A towering challenge. (Docomomo)

Later today, within the next hour or two, the City Council's zoning subcommittee is expected to unveil a compromise that it has reached with New York University on its ambitious and controversial plan to build 2.2 million square feet of facilities on two blocks the school owns south of Washington Square Park. Whatever form that takes, be it shorter buildings, fewer buildings, maybe even though almost certainly not no buildings, it will be the final deal for NYU's 2031 expansion plan.

The faculty of NYU know this full well, and a good many of them dread it. Already 36 departments or divisions at the university have come out against the plan, and even as they realized there was little likelihood of stopping the project in the short-term, a faculty coalition came up with its own plan anyway, releasing it on the same day as the university collects its prize.

"No one knows NYU's space needs better than we do," said Mark Crispin Miller, a media and culture professor who is one of the leading faculty opponents of the expansion plan.

He helped found NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan to write reports and stage protests against the expansion, which the group credits to the university's president, John Sexton, and not themselves.

If the group's counter-proposal (in full below) seems a little late, it is because Mr. Miller said it was only a recent idea, prompted at a City Council hearing for the plan last month. Queens Councilman Leroy Comrie, who chairs the powerful land-use committee overseeing the expansion, asked the faculty "Where was our alternative," Mr. Miller said.

"We decided it was not a bad idea to have something on the record," he said, "even if it might be too late."

While NYU has drafted dozens of flashy renderings, and the zoning documents associated with its plan stretch into the hundreds of pages, the counter-proposal is but five pages long and under-girded by eight simple ideas. The argument goes that NYU only needs a fraction of the space it is proposing because little of what is being initially built—only 18 percent in the first of four towers—is for academic uses.

The balance will be made up from renovations and rehabilitation of existing space, something the opponents argue could be expanded into other buildings not currently under consideration, identifying at least 250,000 additional square feet in the short term. They call for any new construction in the core to be strictly academic, arguing that even they themselves (many of whom happen to live in the superblocks NYU is developing) could stand to commute in from elsewhere in the city.

The plan also calls for prior land covenants to be respected on the superblocks, which would strictly limit development therein, nor should the school attempt to overtake the adjacent park blocks on Mercer Street. Also, no up-zoning of properties or commercial overlay to add stores to the ground floors of the towers that are there now. Basically, very little should be built where NYU wants it right now.

"The NYU2031 Plan reads like a request for a blank check," the counter-proposal declares. "This is an unfair request, because many of its costs will be borne by students (especially in student debt), by faculty, and the surrounding community." So the plan will not just overwhelm the Village, but also the university's balance sheet.

Mr. Miller said this is not how it has to be. "They're either going to live with the Village or crush it," he said. "It's not Columbia, it's not a land grant university. If the place looks like Oklahoma City, what's the appeal? What's the charm?"

He also insisted that even though NYU is likely to get most of what it asked for at the City Council today, his group's plan is not moot. "The Council is not the end," he said. "It's just the beginning." The group hopes to continue hammering on the university's plan, and believes this may have been a turning point for President Sexton's tenure. It has also retained a law firm to consider challenges to the plan once it is approved.

An NYU spokesman dismissed the plan as too little, too late. “The City Council’s Land Use Committee will be voting today on a plan that emerged from a five-year planning process, widespread community consultation, and the extensive review required by the ULURP process," John  Beckman said in a statement. "That’s the key issue today, and we look forward to the Committee’s vote, and the full City
Council vote on July 25.”

The man looks at the audience. "Did he really say that? ' A aspect of poverty is food.' He says things like this all the time-things that make me feel I am losing my mind."

The man onstage is Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University and the author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder . Like many New Yorkers, the 53-year-old Mr. Miller has found himself uneasily adrift, while the rest of the country seems to be just wild about W. For someone who believes, as Mr. Miller does, that the 2000 election was fraudulent, that the Iraq war was a crime against humanity and that the current policies of the Justice Department are a death knell for American democracy, these are bleak, maddening times. To cope with his own bubbling rage and reach other despairing blue-staters, Mr. Miller is performing his one-man comedic play, Operation American Freedom , at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village to sold-out crowds every Saturday night through June. The show could be seen as a response to the lament that rings out from Unitarian pot-luck dinners, indie rock concerts and sociology departments across the land: that the Democratic Party has been struck dumb by the Bush administration's audacity.

