Though Madonna's appearance was kept tightly under wraps, The Observer's arrival, at the Museum of Modern Art, was met with dozens of photographers and fans alike, all holding snappers at the ready. Apparently we weren't the only ones in the know.

The press went duly mad for the Queen of Pop's arrival, a fact emphasized by Parker Posey whose time on the red carpet was cut short by the appearance of the director herself. Ms. Posey bounced down the line of reporters, shouting "Madonna is here! Madonna is here!"

As she posed for photos, we spoke with British actress Andrea Riseborough, who plays Ms. Simpson in the film. Ms. Riseborough adhered to the processes involved in physically assuming the unique figure of the Duchess of Windsor. "I trained very hard. I'm half the size of myself now," she said.

THAT WOMAN: The Life Of Wallis Simpson, Duchess Of Windsor by Anne Sebba, questions the sexuality of Ms. Simpson. So did Ms. Riseborough feel the protruding pressure of androgyny in her role? "No. She wasn't an hermaphrodite. She was just the perfect person to project that on to."

When we asked Madonna the same question, however, she found it difficult to answer.

"I dont know. I dont think so. No. No, I think that's an assumption that one shouldn't make." She offered, while being eased away by her publicist. Resisting, Madge returned to make it clear exactly what she thought.

"There is no empirical evidence stating such," she said matter-of-factly.

While the question over Wallis Simpson remains up in the air, we do have empirical evidence, in the form of photographs, of the high-styled Donna Karen, Anderson Cooper and Kim Cattrall. All of whom graced Madonna with their presence last night.

In the pre-screening introduction she alluded to her disappointment at not being offered a glass of champagne. "So I'm not drunk." Pausing as the lights dimmed. "I hope I enjoy the film. So did we.

Organizers had lavished as much attention on setting the scene at the ball as on the art. Guests were able to adorn a wire-frame sculpture with crepe paper, and an energetic accordionist (his accordion labeled "Caligula") moved from room to room, performing Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" accompanied by a belly dancer wearing bells.

Actress Parker Posey, wearing neon-pink vintage, was engaged in discussion with her boyfriend, the artist Scott Lenhardt, and a group of clowns in glow-in-the-dark hats and rings. "Should we go up? Should we start down and go up?" The actress decided to ascend the five flights of stairs.

"I loved the clowns--their hats!" Ms. Posey told The Observer, once we'd both arrived safely at the fifth floor. Could she herself be an artist? "I could never do that--I'm in awe of that. I think--if you can make it alone," gesturing at her artist boyfriend. "He's alone in his studio. I need collaborators. I go to actor camp." Ms. Posey plans to make a documentary with former MTV News-woman Serena Altschul about the death of etiquette--oh no, is it really dead? The actress assured us it wasn't, and that her belief in common courtesy was reinforced that morning while listening to NPR.

The Observer wandered a floor down. On the fourth floor, the smell of a certain medicinal drug wafted through the air, though the source was unclear. The student artists' work was all for sale; one artist set out a plate of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Fabiola Beracasa, in cream eyelet and two-tone spike heels, was on the hunt: "I'm always looking for art to purchase-but if I tell you which art, someone else will buy it!" She knew the game. "This all has me inspired to go to art school. I'm interested in making art out of things other people consider useless or garbage, making it useful." The Observer stepped to the stairs, dodging a pair of roving saxophonists blaring away in the stairwell.

Actress Jena Malone, donning an oversize blue blazer and white floor-length gown, was totally covered up compared to her scantily clad character in Sucker Punch. She said she wouldn't be willing to put paintbrush to easel: "I don't put that kind of parameter on it. Creation is creation." The accordionist roved through again, with his belly dancer jingling behind him.

Yet one more floor down, sitting in the second-floor bar, was Sally Singer, editor of T. "It makes me realize, I couldn't be an artist. I couldn't do what anyone here does." Ms. Singer twirled her hair. "They're training in deeply unironic ways. There's a kind of magic to that."

Ms. Singer had convinced The Observer of the power of art-sadly, we were sitting in black upholstered armchairs, with no art around, save for the bartenders' black feathered wings. (When asked why he wore the wings, the bartender gestured at the gothy décor and declared, "It's the room.") Still, there was something greater here! We had to return to the irony and pettiness of fashion, though: what Ms. Singer was wearing. "It's Marco Zanini for Rochas," she sighed. We apologized for the shallowness of our question, and were cut off. "Listen. I live in that world. It's a spring dress from Rochas."

