people are ignoring you, and the help is sassing you back, it's probably because your hair is thin and straggly. You need volume and length: You need extensions.

Make an assignation at the chicly boutiquish salon entitled Dandie (100 Stanton Street, behind Katz's Deli, 598-4490). This salon boasts four chairs, two "climazone centers" (futuristic hair-dryers) and three of the most creative people in hairdressing today:

Seth. Repeat after me: Seth Silver's single-stranded, silicon-sealed extension system. Seth Silver's single-stranded, etc. But Seth's system is far more than just a sibilant tongue-twister: It's a life-changing hair-extension procedure that will get you the volume you need and, consequently, the respect you deserve. Seth understands the equation between hair and power. With his silicon gun, he can give you "exactly the right balance of Donatella and Gwyneth." Prices vary between $500 and $1,200.

Carol Ann, a self-described "extension goddess and visual assault artist," has a more extreme mandate and a completely different technique. Using her pinched braiding, she can make you into a neon-haired cyber-slut at a cost of $100 per hour. For non-cyber-sluts, the exotically maquillaged Carol Ann recommends, for this season, a violet pinch-braided "Mrs. Robinson" streak for approximately $100.

If you just want a damn good $100 haircut, Wendy's your man.

My boyfriend, Jonathan Adler (don't you hate the word "partner"? It connotes law firms or boring Westerns, and boyfriend keeps the skippy romance in a relationship), has started a series of micro-exhibits at his Broome Street store featuring intriguingly iffy work from the margins of the art world. Previously exhibited: a collection of Leroy Neiman commemorative plates (these are now on view at the Jonathan Adler East Hampton store) and plexiglass portraits of Asian porno queens by Steve Caliguiri. Currently on view: the heavy-metal bad trips of Scott Lenhardt. Scott, a bona fide snowboard-graphics artist living in Vermont, has lacquered his nightmares onto snowboard-sized panels to create an 80's heavy-metal moment, executed to perfection and guaranteed to vibe off unwanted relatives who drop in during the upcoming holiday season.

If you are having problems with your weight, call 941-8950 and commission Scott to mural the front of your refrigerator.

Abject apologies for lauding Lord Berners/Adela Quebec's The Girls of Radcliff Hall in last week's column and failing to point out that it can only be purchased directly from Elysium Press Books. Contact David Deiss at 802-763-7147, or check out their Web site at www.ElysiumPress.com.