"Without a doubt, what is most troubling to me about this administration is the near-total and apparently systematic denunciation of the truth in matters large and small," Mr. Miller said over lunch recently. "It is the mind-boggling mendacity of these people who tell you that black is white and white is black."

The show is a largely improvised rant each week-more like a bitch session in your friend's apartment than an evening at the theater, with topics ranging from W.'s reputed prowess at lighting his flatulence during parties at Yale to the Pentagon's public-relations machine. Indeed, Operation American Freedom grew out of a bitch session between Mr. Miller's wife, Amy Smiley, and her hairdresser, Antonio. When Ms. Smiley told Antonio that her husband was having difficulty finding public forums outside academia post-9/11, Antonio said that not only was he himself a radical Italian socialist, but he had contacts in the city's arts scene. Prego ! He was able to get the alienated academic into the Cherry Lane Theater, and he and Mr. Miller plan to take the show to a larger venue this fall.

Mr. Miller is encrusted with a thicker level of learning than political comedians like Michael Moore or Bill Maher. He studied literary criticism at Johns Hopkins in the 1970's and wrote his doctoral thesis about courtliness in the Renaissance. He subjects Mr. Bush's malapropisms to the same textual scrutiny he once applied to Henry VIII .

"There was a moment during the second debate with Al Gore," Mr. Miller said, "when they were talking about a hate-crimes bill in Texas. Bush launched into this thing about the murderers of James Byrd and how the state was going to fry them. There was a look of glee on his face. He spoke with ease and conviction, completely unscripted. That was a revelation to me. I realized that he is capable of speaking cruelly."

His take on the G.O.P.: "They are pathologically concerned with purifying themselves, and they project the hatred they have for themselves onto others."

One point Mr. Miller makes repeatedly during his show is that George Bush is not stupid. "He is proud of his ignorance, proud that his mind is shut tight like an oyster, but he's not stupid," Mr. Miller tells his audience.

"If Bush were just a laughingstock, just a boob who happened to be dumped on the throne by the forces of evil and bore no other relation to them, it would be cruel to do what I do," Mr. Miller said. "I'd be mocking the afflicted. But it's not cruel because he has much in common with the people around him, and the movement he represents is pure vindictiveness. They want to win, and they want the loser to suffer."

To prepare his book and his show, Mr. Miller has probably ingested more words of George W. Bush than any other American. "It's not easy to be immersed in this stuff," he said. "But I have this compulsion to set the record straight. I can't stand the constant lying. I believe we are obliged to speak out, if for no other reason than it's easy to imagine a future where people will berate themselves for having gone about business as usual."

He'd rather have them berate themselves now. Or better yet, berate others. At the start of his show one night, he told the audience, "I hope you want to leave here tonight and pick a fight, not crawl home and cry."

-Elizabeth Cady Brown

Was It Good for You?

Broadway musical veteran and two-time Tony nominee Rebecca Luker is pretty and blond and nice, and it's starting to become a big fucking problem.

The winsome actress-slash-singer insists she has an inner bitch that's aching to get out. It's just that anything but bonny, blue-eyed goodness is hard for the bonny blue-eyed Ms. Luker to sell. For over a decade, Ms. Luker, 42, has been the Great White Way's cherry-lipped reincarnation of Shirley Jones and Julie Andrews-the perennial bloomers-clad lass who Sally Bowles and Velma Kelly could rip apart with a stiletto. In The Music Man revival, she was chaste Marian the Librarian; in Show Boat, she played the ingénue Magnolia; and in The Sound of Music , she went out on a limb and sang the part of everyone's favorite lapsed nun with such gusto that one could forget anyone else had ever played the part. She tried to tart things up a bit last year when she took her first non-musical role, in The Vagina Monologues . "I did the one that had all the moans. What a hoot!" she said. "I had a ball …. The producer called and said, 'Which part do you want to do?' And I said, 'I want to do anything except the part of the woman who does the moans,' and he said, 'Well, in that case, that's the one you're going to do!' And it was just horrifying to think that I'd have to do 14 different orgasm sounds onstage! He said, 'You need to do it-it'll be good for you.' So I worked on it, and it ended up being my favorite part of the show, honest to God."

