Golden Globe nom-toppers. (Various)

Not too many surprises this year in the nominations, announced today, for the 2013 Golden Globe Awards. This year, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will be making history as the first female duo to host the ceremony, held on Jan. 13., but other than that, it's all Lincoln (seven nominations), Argo (five) and Django Unchained (ditto).

In television, we're looking at dramas like Game Change (five), Homeland (four, including one for "The Bear" Patinkin), Downton Abbey and, yikes ... how did The Newsroom (two) manage to get on there? That's more nominations than Mad Men (one) received! Comedies remained from last year: Girls, 30 Rock and Modern Family topped the chart. HBO shot to the top of the chart with 17 nominations total, and in a distant second place came Showtime, with seven.

Read the full list below:

Best Motion Picture, Drama

Argo
Django Unchained
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Zero Dark Thirty

Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Les Misérables
Moonrise Kingdom
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Silver Linings Playbook

Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama

Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Richard Gere, Arbitrage
John Hawkes, The Sessions
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
Denzel Washington, Flight

Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy

Jack Black, Bernie
Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Hugh Jackman, Les Misérables
Ewan McGregor, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Bill Murray, Hyde Park on the Hudson

Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama

Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Marion Cotillard, Rust and Bone
Helen Mirren, Hitchcock
Naomi Watts, The Impossible
Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea

Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy

Emily Blunt, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Judi Dench, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Maggie Smith, Quartet
Meryl Streep, Hope Springs

Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture

Alan Arkin, Argo
Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained

Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture

Amy Adams, The Master
Sally Field, Lincoln
Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Nicole Kidman, The Paperboy

Best Director

Ben Affleck, Argo
Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

Best Screenplay, Motion Picture

Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty
Tony Kushner, Lincoln
David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
Quentin Taratino, Django Unchained
Chris Terrio, Argo

Find out which star's daughter is Miss Golden Globe

Best Foreign Language Film

Amour (Austria)
A Royal Affair (Denmark)
The Intouchables (France
Kon-Tiki (Norway)
Rust and Bone  (France)

Best Animated Feature Film

Brave
Frankenweenie
Hotel Transylvania
Rise of the Guardians
Wreck-It Ralph

Best Original Song, Motion Picture

"For You," Act of Valor, Monty Powell & Keith Urban
"Not Running Anymore," Stand Up Guys, Jon Bon Jovi
"Safe and Sound," The Hunger Games, Taylor Swift. John Paul White, Joy Williams & T Bone Burnett
"Skyfall," Skyfall, Adele & Paul Epworth
"Suddenly," Les Misérables, Claude-Michel Schonberg & Alain Boublil

Best Original Score, Motion Picture

Mychael Danna, Life of Pi
Alexandre Desplat, Argo
Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina
Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil, Cloud Atlas
John Williams, Lincoln

Best TV Movie or Miniseries

Game Change
The Girl
Hatfields & McCoys
The Hour
Political Animals

Best TV Series, Drama

Boardwalk Empire
Breaking Bad
Downton Abbey
Homeland
The Newsroom

Best TV Series, Comedy

The Big Bang Theory
Episodes
Girls
Modern Family
Smash

Best Actor in a TV Series, Drama

Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad
Jeff Daniels, The Newsroom
Jon Hamm, Mad Men
Damian Lewis, Homeland

Best Actor, TV Series Comedy

Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
Don Cheadle, House of Lies
Louis CK, Louie
Matt LeBlanc, Episodes
Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory

Best Actress in a TV Series, Drama

Connie Britton, Nashville
Glenn Close, Damages
Claire Danes, Homeland
Michelle Dockery, Downton Abbey
Julianna Marguiles, The Good Wife

Best Actress in a TV Series, Comedy

Zooey Deschanel, New Girl
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
Lena Dunham, Girls
Tina Fey, 30 Rock
Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation

Best Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie

Kevin Costner, Hatfields & McCoys
Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock
Woody Harrelson, Game Change
Toby Jones, The Girl
Clive Owen, Hemingway & Gellhorn

Best Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie

Julianne Moore, Game Change
Nicole Kidman, Hemingway & Gellhorn
Jessica Lange, American Horror Story: Asylum
Sienna Miller, The Girl
Sigourney Weaver, Political Animals

Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Mini-Series or TV Movie

Max Greenfield, New Girl
Ed Harris, Game Change
Danny Huston, Magic City
Mandy Patinkin, Homeland
Eric Stonestreet, Modern Family

Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries, or TV Movie

Hayden Panettiere, Nashville
Archie Panjabi, The Good Wife
Sarah Paulson, Game Change
Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey
Sofia Vergara, Modern Family

Cecile B. DeMille Award

Jodie Foster

Russell left Rachel eight months ago. And thank God. Rachel's mother said: "Good. Feh . Stick to your own kind."

I get that one, too. My good friend Julie, she sees me founder and sink in all my romantic forays. She sees the boys I date: tall, thin blonds, the pug-nosed type. She says: "You have no luck with these boys because they're not Jewish." Julie isn't Jewish, but somehow she knows this. "You need to stick to your own kind."

