Janet Mock.

The event extended all the way up a spiral staircase to the bridal and couture displays on the third floor, which had wooden desks and luxurious armchairs in the center of the room because, as a fellow Observer remarked, you need to sit down before they can tell you the prices.

After mistaking a bejeweled seashell for one of Yurman’s newest belts in the men’s collection (“it’s part of the display,” explained the sales attendant), we ran into Janet Mock, People staff writer, transgender activist and GLAAD Awards co-chair.

“To amplify our voice as an LGBT community, and bring us all together, it’s an amazing experience,” she said of the GLAAD Awards.

We asked her about her entrance to the event, because a publicist took a while to find her name on the list.

“Oh, I didn’t notice!” She laughed. “I don’t expect people to know who I am, I’m not a celebrity. I’m just a journalist trying to tell my story.”

Popstar Ari Gold was in attendance as well, but only briefly, and we were temporarily blinded by a large purple diamond pendant in the couture section, so we missed him. Perhaps the hors d'oeuvres didn't sit quite right.

Still, the central staircase, faced in warm marble, has to be one of the finest in the city, reason enough to put the place back on the market, as Mr. Rosen did in 2008. The blushing price was $75 million, the most anyone dared to ask for a home at the time. And there it has sat ever since. Though the place, now asking a mere $50 million, has been far from quiet.

In the intervening years, it has become a boîte of sorts, like so many of Mr. Rosen’s properties--he’s put the house party in Lever House--host to galas, fundraisers, after parties, product launches and, as was the case last night, art shows.

Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, the society fixture, was hosting an opening for Nicholas Pol's Neverlodge—not a bad name for the mansion, either. Even if the art was not all that great, various splatters of paint with clever names (Goat After An Orgasm was one, and not entirely inaccurate) and unusual sculptures of cobbled together ephemera, it all served as a pleasant reminder that townhouses are still lovely, intimate places to show art.

Too bad they command so much more as homes and have thus have become an endangered species uptown.

The Observer caught up with Mr. Rosen just as he was leaving. Before we got a chance to say hi, another guest beat us to the big man. He looked like Mr. Rosen's fellow friend and art dealer Alberto Mugrabi, though it was hard to tell in the faint street light. In the course of the conversation, we overheard the Maybe Mr. Mugrabi remark, "You know, I've talked to two or three people tonight who really want to buy the place."

"Oh yeah?" Mr. Rosen shot back. "I've spoken to more than three. It's great. Everyone wants to buy the place, nobody wants to pay for it."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

The New York Observer can now conclusively report what Ms. Baker does in her spare time: Hang out at New York Observer parties.

Specifically, parties for NYO Magazine, where she was spotted in October at what Observer reporter Elise Knutsen then described as a " tony condo complex 15USW in Union Square."

DNA Info shed some light on Baker's role within VIP Life:

Baker worked for the agency as a contractor referring men to VIP Life, for which she received a finder's fee, said [VIP Life founder Lisa] Clampitt. She'd referred about two or three men to the service, Clampitt said. Both male and female clients at VIP Life must complete an extensive background check that includes family history and relationship history. The agency prides itself on weeding out women who are gold diggers or high-maintenance, Clampitt told DNAinfo.

VIP Life only works with men who are interested in long-term relationships, Clampitt said, adding that she recently turned away a "super handsome" male client because she heard he had a reputation as a player. The service claims it's responsible for dozens of marriages.

An ongoing internal query at The Observer has yet to turn up anything substantive on Ms. Baker's attendance at the party, but when asked for quote on the fact that her colleagues associate with suspected pimpstresses, Observer editor-in-chief Elizabeth Spiers explained: "As they say, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly."

"And no plus one list at the Observer is ever heavily scrutinized, I guess."

[Photo via Patrick McMullan]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Youth, culture.

Though the Islamic Wing of the Met (or more specifically, the Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia—say that three times fast) opened in October, there's no reason for young people not to fête the new galleries five months hence.

The event, dubbed “An Oasis at the Met,” was staged by the institution's College Group, to draw in students with a promise of respite from studies and the travails of college life. Unlike the college oases of binge drinking and raucous parties, students could enjoy the magnificent treasures of Arabia. (And isn't it better to OD on art rather than be hungover from cheap vodka?)