Ms. Singer's predecessor at T was wandering a floor above. "Oh, it's good. It's like being an extra on Work of Art," declared Stefano Tonchi, now of W. What kind of art would Mr. Tonchi produce? "I'd make conceptual art--I like to make people guess what it is." Would W become conceptual? "No! I want people to know what it is right away."

The actress Leelee Sobieski had surpassed Mr. Tonchi--she already is an artist. "Well, I do paint." And what from the news inspires her? "When one would think inspire, you would think in a positive direction-I don't know what to say to that. Everyone's going through tough times right now." Ms. Sobieski gazed at a painting by a New York Academy student of chickens pecking one another to death. She only looked for a few moments before stepping away, but she looked as though she were inspired.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Edited by Daisy Prince

Click here to see photos from the week's best parties.

One star out of Four

The inmates are running a different kind of asylum in Happy Tears, a vulgar, happy-as-cancer aberration that takes the dysfunctional family idea to a new low. Whimsical, yes. Happy, never.

Two estranged sisters with nothing in common are forced to return to their seedy family home in Pittsburgh to deal with their father, who is suffering from advanced stages of Binswanger’s, a rare neurological disorder from which there is no cure. Jayne (Parker Posey) is an incompetent neurotic who can’t face reality on any level, and from her first scene, in which she spends thousands of dollars on a pair of knee-high, stiletto-heel leather boots from a shoe salesman who turns into a buzzard, there is some indication that Binswanger’s might be inherited. Her focused, take-charge older sister, Laura (Demi Moore), grapples with the problems of dealing with three kids and a gay husband while traveling around the country testing the quality of the local water supply. Both sisters once worked as strippers.

Joe, the senile father (played with maximum obscenity by a grotesque Rip Torn), is an incontinent old retired blues singer who sits half-naked at the kitchen table throwing up on himself. He is also being nursed (and ripped off) by a floozy named Shelly (Ellen Barkin), a sexy crackhead and check forger who wants her own piece of the hidden fortune the old geezer is rumored to have buried on the property. While they pretend to deal with real problems (selling the house, disposing of the contents in a yard sale, sending the old man to a nursing home), everyone gets waylaid by a script that is up to its imploding cerebellum in a dementia of its own. Laura spends her time dragging Joe from the table to clean up his very visibly soiled diapers. Jayne is married to Jackson (Christian Camargo), a rich California art dealer and would-be painter who slashes his wrists and paints canvases with his own blood. No wonder she talks to her sex organs and sees people disappear through patterns in the carpet. Shelly wears a stethoscope around her neck and eats with her bare hands while Joe tells his daughters, “She’s had two kids, but she’s still real tight.” For family bonding, they pile up in bed and watch The Mummy together. Later, the family photos turn into Boris Karloff.

Happy Tears was written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, a memorable actor (Streamers, The Lords of Discipline) and an original thinker with a kinky sense of humor who has unfortunately developed no distinctive skills as a writer or director of substance. (His first feature, Teeth, was about a woman with teeth in her vagina.) He is also the son of renowned artist Roy Lichtenstein, and his mother did suffer from dementia, but he insists the film is not autobiographical and claims he did not base the character of Jackson on himself. This is probably true, since nothing in the film smacks of reality. Aside from Demi Moore’s grounded portrait of the world-weary Laura, nothing rings true. Everyone says and does freaky things, but nobody ever comes to life. Even the occasional attempt to focus leads to irrelevant gimmicks and distracting dream sequences: Shelly drinking Joe’s blood like a vampire; Jackson in a straitjacket, bouncing off the walls of a padded cell. During a discussion about long-term nursing, while the doctor is explaining Joe’s dementia, Jayne hears Hawaiian hula music. After a while, you stop scratching your head and start checking your watch. There’s a fine line between lovable eccentrics and certifiable lunatics. The twisted sisters in Happy Tears are not much fun as either.

rreed@observer.com

We started the year worrying that pom-pomed moccasin boots were here to stay. Thankfully, we now know they were not.

Meatpacking district original Florent Morellet failed to understand the skyrocketing rents on his "shabby" bit of Gansevoort St. 

At a Bergdorf Goodman Fashion Week party, a slightly manic Isaac Mizrahi explained why he does not attend fashion shows. Later on, at Cynthia Rowley, Parker Posey told us she doesn't like runway viewing because it makes her sweat. And Victoria Beckham almost prematurely revealed the winner of Project Runway.

A couple weeks later, we continued to talk fashion at the Westminster Dog Show: “You never want to wear anything that outshines the dog, you want to wear shoes that won’t slip, and you never want to wear anything that clashes with the carpet.”