So what is that kind? Stocky, shortish, couldn't use a drill if his life depended on it? No, thank you. I don't want my kind.

Rachel and I talk about this a lot. She's now pining away for a big brute of a man, Casey O'Hannon. He is broad-shouldered and he is thick. He looks vaguely thuggish. Rachel says, "He's so big, and he's all maleness. But my shrink wants me to date Jewish. She thinks my lack of interest in Jewish boys is very telling. It means I'm self-hating, and as soon as I can get over that, I'm done. I'm good. No more therapy."

I had a shrink who thought the same way. She'd say, with a thick Israeli accent, "So much self-hatred, Shaina. Why do you shun the Jewish boys?"

I'll tell you why. Because they are gentle and they have no masculine moves. No machismo. They wouldn't look right bloodied up after a bar fight. They don't swagger. And never have I had a Jewish boyfriend offer to build me a bookshelf.

I want a guy who can find a stud and put up a wall bracket, who knows what a molly is.

Rachel's shrink suggested that Rachel go to Jewish dining night-a once-weekly thing. Jews gather at a restaurant to eat and schmooze. Her shrink thought it was a great way to dispel unflattering stereotypes. So she went.

I asked what she thought of it. "What'd I think of it? I'll tell you what I thought of it. No stereotypes were dispelled-only reinforced. You know, I met a pediatrician. A nice fellow. He told me why he's a pediatrician: He just loves the little babies. That is exactly what he said. He said, 'I just love the little babies.' That is not manly."

I've dated Jews and non-Jews-plenty of both. And the Jewish boys have all faded now into a lump of Jewish ex-boyfriend. They all resemble each other somehow. Either physically or generally-their manner. They reminded me of boys I knew in Hebrew school. I can't separate them from those memories I have of them-or their predecessors-being hauled around by their Jewish mothers. The mothers would then go on and on about Daniel or Joshua and what he does best. But ultimately, I guess, these boys feel so familiar because they remind me of someone who is kind and smart, but not the least bit exciting to me: My pop.

With non-Jews, nothing's familiar. I feel different from them, in a good way. Being Jewish seems sexy and smart then. With non-Jewish boys, I'm more apt to call on my Jewish heritage; I flaunt it, even. I'll explain Jewish holidays or recall my favorite passages from the Old Testament. I'm eager to bring non-Jewish guys around at Passover or Rosh Hashanah so they can hear me sing along in Hebrew, or so I can show off that I know the meanings of the blessings.

You just can't play the Jewish card with other Jews. When the topic of Israel comes up, or the state of the world today-or a cultural event like The Passion of the Christ -other Jews just agree with me, 100 percent. Yes! Of course, it's still hard to be Jewish. There is still so much hatred! No disagreement there.

With non-Jews, it's a much more interesting story. We talk about anti-Semitism nowadays or Israel, and they roll their eyes. They think I'm paranoid. I draw certain parallels between 1930's Germany and life today in the U.S. They think I'm nuts. But then I say something like: "You just don't understand." And they are putty in my hands. I become their little Anne Frank. Their Jewish girl on the verge of extinction. And only they can protect me.

My girlfriend Deb feels similarly. She wants a non-Jewish man who can protect her against the inevitable armies of neo-Nazis. She has what she calls a blue-collar weakness; she has fantasies of robust non-Jews who work at hauling stuff. "I don't want a little weenie Jewish boy. God, I feel terrible saying that. I have so many stereotypes-I think of dating Jews, and I imagine manicured and petite hands. That's awful, but it's just what I think of. And that's definitely a no-no."

She was quiet a moment and then she said: "Besides, why should we want to date them? They haven't wanted to date us for decades. They all bow down to the shiksa goddess."

Ah, the shiksa goddess. It's like the earth quakes and quivers when she's mentioned. Shiksa goddess-the archnemesis of all Jewish girls.

I was recently introduced to a fellow Jew, a good-looking guy from the Midwest. He is thin and intense. A friend of a friend. Somehow the shiksa goddess came up, and he said: "Up until a week ago, I thought 'shiksa' was a compliment. Like 'über-excellent.' I didn't realize it just meant 'non-Jew.'"

Figures.

For years, Jewish women have been depicted as sturdy, two feet on the ground, shleppy, ethnic, unable to eat without getting food everywhere. Meanwhile, non-Jews are sexy, exotic, willowy.

It's all straight out of Philip Roth.

My friends and I are in our 20's. Our mothers are hoping it's a phase: You still have time to outgrow this thing.

And maybe they're right. Single Jewish women in their 30's seem to want Jewish men. An actress friend of mine in her 30's told me, "I dream of Mandy Patinkin from Yentl . That's what I imagine. He'll be up late studying, wearing wire-rimmed glasses. I'll be puttering around, I'll bring him herbal tea, hydrox."

She belongs to JDate and goes regularly to Makor hoping to find her scholar.

But this is nothing new for her; it's just more urgent these days. "It's what I've always wanted. A Jewish wedding, Jewish babies. A Jewish husband."

So is there hope for us twentysomething Jewish girls who lust after goys? Will we see the error of our ways?