But with her Doris Day blond verve and her voice-a light soprano that sweeps you in and makes being a good girl seem pretty damn great-Ms. Luker will have to do a lot more than moan to scrub off the glow of everyone's Puritan darling.

"I'm so not Maria von Trapp …. I'm just me. I'm a nice person, and I think I exude that, but we all have so many sides to us. We all have that dark side," Ms. Luker said one recent afternoon, sipping weak black coffee near the Morningside Heights apartment she shares with her husband, actor Danny Burstein (who's playing Edina's son's boyfriend in next season's Absolutely Fabulous ), and her two young stepsons. She was wearing a tan linen blazer, her golden hair was in a bun at the nape of her neck, and her short fingernails were clean and polished in clear. She looked like the world's prettiest librarian. Asked her current favorite pastimes, Ms. Luker said they included knitting, watching The Golden Girls and doing laundry.

"I'm just a normal person with my own past. We've all made mistakes," she said, launching into a sweet tale of growing up in Alabama, singing into a hairbrush in front of the mirror. She's currently performing in a low-budget romantic comedy, Can't Let Go by Keith Reddin, at the Connelly Theatre, which is located in a Catholic school on East Fourth Street. The play takes place inside a gray, nondescript office. Ms. Luker plays Beth, a blazer-sporting cubicle cog. The play is dotted with musical interludes, in which characters flamboyantly lip-sync songs that help them express their emotions. Ms. Luker mouths the words to a Connie Francis ditty and does a step-and-kick routine. Beth's life mirrors Ms. Luker's in one key way: The spry paper-pusher is plagued by the problem of being universally adored. One after another, her macho boss, a dorky accounting clerk and a pouty lesbian coworker announce their pent-up love for her. Beth spends the next hour staving off their affections and trying to win back the favor of a boyfriend who has decided he wants to become a woman.

"I think Beth is very uncomfortable with all the attention she gets, and I think I'm like that too," Ms. Luker said. "I'm not always happy being the center of attention. And I have no idea what makes her so lovable. She's no supermodel, she's not gross, but she's just normal. She just wants to get her job done. She's kind of a loner, kind of a sad person in her own way, but she's a strong person too. She's sort of a doormat, and yet-she's not."

Ms. Luker said there was another similarity between herself and her character: a passion for cussing.

"During rehearsal, I warned Carl [Forsman, the play's director] that I have a real sailor-mouth, and he said, 'No, if you did, you wouldn't say you did,'" Ms. Luker said. "But I probably say 'shit' a lot. I mean, not a lot, but enough. I say it when I need to: shit. And I say 'damn,' too."

Beth's guns are a little bigger. "Motherfucker!" she yells while storming offstage in Act I.

"It's so much fun to say!" said Ms. Luker, who added that the cursing has kept her from letting her stepsons see the show. "But I'm still working on it, still trying to make it feel right. I haven't really captured the physicality for it yet. You know, my career has been made up of sunshiny, flowery nice characters, and I was just so ready to say 'Motherfucker!'"

-Anna Jane Grossman

New Yorker Cliffs Notes

You probably know who Jonathan Franzen is. He wrote the big best-seller The Corrections in 2001, a book which lots of your friends read and liked very much. Maybe you even read it yourself and liked it very much-and so you might find yourself tempted to read his essay about his high-school high jinks in the current issue of The New Yorker . The thing is, it's long. Really long. Note that the editors of The New Yorker are a brave bunch-they splayed Mr. Franzen's essay out over 13 pages, trusting that readers wouldn't give up or be distracted by the nice ad for the Mini Cooper-you can punch out along the perforated lines and build your own really mini Mini Cooper! (page 108) -or find themselves reading about the virtues of earning an M.B.A. from Yale (advertisement, page 117) instead of about Mr. Franzen hiding from the police "in a clump of rhododendrons."