On the one-year anniversary of The Box, now-embattled owner Simon Hammerstein told us: “If you look at the program from last year till now, certainly we kept pushing the boundaries of what we thought people would be able to take. … It paid off because people really responded well to stuff that I thought they would get creeped out by." How things change in a year!

L.A.-based institution Wolfgang Puck dissed hometown hero David Chang. 

We attended a non-fund-raising fete in honor of the Jagger Dagger--a specially designed $250,000 ice pick that Jade Jagger created for Belvedere vodka--and Alexander Wang, Tara Subkoff, and Tatiana von Furstenburg were all confused. 

Even after quitting his (recently resurrected) Gatecrasher column, Daily News gossip Ben Widdicombe found the time to fill us in on New York chatter from Istanbul.

Sarah Jessica Parker played rock star at the premiere of Sex and the City. 

A post-Padma Salman Rushdie shilled for the Kama Sutra at a steamy Barnes & Noble reading. 

Summer rolled around and we pondered the wearability of the season's ubiquitous maxi dress.

At the 30th anniversary of Betsey Johnson, the designer mourned the death of downtown. More recently, the old-school club kids at Susanne Bartsch's Christmas toy drive proved that they're still having fun. 

Out in the Hamptons, we tried--and sort of succeeded--to wheedle information out of a freshly divorced Christie Brinkley.

We made a study of Chuck Bass--er, Ed Westwick's--carefully crafted photo face in preparation for a very special Gossip Girl party.

At the DNC in Denver, the celebs of the Creative Coalition wondered how to get in touch with the common folk. However, by the end of the week, they were more than happy to relax at Google and Vanity Fair's fancy get-together.

Over at the RNC in Minnesota, buddies Danny Meyer and Tom Brokaw unwound over junk food and fly-fishing chat.

Fashion Week: Round II brought us to a glittery party hosted by Interview at the unfinished Standard Hotel and a premiere party for The Rachel Zoe Project, where Ms. Zoe's mother told us some cute stories about her daughter (our next run-in with Ms. Zoe was less warm). Andre Leon Talley hoped for a new generation of less emaciated models, and Andre 3000 informed us that dressing well doesn't mean you're gay. To top it off, we stumbled upon a quietly A-list party on West 31st St. 

At an Accompanied Literary Society party (co-hosted by Diesel), literature (sort of) met fashion. We met Fiona Apple, who was there with author-boyfriend Jonathan Ames. 

Toby Young returned to New York to promote the film version of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. 

We got pre- and post- election assessments from the literary and media set at the New York Public Library Lions benefit and a screening of After the Party, respectively.  

We found out that Katie Holmes and Suri Cruise eat at the Zaro's across the street from our office (sometimes)!

The art and social worlds were forced to note the tanking economy. 

Finally, to close out the year, we were treated to a discourse on hip-hop by Tom Wolfe. 

The Observer has been known to wallow in TV sleaze now and again, but even we somehow overlooked the fact that there’s actually a show dedicated to finding “talented” girls who excel at quasi-stripping at meathead bars. But there you have it: Named for the famed East Village joint, The Ultimate Coyote Ugly Search returns for a third season on CMT. Ten ladies compete to join a troupe departing N.Y.C. to tour “the country singing and dancing on bar tops and impressing crowds.” Hmm. Will this make us feel superior, or fat? We might avoid finding out.

Speaking of fat … the Learning Channel (best known for their pretty good show Little People, Big World, about a couple with dwarfism and their crazy, hyper-athletic kids) debuts I Can Make You Thin (March 7, 10 p.m.). Starring British self-help guru Paul McKenna, the show will be ‘interactive’ and will ‘transform your relationship with food,’ according to Time Warner Cable. Actually, we like our relationship to food just fine, especially when Padma Lakshmi is telling us about pork belly on Top Chef, Bravo’s monster reality hit, which returns on March 12. For the fourth season, the game’s in Chicago, but about half the contestants are from N.Y.C. However, one of them, Spike, points out in his online bio on the Bravo site that he’s from “Williamsburg, NY.” Hipster much? We know who we won’t be rooting for!

Don’t worry. There are a few new scripted shows that might well be worth your viewing. Fox premieres Canterbury’s Law on March 10 at 10 p.m., a new legal drama about renegade defense attorney Elizabeth Canterbury (played by new mommy Julianna Margulies), who’ll bend the rules to do right by folks wrongly accused of crimes. And, of course, her intense focus on work also complicates her personal life. Best part? Aidan Quinn, of whom we don’t see enough these days, co-stars as Canterbury’s husband.