"I don't know," Rachel says when I ask her if she thinks she'll outgrow this. "I mean, doesn't Lenny Bruce say an Irishman who's lost his religion is now a Jew? If that's the case, I'm covered."

The Hollywood character actor and Broadway star recently listed his three-bedroom duplex loft at the Sugar Warehouse, located at 79 Laight Street, on the market for $1.895 million-without ever having moved in.

Mr. Patinkin and his wife, actress and writer Kathryn Grody, bought the 2,600-square-foot apartment in mid-July of 2002. It apparently wasn't a good fit from the start. Soon after the purchase, they began renting it out to a tenant, whose lease is up in November.

"They were just looking for a change," said the apartment's listing broker, Stephen Perlo, a vice president at the Corcoran Group. He declined to comment further on the Patinkins' plans.

The about-face is an uncharacteristic one for Mr. Patinkin and Ms. Grody, who, with their two children, had been living in the same rental building on the Upper West Side from 1979 well into the 90's. When a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter toured the unpretentious flat in 1995, Mr. Patinkin explained to him, "We don't like fancy."

In fact, their short-lived adventure at the Sugar Warehouse was a bit fancy. The apartment they're now listing has prewar details, beamed ceilings, hardwood floors, high-end appliances and large windows on the north and east sides. The downstairs has an open kitchen and living room, and there are skylights in each of the three upstairs bedrooms.

"It's the best in downtown living," said Mr. Perlo.

Perhaps the commute was getting to him: Mr. Patinkin is currently starring in the new Showtime series Dead Like Me , in which he plays an undead grim reaper whose job it is to harvest souls of the soon-to-be deceased. It films in Vancouver, B.C.

TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN! TV EXEC BREAKS SWEAT TO CLOSE

370 East 76th Street

One-bedroom, one-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $489,000. Selling: $477,000.

Maintenance: $798; 48 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: one and a half months.

"We all could have used a good drink after that," said Wendy Divack, broker at Charles H. Greenthal, of the tense closing at this East Side apartment she recently represented. It's unusual for a closing to depend on how fast the buyer can run, but this one did. The buyer had taken out a jumbo mortgage as well as a home-equity loan to cover the costs of her new pad, but unfortunately, because of some miscommunication at the bank, wasn't able to come through with the $35,000 loan in the crunched closing. All parties involved were already at the end of their ropes: The seller was primarily living abroad, making it difficult to communicate, so closing dates had already been postponed. But the buyer, a career woman working in the TV industry, was determined. She'd spent several months looking for a place, and immediately knew that this high-floor apartment with a balcony in the luxury Newport East building was the right one; she wasn't about it let it drop. She bolted to the bank to grab $35,000 from her personal savings. Money in hand, she soon returned. Two and a half hours later, the deal was closed, and the buyer is now having drinks by the rooftop pool of her new home, and biding her time until the reimbursement check arrives. "These things happen and then the next day you go on with your life and enjoy," Ms. Divack said. Rena Black at Bellmare Realty brought the buyer.

RECENT TRANSACTIONS IN THE REAL ESTATE MARKET

CHELSEA

22 West 15th Street

One-bedroom, one-bathroom condo.

Asking: $520,000. Selling: $500,000.

Charges: $414. Taxes: $482.

Time on the market: nine months.

MODEL TENANTS Two renters had been pitching tent in a one-bedroom condo, whose owner, living in Belgium, decided he wanted to sell the place last November. The only problem was that their lease wasn't due to expire for another year, and the tenants, a couple in their 60's who run a local business around the corner from the building, had no interest in moving out just yet. So broker Karen Gastiaburo at William B. May went about showing the apartment, trying to explain the sticky situation to any prospective buyers, and negotiating the tenants' schedule, but she found the year wait for a move-in date a bit of a turnoff to most. Ms. Gastiaburo persisted nonetheless, and finally met with Victoria Rong at Citi Habitats, who decided to work her way backward. The two brokers discussed with Ms. Rong his last possible closing date, which was this July, and decided to work from there, trying to find a comparable place for the elderly tenants within a few months. But little was to be found: It was a nice apartment, with 715 square feet in a building they loved, and a fairly low rent. It seemed as if the deal would fall through. Until, amazingly, the tenants themselves found a new place in the same building, directly upstairs from their old apartment. The closing went through in July, and the tenants happily traveled up a flight. "They were extremely generous, especially under the circumstances. It was a joke to them on some level: 'We are going to have to move eventually anyway, let's just do it sooner rather than later,'" Ms. Gastiaburo said.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

350 Bleecker Street

Two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $685,000. Selling: $660,000.

Maintenance: $1,006; 60 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: two months.