Onlookers spied from the balcony, which became an increasingly crammed fire hazard, while hundreds of undergrads milled about the Great Hall (though many were waiting in the serpentine coat check lines). The party attracted more than 3,000 guests.

Even for neophytes, uninterested in art, the visual delights of delicate folios, gigantic tapestries, mosaic alcoves and a room imported all the way from Damascus were arresting.

Despite the grandeur of the Great Hall and the glorious art, the guests of the event were far more fascinating and painfully entertaining. And from these most distinguished guests came a variety of reactions to the wing.

“What the hell, yo,” said a young woman to her companion as they looked at an Indian folio page. Needless to say, the discussion between party guests wasn't always high criticism.

If there is one thing that college girls like to do, it is to take pictures of themselves and others, preferably both in one shot. And by our informal count, more photos were taken at the 3 hour event than an entire day of Fashion Week.

Some party-goers were more artistically astute than others, of course. One young woman pointed to the floor of the Moroccan room to her friends, explaining the design, something she learned in an art history class.

Even if many of the guests were behaving as if the event was a cross between a party and a field-trip, they were still talking about the art. And isn't that what really matters?

After the ensemble Zikrayat played traditional Middle Eastern tunes, DJ Louie XIV hammed it up for the audience with generic club music. It was when The Observer heard Ke$ha echoing through the hall, that we knew it was our cue to leave. Young people these days.

A guess procures a swag bag the Heeb party.

The publisher of a 10-year-old Jewish periodical that is no longer in print still has plenty of things to worry about.

“Are the knishes kosher?” one partygoer kvetched to Heeb magazine’s David Kelsey last week, before sinking her teeth into the uninviting clump of potato.

“They’re kosher, but not Glatt kosher,” said Kelsey, as the guest scurried off to nosh.

Mr. Kelsey has been running Heeb for the past two years, as it transitioned to a purely digital product. The magazine’s niche has leaned toward young secular Jews since New York Times scribe Jennifer Bleyer founded it in 2002. One year later, publisher Joshua Neuman refashioned it to encompass an entire lifestyle of ironic urban living.

And while Mr. Neuman and the pulp are gone, the pithy commentary and the festivities—including the decennary anniversary party at Fontana’s—remain.

And yet.

“I miss the euphoria of an issue hitting,” said Mr. Kelsey. “That’s so exciting when you’re a quarterly, as opposed to when you’re a daily.”

The Observer said we missed the covers, especially the ones featuring Israeli model Bar Rafaeli in a swimsuit and Sarah Silverman wrapped in a white bed sheet.

“I totally miss the covers,” he agreed. “That’s probably what I miss the most.”

We rarely make a point of arriving early, but the city’s most controversial spirit, Wodka Vodka, was one of the party’s sponsors. The brand is known for its blunt, some would say offensive, advertising and Fontana’s offered free mixed vodka drinks from 8 to 9 pm. Like many of Heeb’s guests, we wanted to try it without paying for it.  As it turns out, we made the right call.

“I’m not a vodka drinker,” said Heeb’s Jonathan Poritsky. “It’s free and I’m not one to judge.

Mr. Kelsey corraled more Heeb staffers including Jeff Newelt, who edited Harvey Pekar’s (American Splendor)  web comic series "The Pekar Project" and has even been a character in the author’s comics. (He reported his pride in Pekar’s posthumous novel, Cleveland, which he also edited and arrives next month.)

“Harvey was more of a mensch, more of a Jewish grandmother than a curmudgeon,” Newelt said. “The movie focused on his grumpy side, but he was the most appreciative person on the planet.”
And the vodka?

“It’s pretty damn smooth. No bite. Nice finish. I’m a vodka drinker. I’ve yet to cringe. The drink special ended just as a line started to forms downstairs, where mini-knishes were being served.

“Have you ever seen Jews stand in line before for food?” asked the Jewish Daily Forward’s associate publisher Barry Surman. “Usually they push their way to the buffet.”
Heeb managing editor Abigail Greenbaum said that she had in fact witnessed such a line.
“I grew up in the Catskills,” she explained.

We asked Ms. Greenbaum whether Wodka sponsored the party in order to repair its image among the Jewish community after one of its billboards led to a New York Post story, headlined, “Booze ruse screws Jews.”