On March 14, Fox will also premiere The Return of Jezebel James, a new sitcom from Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. Parker Posey has her prime-time debut as Sarah Tompkins, a successful children’s book editor and writer (her teen novel alter ego is the titular Jezebel) who, due to a medical condition, can’t get pregnant. But she wants a baby, so she asks her sister Coco (Lauren Ambrose) to carry it for her. The combination of these two, plus Dianne Wiest (as their mother) and Scott Cohen (a.k.a. Max Medina from Gilmore Girls) has us clicking feverishly on the DVR. The pilot we saw a year ago was iffy, but we’re crossing our fingers this one has come together.

Samantha Who? isn’t exactly new—nine episodes aired from October to December of last year—but it’s probably new to you. The ABC comedy, which returns on April 7 to complete its first season, deserves a bigger audience than it’s been pulling. The premise is goofy: Samantha (Christina Applegate of Married With Children fame) plays a mid-30’s career gal who just happens to be recovering from a nasty case of amnesia. As she pieces her life together, she realizes that she wasn’t such a nice person before she lost her memory, and sets out to right some of her many wrongs. Barry Watson (big bro from 7th Heaven) co-stars as the good-guy ex-boyfriend who can’t help but help Samantha navigate her new reality. This show is cute, funny and downright good-natured. And what’s wrong with that?

We don’t usually go for comedy for comedy’s sake, but Comedy Central’s got Lewis Black doing a fake courtroom thing with the new show Lewis Black’s the Root of All Evil (March 12, 10:30). The show will have “Judge” Black presiding over imaginary cases (i.e., Paris Hilton v. Dick Cheney) argued by a rotating roster of comedians. Over on Showtime, comedienne Tracey Ullman stages a comeback with State of the Union (March 30, 10 p.m.), doing her best impersonations of American pop cultural and political figures, as well as an array of American characters. Given the election year, this just might be perfect comic timing.

Today, a buyer named Jeremy A. Rossman (who is either a rocker or a lawyer based on a cursory Google search) paid $1.31 million for the indy darling's old digs.

Last night, Parker Posey said she had a cold.

“Can you tell?” the actress asked in an earnest tone. No, we assured her. And it was true. Considering the flight of otherwise red-faced, smooshy-coiffed guests who had just braved a blizzard to attend the New York Academy of Art’s Tribeca Ball, Ms. Posey, in her breezy Cynthia Rowley dress, appeared the ravishing exception.

Still, Ms. Posey was in clouds.

“Look at my watery eyes,” she insisted, moving her face a couple inches forward to offer a better peek. Sure, her mouth was hanging open in a rather distracting fashion. But her eyes—both of them—appeared to be coated in a healthy amount of fluid.

She sighed and turned to look at a spunky Alan Cuming cheerleading a group of apprehensive guests up several flights of stairs.

The New York Academy of Art’s studio spaces, housed in a handsome five-story structure on Franklin St., played an integral role in last night’s event. After arriving, guests were encouraged to head directly to a bar on the building’s top floor. Drinks in hand, partygoers, who were asked to dress in “bohemian chic,” could then wind their way down, stopping off at each level before returning to the ground floor, where dinner and dancing would commence. Each floor had several components of live artistry—from a man in burlesque drag modeling for a few fidgety painters on art horses (floor 5) to a sword swallower swallowing swords next to a student spraying water on his lineup of dwarfish clay figures (floor 2).

One of Ms. Posey’s more iconic—and for our purposes, relevant—film roles was as Mary Boone, the New York art dealer and gallerist, in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 Basquiat—an engrossing portrait of the titular, tragic artist, Jean-Michel, who was played by Jeffrey Wright. The flesh-and-blood Ms. Boone, as it happened, was also a guest at last night’s party: something of an awkward overlap. Indeed, Ms. Posey’s portrayal of her was less than flattering, however honest.

“I got to wear Mary’s clothes in that movie,” the actress recalled, but she seemed to remember little else. When we tried to jog her memory by reciting one of her lines—“Listen, whoever you are, can you please move? We’re trying to hang paintings”—she offered a blank stare. “See, I don’t even remember that,” she said in a way that made us feel slightly precious.

Basquiat was shot, after all, more than a decade ago. And since then, Ms. Posey said, the New York art scene “comes and goes from what I can see. I wish there was more attention towards it. Now it seems there’s a lot of attention to fashion,” she told us. (Ms. Posey, often called, in turns, a style icon and muse, attended only Ms. Rowley’s show during the recent fashion week.)