MAGNOLIA STEAL There are plenty of reasons to want a place in Greenwich Village: Its tree-lined streets, laid-back vibe and authentic neighborhood feel, after all, are good enough for the likes of Julianne Moore, Gwyenth Paltrow and Sarah Jessica Parker. All that factored in to this J.P. Morgan associate's decision to leave a cookie-cutter flat in midtown west-but the clincher was this apartment's proximity to Magnolia Bakery, which offers retro-tasting frosted cupcakes to the village-trendy masses strong enough to brave its crazed lines. It also happened to be a smart investment for him: a corner apartment with city views, two split bedrooms, an open kitchen and a gorgeous roof garden. "It is fabulous, he just went in at the right time and just scored," said the buyer's broker, Nancy Lee at the Corcoran Group. "He had a good eye for real estate." The seller had moved back to his original Australia for work, but left the renovated apartment in good condition. Wigder Frota, also at Corcoran, had the exclusive.

"Julianne has always wanted a brownstone and is shopping foronenow," Ms.Moore's spokesman, Stephen Huvane, told The Observer . "Their current apartment is very large, and having the second child did not cause them to reconsider a new home because of space."

The apartment was always a bit of a brave step for a starlet: It overlooks an area of the West Village-the meatpacking district-that still smells of animal fat in the summer, even if the well-heeled (or readers of the Times Styles section, at least) continue to eat moules frites at the tables outside Pastis. And there are signs of re-emergence: The Swiss design firm Vitra opened a showroom, and Stella McCartney and Steve McQueen both opened up new boutiques recently.

"Julianne loves her neighborhood, and although she has not yet found a new place, she is still strongly considering the same neighborhood or very nearby," Mr. Huvane said.

Her brokers at Sotheby's International Realty declined to comment.

Ms. Moore and Mr. Freundlich met on the set of The Myth of Fingerprints , which Mr. Freundlich directed and in which Ms. Moore played a starring role. The movie was released in 1997, and their first son, Caleb, was born in December of the same year. In July of 1999, the three settled into an apartment on the second floor of this former warehouse building and paid $900,000 for the privilege.

But when the penthouse, which previously belonged to a couple relocating to Florida, opened up, they decided to buy it for $2.65 million in October 2001. They began a gut renovation on the place thanks to Mr. Freundlich's brother, who coordinated the redesign, and had only just moved into their new place in April of this year when their daughter, Liv Helen, was born. Now they had two places in the building: the original downstairs place and the penthouse. In July, they finally sold the downstairs place for $1.95 million, clearing the way for this sale.

But they needn't have left this apartment to find refuge from the city, said Kathy Matson, an independent broker who sold Ms. Moore the penthouse.

"The whole feeling was romantic and airy, and you don't feel like you're in the city," said Ms. Matson of the renovation. "Just imagine being in your room with a large skylight, and you have a wall of glass doors facing west that open to a planted terrace. It was very special."

Ms. Moore's early investment in the meatpacking district wasn't her only sharp real-estate decision. Real-estate records indicate that she negotiated her broker's fees down to 5 percent. (Most brokers charge 6 percent of the sale price.)

With the holidays approaching and Ms. Moore set to begin filming Without Apparent Motive with Richard Gere in February, time's running short to bag that brownstone. Let the shopping begin!

We Like Fancy: Patinkin Clan Buys $1.68 M. Tribeca 'Wow' Loft

In 1995, Mandy Patinkin invited a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter into his family's modest UpperWestSideapartment and said that his clan had decided against moving into a more lavish place because "we don't like fancy."

A lot can change in seven years, even for a man whose most memorablelineisin1987's The Princess Bride : "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

Mr. Patinkin and his wife, actress and writer Kathryn Grody (who has spun urban pastorals into one-woman shows about raising two sons on the Upper West Side), recently purchased a sprawling three-bedroom duplex loft in Tribeca.

The theatrical duo paid $1,680,500 in mid-July for the 2,820-square-foot condo at a former sugar-processing warehouse on Laight Street, which was converted into 32 luxury condominium units earlier this year.

"You walk in and just go 'Wow!'" the building's on-site developer, the Corcoran Group's Tricia Cole, said of the building's luxe duplexes. "They have very dramatic loft feelings."

Dramatic feelings are nothing new for the star of Sunday in the Park with George , who is still very much in demand: He takes his one-man show, Mandy Patinkin in Concert: Celebrating Sondheim , a tribute to the composer's music, to Henry Miller's Theatre Dec. 2.

Mr. Patinkin and Ms. Grody recently sent their oldest son off to college, but their youngest will likely be accompanying them to their new home south of Canal Street-which means that Ms. Grody may soon be penning maternal memoirs from a new milieu.

The six-room condo has 16-foot ceilings, a wood-burning fireplace, and oversize windows facing north and east.

Neither Mr. Patinkin nor Ms. Grody could be reached for comment, and their broker, Jim Brawders of the Corcoran Group, did not return calls.

upper east side

30 East 65th Street

One-bedroom, one-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $999,000. Selling: $950,000.

Maintenance: $1,800; 44 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: seven weeks.