So, to save you some time, here's all you need to know about the Franzen essay. The comments below should stand up just fine for purposes of literary cocktail-party chatter, or even if you suddenly find yourself mushed up against The Author himself on the No. 6 train and you want to brighten his day by telling him how much you enjoyed his essay in The New Yorker :

The story takes place in St. Louis in 1976. Mr. Franzen and his high-school friends want to slip a car tire over the school flagpole. They do not succeed. While standing on the roof of the school, he smells "the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky." His father was good at building things. He was not and "hated being young." Dumped by first girlfriend, identified as "M-." When he was alone in the house, he played his own records (Grateful Dead and Moody Blues). His mother says, "Turn that off! That awful rock music! I can't stand it!" He finds social acceptance when he starts wearing Levi's straight-leg corduroys. He likes snow because of its "transformative enchantment of ordinary surfaces." He and his pals steal clappers from all the school bells; hence, no morning bell. He falls for girl named Siebert; she falls from tower, breaks back, but gets better. He concludes that "[A]dolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom." Goes to college. During summer break, he dresses up like blind person at behest of prankster friends. He feels guilty. The essay ends with Mr. Franzen going for a drive with his parents.

"I turned my ringer off, set aside my paperwork and sat glued to my TV," said the 25-year-old project manager, gesturing with her hands to indicate a distance of eight inches from the screen, "while J. Lo spilled the dirt about her engagement to Ben. It was better than The Bachelor finale."

To be sure, women all over the city turned off their ringers that same night in November, or the evening Making the Video: Jenny from the Block premiered on MTV, or slunk to their desks well after 10 o'clock one morning in December, unable as they were to extricate themselves from that morning's J. Lo concert on NBC's Today Show , live from said block. These women, it bears mentioning, know their Tariq Aziz, their Hans Blix, their Kim Jong Il, their Allison Pearson. These are otherwise smart women who simply cannot get enough news, gossip, shopping-spree summaries and office-pantry deconstructing of the incessantly publicized relationship between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.

Of course, ironic analysis (as well as maintaining self-aware humor about one's own pathetic-ness) mitigates the shame of being caught in the vortex of Lopez-Affleck overexposure. Or does it? Few of the women interviewed for this story would allow their last names to be used.

Certainly, the country has seen its share of celebrity couples before, but the magnitude of this particular pairing can best be formulated by multiplying Ms. Lopez's $10-million-a-picture salary by Mr. Affleck's $10 million–plus salary, all to the 6.1-carat pink-diamond power. Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt's courtship seems narcotized in comparison.

Why do otherwise sober New York women care so much about this couple? One reason is that it's local news: Ms. Lopez and Mr. Affleck are just downtown in Tribeca; they occupy the center table at Nobu; they swing by the Castle Hill section of the Bronx. Women have observed the progress of their relationship the way they would a midtown-skyscraper construction project, with a "Jesus, that thing went up fast!" reaction-and also a "How safe can something be that went up that fast?" reaction.

The extent of New York women's obsessions may vary, but they seem to be uniformly informed (and enabled) by Us Weekly , first and foremost, as well as People , the Post 's Page Six, E! and the 7 o'clock news: Entertainment Tonight , Extra and Access Hollywood .

"I buy Us every Tuesday, and if Ben and J. Lo are mentioned, cover story or not, I have to read it where I am, even before I leave the store," Tamara said.

Women have set to memory all manner of mind-numbing, picayune facts and gossipy half-truths about Ms. Lopez and Mr. Affleck's romance, day-to-day activities and preferences.

"I can rattle off all the presents they've bought for each other, and when. I know where they like to eat, and what they ate for dinner the night he proposed," said a 29-year-old Upper East Sider who works in the entertainment industry. One 32-year-old copyeditor said, "I was stopped short when I read about how it was someone's job on the set of the Jenny from the Block video to tweak J. Lo's nipples so they looked properly erect."

Elizabeth, 29, who works in the cosmetics industry, recalled that "on-set, she needs those damn $65 grapefruit candles everywhere. Tell me if it's a lie, but I've heard it's in her contract."