Perhaps Ms. Posey—who said she is about to begin filming director Mitchell Lichtenstein’s next project in which she plays Demi Moore’s sister—had noticed the art world moving in a more corporate direction, something hotelier André Balazs, another guest last night, told the Daily Transom at a party following Art Basel Miami.

“I’m too self-absorbed to really notice,” she said. “I’m totally joking with you, but I don’t really pay that much attention. I love New York, I live here and I have a life here. I go to museums when I can, and I see art.

“I love culture”—she arched her eyebrows excitedly and then, in a transition-free instant, slumped back into apparent ennui—“other than, you know, pop culture.”

"It's a chance to see designers," one told the Daily Transom, before seeing a group with latch-on potential walking by, apologizing and walking after them.

Hamming it up inside for the pre-show flashbulb onslaught were the actresses Sophia Bush and Aisha Tyler, the latter in a cocktail dress, and news anchor Rita Cosby.

Forty-five minutes after the official start time, workers removed a huge, environment-be-damned strip of plastic protecting the runway.

Deep purple, emerald green, navy blue, and gray gave Ms. Acra's collection a regal air. Many frocks looked like classical Greek frieze images, with one sleeve and careful ruffles, mirrored in the model's hairdos: wavy from the neck down, like a complex hairdo finally undone at the end of a party. They were belle-of-the-ball dresses young girls see in their mind's eye when playing dress-up with mom's old nighties.

An hour later and a few blocks south, Ms. Tyler took her coat off at the Cynthia Rowley show, revealing a sleek gray skirt suit. "My hotel's like around the corner from the show," she said with a laugh, when asked how she pulled off the quick-change act.

Further down the row sat Tatum O'Neal, Lipstick Jungle's Kim Raver and Lindsay Price—yes, total Lipstick Jungle saturation point now reached!—and, even further, a messy-haired Philip Seymour Hoffman. On the other side of the runway, Parker Posey, wearing minimal makeup, mock-pouted for a photographer mob, sunglasses on.

"I don't like to go to these things. They make me sweat," Ms. Posey told the Transom.

A blank white runway backdrop fell outward to reveal a sylvan pop-up set with a doorway in its center. Some of Ms. Rowley's designs matched the ragged, leafy shapes and colors of the backdrop. The carefully faded fabrics and Little House on the Prairie shirtdresses seemed bound for Bedford Ave. It all looked deliberately accidentally urban.

And the designer, who had overseen show preparations with two tired young daughters in tow, earned raucous applause from the crowd packed in all the way back to the hall's Corinthian-columned walls.

Because 38-year-old Ms. Posey so perfectly personifies the East Village’s hip foibles and its cheekiness and loveliness, it feels immensely inappropriate that, according to Halstead Property’s Web listings, her artsy three-room apartment in an 1845 brownstone on East 10th Street near Third Avenue is on the market.

Ms. Posey’s co-op, with a 15-foot skylight, a building’s worth of exposed brick, a wall of windows, a claw-foot tub, a working carved-marble fireplace and “exclusive use of the roof,” which sounds very Hollywood, will cost you $1.175 million.

But there’s already competition for the apartment. Three days after showings began earlier this month, an Observer reporter who happened to be in the neighborhood for a Vietnamese sandwich overheard a man saying that he and his boyfriend had put in a bid for Ms. Posey’s place.

But, take note: There’s still time to get the “excellent closet and Storage space and a washer/dryer” that belonged to the Village actress. According to the Halstead Web site, the place hasn’t gone to contract yet.

Why would she want to leave fellow East Village scenesters Chloë Sevigny and ex-Smashing Pumpkins lead guitarist James Iha—who happen to own co-ops in this townhouse, too? A source said Ms. Posey is looking for an apartment with a doorman.

Yet it’s been proven that at any given time at least three people in the neighborhood are watching Ms. Posey’s 1996 comedy Waiting for Guffman. She plays an ambitious Southern Dairy Queen girl who muses, “What New York really is, is it’s an island, with lots of people, lots of different people. … I hope to maybe meet some guys, some Italian guys, and maybe watch some TV.”

Fox claims an overstuffed midseason lineup, with 24 and American Idol returning. But it’s hard not to suspect the show might be on the rocks. No one loved the Gilmore Girls more than us, but clips we saw of the pilot during the spring Up Fronts was only so-so funny.

Still, we’re crossing our fingers that this dream team will get it together for a full season pickup next year.