HOME IMPROVEMENT When the new owner of this 900-plus-square-foot co-op first walked into the place, a prominent architect was already two-thirds of the way through a no-expenses-spared renovation. The apartment's previous owner-a single woman-had hired the architect to design her dream spread, but she had gotten engaged along the way and now needed to find a bigger place to live. But since she had already forked over hefty deposits for all the materials, there was no choice but to complete the redesign. Which was just dandy for the buyer-the chief executive of a public company-because when he first walked in, the apartment was shaping up to be his dream spread, too. "We watched the apartment take shape week after week," said the buyer's broker, Mickey Cohen of Charles H. Greenthal Co. "Can you imagine experiencing the entire renovation and not having to pay for it?" The face-lift included a granite kitchen, custom-made plank wood floors, high-end cabinetry and brass fittings, and niches to hold flat-screen plasma TV's. The bathroom walls were made of a seamless sheet of marble. Every room was wired for sound, and the towel racks were heated. "This was outrageous. I have done dozens of renovations, but I've never seen anything like this," said Mr. Cohen. "If my purchaser had renovated it himself, in a million years he would not have gotten this kind of an apartment." The buyer was so happy with the architect, he hired him to do the apartment's interior decoration, too.

575 Park Avenue (the Beekman)

Two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $725,000. Selling: $655,000.

Maintenance: $3,727; 15 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: two months.

deliver us to beekman place Believe it or not, you can still buy a two-bedroom, 1,400-square-foot Park Avenue co-op in the lower 60's for $655,000. Just ask the new owner of this apartment at 575 Park Avenue. But here's the catch: It's a land-lease building, which means the cooperative is only leasing the building, and the already-high maintenance could spike to stratospheric levels at the landlord's whim. Of course, if you're buying at 575 Park, that's a risk you're probably willing to take: You can't get into the building without having several million dollars' worth of liquid assets in the bank. "It's a fantastic value for anyone who can afford to get in," said the new owner's broker, Irene Simon of the Insignia Douglas Elliman. "It's totally atypical." The Beekman, where Geraldine Ferraro owns an apartment, is one of those old dowager hotels that kept up the five-day-a-week maid service when it went co-op. Many of the units serve as pied-à-terre for out-of-towners-like this apartment, which belonged to two busy professionals who find themselves in Beverly Hills full-time now. They had been subletting their space out to the head counsel of a major corporation for some time before finally giving the place up and selling it to a widower who was downsizing from a grand Fifth Avenue spread. The corner apartment has high ceilings, herringbone-patterned wood floors, and three exposures with river and skyline views.

greenwich village

114 West 13th Street

Four-bedroom, four-bathroom townhouse.

Asking: $2.795 million. Selling: $2.5 million.

Taxes: $13,516.

Time on the market: two years.

EVICTION FRICTION Generally, when selling a townhouse composed of rental units, the seller clears the tenants out before shopping the building around: Why buy into the headache of displacing your tenants? But these buyers-a couple that wanted to make an investment-have had their eye on this building for years. Three of the four tenants left the building without much incident when the seller didn't renew their leases. But the fourth tenant-who had rented the parlor floor for over 20 years-was not as keen on losing his home. "It was a mess," said broker Joseph Dwyer of the Corcoran Group, who worked on the deal with Corcoran brokers Sara Gelbard and Meredith Hatfield. "He dragged things out as long as he could." Two years and one court-ordered eviction later, the way for the sale was clear-and the same buyers who had been around all along were still willing to ante up. Two and a half million dollars is nearly a steal when it comes to Greenwich Village townhouses these days, but it wasn't the tenant trouble that got these buyers their price: The building needs a gut renovation before it can be used as a single-family house. The couple plans to invest over a million dollars in the project. "They knew they could do something for the house," Mr. Dwyer said.

sutton place

16 Sutton Place

Two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $995,000. Selling: $950,000.

Maintenance: $1,856; 62 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: One-year.

incommodious A retired widow who was downsizing from a stately prewar Park Avenue apartment fell in love with everything about this postwar Sutton Place co-op-except the toilet. "It was an odd maroon commode, with a very unusual cylindrical back," said the buyer's broker, Eileen Mintz, a senior vice president at Insignia Douglas Elliman. "That's the one thing she knew she would have to replace." Credit for the flamboyant loo goes to the apartment's previous owner, an antiques dealer from Monte Carlo, who was using the apartment as a pied-à-terre . Notably, the antiques dealer had added archways and moldings to give the apartment a prewar feel, and the spread overlooked both the river and rows of townhouses across the street. "It really had the charm she was looking for," said Ms. Mintz. "It reminded her of a smaller version of the one she was coming from.

Queer bones

Are acting more like

Straight bones

Who are acting more like

Queer bones

It's all so gay!

Mr. Wolfe and his composer-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa have adapted Joseph Moncure March's jagged l920's doggerel poem into a cross-fertilization of subcultures, a melting-pot nightmare of a schizophrenic America. Its demimonde of second-rate showbiz performers, of fallen angels, pushers, pederasts, gays, dykes and straights (straightish, anyway) is of a world without boundaries, colliding and dangerous, in loveless America.

Wild Party is the underbelly of America's meltdown into self-gratifaction and blurred identities, of party time and exploding violence, of forbidden fruit and the price we pay–and nobody does it better than George C. Wolfe. The director of such lasting achievements as Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk , Angels in America and Jelly's Last Jam , which he also wrote, is at his scintillating best on the dangerous edge beyond the mainstream. (His revival of the l944 musical comedy On the Town , for example, wasn't his best work.) That all three of those revolutionary pieces crossed over to Broadway is some kind of miracle. A Wild Party on Broadway is thrillingly wayward and risky, creating its own pocket of resistance, an Alternative Broadway.