Sarah, 27, a magazine editor, has heard that Ben straightens his hair. "He hates it curly," she shrugged. She said she also knows that director Kevin Smith had a video game custom-made for them.

One 31-year-old Gramercy Park resident reported that she and her boyfriend no longer say "Hello" to each other on the phone: "We say 'J. Lo' instead."

And a 31-year-old woman who did not want even her first name used said she and her husband bought In Touch magazine to read on the plane whwen they flew to L.A. for Christmas at her parents'. "We saw a picture of J. Lo and Ben getting takeout pizza from a Beverly Hills pizzeria, and on our first day there, I drove us to the place where I thought the picture was taken," she said. "Do you see why you can't use my name?"

"I went on a blind date last week, and the guy said he couldn't understand why women care about J. Lo and Ben," said the entertainment-industry worker. "I tried to explain it to him. And the great thing was, he got it. He said he felt the same way about an N.F.L. quarterback."

"Jen and Ben feed us lots of dirt, and we crave and crave more-and it's O.K. to crave it, because they've given us full permission and encouragement to do so," Sarah said. Still, no one is naïve enough to think that mere coincidence had them getting engaged within weeks of when Ms. Lopez's album This Is Me … Then debuted and her film Maid in Manhattan opened.

A fair number of these women also found themselves captivated by and kaffeeklatsching over The Bachelor, and they simply refocused their critical views from one stagy, forced romance to another. Moreover, this one is not limited to seven measly episodes-it's the all-you-can-drink water-cooler conversation. It's as though the air people breathe has been infused with Ms. Lopez. (Fitting, since $40 million worth of her new scent, Glow by J. Lo, has sold in the four months since its launch.) If in the past such a media blitz has been the effort of a studio-as it was in 1950, when MGM outfitted Elizabeth Taylor in her Father of the Bride gown when she wed Nicky Hilton a week before the actual movie opened-now it's Ms. Lopez herself who's working the media miracles. And even in the relentless strafe of publicity and soft news, women respect her for that. She and Mr. Affleck "position themselves as reluctant media targets, and that makes the media and the public cheer in victory when yet another of their C.I.A.-grade speculations-are they dating? are they engaged?-is confirmed," said Sarah. "It's pretty brilliant."

Ms. Lopez, who is 32, has something else that's just as potent as that brilliance: unstinting ambition.

"I noticed how different J. Lo looks from her fly-girl days," said Sara, a 27-year-old researcher, referring to when Ms. Lopez was a dancer from 1990 to 1992 on the Fox television show In Living Color. "Her skin used to look a lot lighter, her hair looked a lot darker, even her features looked thicker. She was not the über -hot chick we know and love-slash-hate now." Fran, a 33-year-old graphic designer who lives in Nolita, said, "Has anyone actually compared these two women in before-and-after shots? Are they the same woman? Can face-waxing and highlighting really work so well?"

Somewhere between the Clairol aisle and the Jolen cream-bleach aisle, Ms. Lopez picked up an agenda. Sara said she imagined Ms. Lopez sitting down and "scientifically plotting" her career points: "Straighten hair. Go lighter. Don't fight the ass. Don't fight the Latina. Wear a sheer dress to the Grammys. Date Puffy."

Then, to distance herself from the image of being Puffy's mamacita -and put some daylight between herself and his trial for the December 1999 nightclub shooting-she quickly married the apparently mute choreographer Cris Judd in September 2001.

"Everyone used to say Puffy was ruining her career, especially during the trial," Elizabeth said. "She had to get rid of him."

"J. Lo is a hot property primarily because she's a 'Woman in Control,' an icon of post-feminist autonomy and old-fashioned rags-to-riches elevation," said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University. "It is her aura of cool mastery, as much as her great beauty and fantastic body, that makes her popular. It's the entrepreneurial fantasy she lives that makes her such a star."

"I think, particularly in New York, she is so captivating because she's the ultimate alpha female," said Janice Min, executive editor of Us Weekly . "Like a lot of women in their 30's in New York, she's found herself at the peak of her career after toiling all these years."