“There was nothing they needed to repair,” she said.

In the back room there were about 150 Heeb gift bags neatly arranged on a pool table.

At past events, guests enjoyed a sundry bag of self-hating Jewish commodities, such as bacon-flavored lip gloss and a vibrator. This year? Office supplies.

The swag included: a copy of the Forward, a disposable Flat Rate Moving pen, a plastic Flat Rate paper clamp, a stack of J Space Post-It notes, a Flat Rate tape measure, a Modern Tribe chocolate gelt candy, a gold-colored Heeb lapel pin and postcard of Yonah Shimmel’s Knish Bakery

On our way out, we spotted Orthodox bike maven Baruch Herzfeld (best known for once shoving a caffeine suppository into his posterior before Rosh Hashanah, for an article he was writing) perched himself near the stairs.

He was chatting up a woman named Sarah who left a strict Hasidic sect in Boro Park (but does not have a book coming out about her experience.) She asked if we had a joint. We didn’t.

Jackie Mason’s daughter, Sheba Mason, happened by. She said the event was a “lovely party,” but could have used more dancing.

In addition, she found the cuisine somewhat typecast.

“Knishes are a stereotypical food,” Mason noted. “[Jews] also eat chips and salsa sometimes.”

1. QEvents' "Quintessential Holiday Experience"

MJE East, 5 East 62nd St, New York, NY 7-11:55 pm
This is how you know that the party thrown by the Manhattan Jewish Experience is going to be the place for guilty Jewish singles tonight:
A) It was listed on Guest of a Guest's event calendar;
B) Using the P.C. term "Holiday" to describe one of the most important dates in the Talmud shows a gentrification on par with the stores calling Christmas lights "Holiday Decorations";
C) Cocktail hour!

2. Apple Stores
(various locations)

Apples and honey are the two main staples of Rosh Hashanah, so tonight is a good a time as any to go get your Macbook fixed. Sure, it's a metaphorical stretch of Apples to apples, but maybe if you spill honey all over your keyboard, God will count it anyway.

3. "High Holidays At The Loft"
The Chabad Loft,  144 Fifth Ave.

Killing two birds with one stone: You can both attend services, and tell your friends the next day that you were busy at "The Loft" last night. They will probably assume it's just a cool club they haven't heard of yet.

4. Occupy Wall Street
Zuccotti Park, between Broadway and Church streets and Liberty and Cedar Streets

Bring food and candles and make your own prayer books/drum circle. We're sure that just one shofar blast will be effective in creating your own DIY service.

5. Attend Congregation at Beit Simchat Torah
57 Bethune Street

An open-door policy is a nice relief from the usually pricey synagogue tickets, plus it's the hands-down hippest congregation in the city. LGBT-friendly and celebrity sitings galore, this is definitely the place to go if you need to tell your parents you're doing something for the holidays...even if that something is trying to spot Demi Moore during the Kiddush.

Why not? (Getty Images)

Dana Karwas had two images mind as she set about planning her 30th birthday party. It was to be the first grand celebration of her life. One image was the scene at the end of Fellini’s 8½, when a small brass band does a brief march on an Italian beach. Another was a persistent daydream about holding her friends hostage.

“I really wanted to kidnap some people and take them out to Coney Island,” she said.

So she did. On her birthday, a group of 15 people met in downtown Manhattan. At 8:45 p.m., three black cars showed up. Everybody was blindfolded, handed a bag containing a musical instrument and some drink, and then shoved into a car.

“The cars were instructed to zoom as a procession towards Coney Island,” said Ms. Karwas.

The blindfolds came off when they arrived. The late-October night was chilly—a wind blew and a slight rain had started to fall. The group was instructed to play their instruments, march along the beach and recreate the ocean-side scene that Ms. Karwas, who grew up in Missouri, had long dreamed about.

“It made me so happy, I think I cried,” she remembered.

They marched down the beach to Tatiana’s Russian restaurant, where, said Ms. Karwas, a table laden with “trays and pyramids of food” awaited them. They ate. After a performance that Ms. Karwas describes as a sort of Russian Cirque du Soleil—techno, trapeze artists, contortionists, neon lights—the evening evolved into an all-out dance party.

“And that’s when it kind of felt like a wedding,” she said.