At one combustible peak of Mr. Wolfe's staging, when the party itself was coming unhinged, when it seemed to be imploding on stage in a haze of coke and sex and the promise of death, I thought that this fantastically ambitious new musical was actually on the cusp of making theater history. Who has risked anything like it before? And I felt the same sense of excitement during the opening scenes of the show, which had me on the edge of my seat in anticipation. From the start, Mr. Wolfe and his creative team had thrown down an unexpected ace, taking us completely by surprise.

The first scenes are performed like burlesque turns, with each one announced by a title on an easel. Students of theater technique call this Brechtian; truth is, it was born in vaudeville a century ago. In l960 Cabaret mastered the form with its diabolic host tempting us to join the lowlife party where "everything is beautiful." John Osborne's The Entertainer in 1950 memorably interchanged the domestic drama on stage with the failed comic Archie Rice (played by Laurence Olivier) performing seedy vaudevillian turns in decrepit music halls. ("Let me know where you're appearing tomorrow night," Archie says famously to his silent audience. "And I'll come and see you .") I thought that if only Wild Party could maintain its opening metaphor, it would be simply remarkable. We would have the party action with its ironic shadow, the cheap show-biz acts set before a sleazy backdrop in vaudeville. As the refrain of the 14-year-old Nadine, a future hooker with stars in her eyes, goes:

I always wanted to see the lights of Broadway

I always wanted to hear the traffic roar.

I always wanted to be a part

Of New York City's great big heart…

But the vaudevillian concept is abandoned after the opening, reducing it to a prologue. It returns haphazardly, like a convenient bookend, for the ultimate scene–the killing of Burrs, the psychotic lover of Queenie. But it is too late by then, I'm afraid, and the killing ought to be awesomely real, not confused with sideshow irony. So the opportunity was lost, though Mr. Wolfe has the surest sense of a musical's intoxicating pulse since the late Michael Bennett. He creates rhythmically, on the wing, knowing how to keep the stage hot, in this case simmeringly on the boil, wired, rude, uncensored. His effects are visceral, his stage pictures rarely still. Yet for all the seductive action, Wild Party is like a beautiful problem child who needs slapping around a bit. It needs more time to be fixed, the very thing ambitiously risky projects always need.

Take Mandy Patinkin's manic Burrs. Mr. Patinkin's excesses are well known, and as he's playing a murderous psychotic, he's entitled to be over the top. But so much? The idea of him playing Burrs the entertainer in Jolsonesque black face is brilliantly creepy. Burrs is a red-nosed clown in the original poem. He's a character who hides behind masks. When Mr. Patinkin encourages us to applaud in the opening scenes–applaud him , actually–it's in vaudevillian character. He's a washed-up entertainer begging for applause. But when he asks us to join in a solo song of his much later, and even encourages us to applaud during a party scene, Mr. Patinkin has stepped right out of character into narcissistic areas no one ought to enter. How to control our Mandy? You can no more slow him down than a runaway train. You can try. A refrigerator dropped on his head from a great height might do it. But, momentarily stunned, Mandy Patinkin would rise again.

On the other hand, Toni Collette, in the central role of Queenie, is a major triumph from start to finish. She is the kind of open-hearted, God-given talent audiences fall in love with. And so we did, cheering for her at the curtain call. Her loose, innate sexuality makes her so believable, her warm uninhibited center seems to embrace us. You will surely know her as the single mother in The Sixth Sense (for which she was nominated for an Oscar). I remember looking up her name after seeing her lovely, touching performance in the movie, wondering who she could be. (Answer: the dumpy Aussie in Muriel's Wedding. ) Making her New York stage debut in Wild Party , Ms. Collette throws herself into Queenie–"lips like coals aglow, her face was a tinted mask of snow"–and we are at her feet.

Then again, the somewhat underwritten character of Black (played by a weak Yancey Arias with a velvety voice) is no match for this Queenie. Ms. Collette possesses the stage presence that's missing from the too-cool Mr. Arias, and there can be little sexual heat between them. The ensemble is otherwise exceptional, including Tony Award- winner Tonya Pinkins as Queenie's friend and rival Kate, and Eartha Kitt–of all unexpected people!–as Dolores, the wise old vaudeville broad who reminds one, just a little, of Eartha Kitt. The star appears on stage like a tiny, glamorous apparition. Ms. Kitt is petite; it's the legend that got big. She is, of course, the master of purring feline suggestiveness, and it's a pleasure to welcome her to the party here.