What's more, the career high point for her doesn't mean advancement to management level or a window office. It means market dominance in the motion picture, music, fragrance and hootchie-mama velour-tracksuit sectors.

Ms. Min continued: "Women love J. Lo- and her critics may say this is a fault-because she has nothing but confidence. She is so not neurotic. She doesn't worry about whether an outfit makes her butt look big, or if she should have said that, or if she should have ordered that dessert …. She seizes the world by its balls and treats her personal life like she does her business, with ruthless efficiency. She does what all women would like to do if they didn't worry about what other people thought."

There's also been some speculation that Ms. Lopez and Mr. Affleck have strategically coupled up to broaden their individual appeal and to cross class barriers: She makes him street; he makes her white.

One writer in her 30's said, "What many Park Avenue women politely whisper about J. Lo and Ben is 'chambermaid syndrome,' which is ironic given her new movie. They can't abide that he would choose J. Lo over Gwyneth, the jewel-in-the-crown of the sophisticated, chic, pretty young things."

It should be noted that Mr. Affleck and Ms. Paltrow broke up four years ago-or, in Lopez time, two husbands ago (she split from Ojani Noa, waiter-turned-restaurant-manager, in 1998). The writer continued, "The way women whisper about J. Lo, you would think she was Sally Hemings."

Which would liken Mr. Affleck to Thomas Jefferson-a bit of a reach, even before taking into account how many women think that he's the one who's dating up.

"I feel like he's really the lucky one in this arrangement, obviously," said Stephanie, a 28-year-old landscape architect from Park Slope. The entertainment-industry worker stressed, "There's no way he would have been People 's sexiest man alive this year if he wasn't dating her."

"Ben Affleck is not an A-list glamour-puss like she is," said N.Y.U.'s Mr. Miller. "He's more of an actor than a star. Handsome, certainly, but not unearthly in his looks. She, on the other hand, is silver-screen material." When the couple appear together in Gigli , which will open in the spring, Mr. Miller predicted that "she'll wipe him off the screen, much as Greta Garbo wiped out Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka ."

Ms. Lopez the screen siren, it turns out, is as much a contradiction as the Manolo Blahnik Timberland-style boots she wears in the Jenny from the Block video. Despite all the mad bling, she's real, she's real and, oh yeah, one other thing: She's real.

"Everything you hear about her is like, 'You can't look her in the eye, she's so demanding, she needs white roses and white scented candles in her dressing room, she bathes in Evian,'- she's everywhere, every guy you know wants to have sex with her, and you get the feeling that she's a grade-A bitch," Sara said. "But then you find yourself watching Revealed with Jules Asner, or sitting through Maid in Manhattan , and smiling and nodding along and thinking, 'Gosh, I like J. Lo.' Call it charisma or old-school movie moxie or Madonna-like ambition, but she does it. You can't take your eyes off her."

"Even though I know I shouldn't give a shit, I can't help but watch, rapt, anytime there's an interview with her," said Stephanie. "I'm helpless against her charms. And that adorable giggle."

A 34-year old magazine editor said, "Everything about her is extreme-the clothes, the furs, the pink ring. And her enormous ass, which I can't stop looking at, especially in the Jenny from the Block video, when he sort of slaps it."

"He's Hooked On Her"

Mr. Affleck, in stark contrast, inspires more derision than admiration. Fran, the graphic designer, could muster only one word about the 30-year-old actor: "Snore."

"He dips dangerously into Derek Zoolander territory, with that no-smile, squinty-eyed, serious face that he affects whenever he's being photographed," said Sarah. "He did it for the 'Sexiest Man Alive' cover. He must practice it in the mirror-maybe while he's straightening his hair."

Amy, 31, who works in subsidiary rights, readily admitted her ideal outcome for the Lopez and Affleck relationship. "I want her to destroy that milquetoast frat daddy, vagina dentata style," she said. "If Ben Affleck can be left a brittle shell of a man, then J. Lo will not have shaken that ass in vain."