Set designer Robin Wagner, with lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer and the stylish costume designer Toni-Leslie James, have created their very best work, a form of fading grandeur in an abandoned Harlem ballroom that's perfect for the seedy elegance of the story. It's as if Queenie and Burrs and company are squatting there in time past, whirling before us like ghosts from a shadowy, ruined place. There will be other times, other stories, other chances to make right. If you believe that a show as safe as Contact is somehow the revolutionary musical of our time, you will be unlikely to see what Mr. Wolfe and Mr. LaChiusa have dared to achieve with Wild Party . It saddens me: The mediocre triumphs, the innovative is clobbered. Very well; then let us applaud Wild Party. With all its faults born in wild imaginings, with all its rough exuberance and uncompromising sexiness, Wild Party is where we prefer to be.

About midway through the Joseph Papp Public Theater-New York Shakespeare Festival's Gala 2000 at the Chelsea Piers on March 13, producer George Wolfe got up and likened working on the Public's latest Broadway-bound project, The Wild Party , to performing "open-heart surgery on yourself on the No. 2 train at 3 o'clock in the morning." (No doubt, at least a partial reference to the fact that the show will be competing with the Manhattan Theater Club's Off-Broadway version.)

Surgery aside, the Public's gala felt like a late-night subway ride, too: slightly surreal, slightly nutty and occasionally unsettling, as when Ute Lemper paused in the middle of singing, "I Am a Vamp," a Weimar-era cabaret song with vampiric references, to say, "Hitler, just shut up, O.K.? You're dead! Go back to sleep!"

And though those who were along for the ride were distinctly of the non-straphanger variety– Talk editor Tina Brown and America Online president Robert Pittman had brought together 500 of their friends and acquaintances–many of the benefitgoers seemed to have donned that cloak of invisibility that is so much a part of subway etiquette. The room contained some of the most talked about people in the city, including Ms. Brown, Mr. Pittman, embattled Seagram chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr., David Bowie, his model wife, Iman, and New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith (who got the full Talk treatment, being seated next to Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels at Ms. Brown's table) but, chalk it up to the frigid weather, there was more chance of getting sparks out of the parmesan crisp that was served with the salad course.

Mr. Pittman was first up to the microphone, and he established the evening's running joke. In his authoritative voice–imagine Charlie Rose without a trace of indecision–Mr. Pittman referred to the evening's honoree, actor and The Wild Party star Mandy Patinkin, as Mandy Potamkin . (Later, in the evening, when The Transom asked Mr. Patinkin if he had recently sold Mr. Pittman an automobile, the actor laughed. "That happens to me all the time," said Mr. Patinkin, without any trace of irritation, adding that when he was a student at Juilliard, one guy befriended him, then asked, "Can your father help" with the brand new Chevy he had in mind. Mr. Patinkin said that when he explained that he was not related to the Potamkin automobile family, "I never saw that guy again.")

After Ms. Lemper's musical interlude, in which she sang the lyrics: "I bite my men and suck them dry, and then I bake them in a pie," Mr. Wolfe took the microphone to issue a breathless round of thank yous and to do a little schtick. "I'm babbling a little bit, but, hey, you know that happens," said Mr. Wolfe, who often seems to be channeling an adult version of Family Matters character Steve Urkel.

Sunday in the Park With George director James Lapine took the stage to present Mr. Patinkin with his award, but not before having some fun with Mr. Pittman's pronunciation gaffe. After telling the audience the correct pronunciation of Mr. Patinkin's name, Mr. Lapine pronounced his own surname as "La-peen" and then went on to mispronounce the name of the award that Mr. Patinkin was receiving, the Susan Stein Shiva Award. The late Ms. Shiva's surname is pronounced "Shee-vah," but Mr. Lapine pronounced it as if he were referring to the weeklong Jewish mourning process ("Shih-vah"). Whether or not he was doing this on purpose, Mr. Lapine then kept alternating between the correct and incorrect pronunciations of Ms. Shiva's name, even though he acknowledged–with Ms. Shiva's widower, Gil Shiva, in the audience–that the crowd would soon be sitting shiva for him if he didn't get it straight.

Mr. Lapine did get one thing right on the nose.

"Mandy doesn't do anything by halves," he told the crowd before giving Mr. Patinkin the award.

Mr. Patinkin did not disappoint.

"James, Jesus Christ!" blurted out Mr. Patinkin as he bounded up on stage in his tasteful black-on-black ensemble. He explained that this was the "first time that I've allowed anyone to give me an award" because he didn't feel "near enough to the dead" to accept one. But, Mr. Patinkin explained, "When you are rehearsing a Broadway show, you are near enough to being dead. So I have chosen to accept this honor."

Mr. Patinkin then warned the crowd, "If you need to go the bathroom, I'll be up here for three hours."

Actually, Mr. Patinkin spoke for 10 minutes (The Transom timed him), although he talked fast, spanned a lot of history and named a lot of names (Peter Weller! Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio!).

But what was remarkable about the speech was that even in this age of ironic detachment, Mr. Patinkin managed to be irony-free for the entire 10 minutes. And when he said, about five minutes in, "So when we all make fun of Sally Field for the Academy Awards speech [in which Ms. Field essentially told the crowd, 'You like me. You really like me'], I give her a break," the distinct impression was that Mr. Patinkin was not kidding. Like it or not (after listening to the speech one actor told The Transom, "We're not all like this"), it's clear that Mr. Patinkin is a man in love with the theater.

Mr. Patinkin remembered being 13 years old and rehearsing a scene for Carousel in the Chicago Jewish youth center where he had gone to nursery school, and being told what the play was about: "If you love someone, tell them."

Eventually, Mr. Patinkin arrived at a less joyous occasion. His starring role as a transsexual in the Public's disastrous 1987 production of David Hare's The Knife at the Public Theater, which took place during Mr. Papp's reign there.

"I was a wreck doing The Knife ," Mr. Patinkin told the crowd. "If you'd seen The Knife , you'd know why," he said, adding that one scene required him to wear a blue ball gown. "It was a fucking disaster," spat Mr. Patinkin.

"I didn't know how to tell Joe something was wrong," Mr. Patinkin told the audience. He wanted to tell Mr. Papp that "I didn't care about the placards and awards" that adorned the Public founder's office. He wanted to tell Mr. Papp that he cared about him. "I sensed that he needed to know that I … liked him," said Mr. Patinkin (and that is where the Sally Field reference came in). So he went into Mr. Papp's office. "I started to weep," he said. "[Joe Papp] grabbed my arm."

Mr. Patinkin and Mr. Papp bonded. Mr. Patinkin said he sang the mourner's kaddish in Hebrew in memory of Mr. Papp's son Tony, who succumbed to AIDS in 1991, just months before Mr. Papp would also die. "Joe said that was beautiful and that he'd like me to do it tomorrow night for Jackie Mason and some people."

"Joe is with me every moment of my life," said Mr. Patinkin. "I have a picture of him in my dressing room," and he brought his speech back to Carousel . "If you love someone, tell them," he said. "Tell them before the light goes out."

More recently, Mr. Patinkin said, "George Wolfe came into my life at another moment when I was frightened, and he held my hand," perhaps a reference to the theater grapevine that, behind the scenes, The Wild Party has been as emotionally and psychologically overwrought as the piece itself.

"I bless you for keeping this, Joe's dream," said Mr. Patinkin as he began winding up for one last crescendo of emotion. The train was reaching its terminus.

"The last musical I was in was a piece of dreck!" Mr. Patinkin said. As the words came out, he seemed to reel himself in a bit. "It was a wonderful piece, but without the fucking dress."

Hot Flash for Hillary!

Menopause was far from Hillary Clinton's mind when she worked the rope line of the cocktail party at Maxim's for the Women's Campaign Fund on March 13.

Actress Robin Strasser changed that.

Ms. Strasser, who recently left the soap opera One Life to Live , where she played the diabolical Dorian Lord, presented the First Lady with six hours and four minutes of instructional videotapes on hot flashes, mood swings and other symptoms of this transitional phase of a woman's life. Ms. Strasser underwrote the production and also stars in it, visiting everyone from Ivy League doctors to Chinatown herbalists in search of on-camera relief. "You see me having a bone density test," she told The Transom.

Ms. Strasser told the First Lady that the gift was "unaligned with product identification," and Mrs. Clinton accepted the tapes without breaking her trademark opaque smile, then promptly handed them off to an aide.

Her mission complete, Ms. Strasser headed downtown by car to one of 13 dinners that were being held to benefit the Women's Campaign Fund. En route, the discussion turned to women's passages and whether Mrs. Clinton had made hers. No one could recall the senatorial candidate making any pronouncements on the subject, but Ms. Strasser said the signs of "perimenopause" were obvious. "When Chelsea was about to go to college, she was about to adopt a baby," the actress recalled. "It's her hormones talking to her."

The subject temporarily vanished at the West Village town house of software designer Ray King and his wife, Deneen, both of whom looked closer to the concerns of adolescence than middle age. Hosts and guests at other dinners around town included former Police Commissioner William Bratton and his Court TV personality wife, Rikki Klieman, as well as model Marisa Berenson and Oxygen Media chief executive Geraldine Laybourne, who was said to be the evening's most desired guest. However, the Kings' home was the only one that boasted a reflecting pool in the middle of the living room with a retractable roof. (The house is on the market for $8.5 million.) Mrs. King said her daughter used the pool for wading, while her husband used it "more or less to reflect upon." She added that they are hoping to move to Westchester, where they'll be able to have horses.

The guests at the King residence included interior decorator Mario Buatta, artist Donald Sultan, actress Sylvia Miles and two women who have been the beneficiaries of the Women's Campaign Fund's financial and technical largess: Heidi Behrens-Benedict, a candidate for Congress in Washington and Nancy Farmer, who is running for state treasurer in Missouri. (The fund is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to electing pro-choice women to public office.)

Both women thanked the fund for its support, and Mr. Buatta shared his own Hillary Clinton story with the table. Back in the late 80's, she served as the lawyer for a company with which he went into the fragrance business. "She wrote a tough contract," he recalled without bitterness. "I got fired after three years."

At the end of the evening, Ms. Strasser rose to announce that each of the guests was to receive a complimentary copy of her menopause tape as a memento of the evening. Ms. Miles sighed loudly. "It happened so long ago," she said.

–Ralph Gardner Jr.