For single women, Mr. Affleck offers a too-much-of-a-good-thing cautionary tale about relationships, with all his ass-kissing Tobor the Boyfriend Robot behavior. His excessive and oftentimes hackneyed expressions of adoration can make him pretty unattractive. For instance, on a November-weekend spending binge in Las Vegas, he reportedly bought Ms. Lopez's mother an E-class Mercedes Benz. And, of course, in the Jenny from the Block video, he actually plants a big old kiss on her big old ass (after giving it a quick little polish, as though he were shining the teacher's apple). Yes, many a single woman can tuck in all alone each night thankful that she's not mixed up with that brand of poontang-whipped, pretty-boy shopoholic.

On the topic of -oholism, Mr. Affleck has arguably replaced his addiction to alcohol with an addiction to affection and attention. Thus his and J. Lo's seventh-grade-dance-style public make-out sessions. Thus their cruising through the Los Angeles canyons in the convertible Bentley.

"I think he's hooked on her and everything that comes along with her-the paparazzi, the fancy cars, jetting off to her house in Miami," said the entertainment-industry worker.

Kitty, a 31-year-old Upper West Sider who also works in the entertainment industry, went so far as to suggest that "Ben has become a Stepford boyfriend due to his rehab back in the summer of 2001. I recently read some old interviews with him, and was struck by how candid and funny and crass he used to be. Now he's so sappy and earnest, totally without edge."

Indeed, old interviews with Mr. Affleck suggest that he recently took a meeting with body snatchers: In the fall of 2000, he was quoted talking about a three-month period when he burned through $40,000 (compared to the $400,000 he reportedly spent that weekend in Vegas). "That taught me to be a little more careful and ever since I've tried not to emulate the typical celebrity lifestyle," he said. "I mean, I don't need a couple of Ferraris and a marble palazzo to feel good about myself."

So said the man who now buys his girlfriend a luxury car in the "you get me next time" way that other boyfriends buy their girlfriends cups of coffee.

For all the chatter about the indicia of their courtship-the jewelry, the gifts, the designer clothes, the Lucite-heeled stripper shoes, the candles and strewn rose pedals-very little is said or ventured about their courtship's emotional underpinnings. Maybe admitting that they truly do desperately love each other would mean forfeiting the requisite New York City, media-savvy cynicism.

"Whenever I see them together, I just think they're putting on a show. How can someone go from P. Diddy to a cheese-dick like Ben?" said the entertainment-industry worker. "And how can a guy go from Gwyneth to J. Lo? I think I'd believe their love more if they didn't go around flaunting it. You'd think someone who's had two brief, failed marriages would have a little more shame."

Sara pointed out, "There is no reason on earth to think he's anything but another Cris Judd."

Elizabeth, on the other hand, conceded that "they fit a purpose in each other's life. Do I see them growing old together? That's a stretch."

"Every woman wants to end up in a relationship when you paw at each other all the time because you're so in love," said Us Weekly 's Ms. Min. "Does that intensity ever last? It might evolve to a whole different level that works for them.

"They got really hot really fast," she added, "and they're going to have an enormous, lavish wedding, I imagine. And the only thing I can say is, I never saw her acting this way with her other two husbands."

(Ms. Lopez did, however, act that way with P. Diddy, who was, of course, considerably higher-profile than Ojani Noa and Cris Judd.)

The true test of J. Lo and Ben's commitment to each other, and their commitment to exposing that commitment-and women's capacity to care endlessly about it-may come with their rumored Caribbean wedding next month. Other hyped celebrity engagements and weddings serve as measuring sticks: Even Madonna wanted to cop some privacy both times she got married. Anne, a 32-year-old who works in book publishing, said, "J. Lo's whole shtick with Ben is the worst since Catherine Zeta-Jones sold her wedding photos."

But Catherine Zeta-Jones' sale of photos from her November 2000 wedding to Michael Douglas (to OK! magazine for $1.5 million) seems downright plucky-quaint, almost-compared to what Ms. Lopez and Mr. Affleck have exhibited so far. One can only assume they'll keep it up. Until they don't.

"They will be so embarrassed when this doesn't work out," the entertainment-industry worker said. "I can't wait."