As more people hit 30 unmarried and without children—without any real emblem of their now undeniable adulthood—the 30th birthday party has become an increasingly elaborate affair. For some, it becomes a sort of second bar (or bat) mitzvah—a full-on party with the celebrants focused wholly on the honored guest, and an atavistic return to the unencumbered joy of childhood parties. For others, the 30th is a pre-emptive declaration of elderly gravitas, where accomplishments and experiences thus far are elevated to epic proportions by a youth-obsessed culture. The 21st birthday is an amateurish bacchanal, a mere permission slip, usually memorable for the next morning’s ailments. The 40th is so far off as to be unimaginable. The 30th is where the real party is.

As a result, there’s been a proliferation of a different kind of save-the-date, like the email we received last year, subject heading: “new year’s birthday / get your face melted.”

“I am turning 30 in December,” the email read. December, at the time, was seven months away. “I know it’s a big commitment to trek out of the country for a 5-7 day party,” it continued, “but shit, when have we been known not to throw the parties that melt your face off.” More such emails followed.

“I am turning 30 in August (!), and I’m planning a birthday dinner at a restaurant in Carroll Gardens,” said another. “Let me know if you’re around, and if so, I’ll send you an invitation (yes, I printed invitations because I’m obsessed with my birthday).”

When the paper version arrived, it was lovely, like a wedding invitation, with an embossed green bicycle and elegant font on creamy paper. The card was as much a special occasion as the party, and we were reluctant to even throw it away. We sent our reply, put on a nice dress and were treated to a lavish dinner in a very nice restaurant that felt, well, like a wedding reception without the drunken uncles.

The Observer’s solicitation for more stories of extravagant 30th birthday parties at first yielded little.

“For mine I went to Grand Sichuan,” wrote one 30-something. “I await your call.”

“A huge storm hit just before my backyard bbq and power was out for a week,” wrote another. “Not extravagant.”

“I ate a piece of steak in Nairobi by myself,” said a third.

But soon we were inundated. Those celebrating the end of their 20’s rented houses in Costa Rica; they rented bars in Manhattan; they rented restaurants in Brooklyn. They rented party buses, in which they put 50 of their best friends and took them to Medieval Times in New Jersey. (“They all got crowns and big goblets of wine and beer and swords,” said the birthday boy’s wife. “It helps make a somewhat depressing age somewhat more manageable.”) The invitations were exuberant: “Think the Oscars … think of a Vegas night club, Kentucky Derby, or P. Diddy’s Hampton White Party,” said one invitation, for a party at a hotel in California.

In some cases, the planning was underway more than a year in advance. We called a young woman who was planning a birthday for her husband in August 2012 (she asked that her name not be used, as she wants to surprise him).

“So the tentative plan is that I would start contacting his out-of-town friends maybe six months in advance,” she outlined. “I would have everyone fly in, then rent a party bus, and it would basically be a treasure hunt from his parents’ house in New Jersey into Manhattan.

“We’ll probably rent out a restaurant for all those people,” she continued, “and then the next day fly to Vegas and then—this is a little over the top—but then we would go to a beach resort in Mexico to calm down.”

“Like a honeymoon for your birthday party?” we asked.

“That’s the vision,” she said. “If I’m going to take some days off work I might as well take a vacation.” Even married 30-year-olds were treating the birthday like a nuptials redux.

She said the birthday party would be “a different scale” than the couple’s wedding. They had 180 people there, and she expects maybe 50 people for the first phase of the birthday party. She said that she had asked her parents back in Minnesota how they had celebrated their 30th birthdays. Neither one remembered.

“A party bus makes sense; 30 is not old,” said one New York woman who works at a Manhattan private school and did not want her name used, saying she was embarrassed about her party. “My mom was like, ‘Your 30th birthday party is coming up, maybe we should have a nice party—you’ll never get married, so this is an excuse for a party.’” Instead of a party bus, her parents rented out a wine bar on the Upper West Side.

“My whole thing was that I wasn’t married and my younger sister’s married,” she said glumly. “There was just this overkill, in my mind, of ‘We’re throwing a party for you because you’re not married.’” Her parents came to the party, of course.

“I was dating this asshole but we’d only been dating for a month, and having him at the birthday put all this pressure on the relationship,” she said. “We had really good food. I didn’t eat any of it.”

Of the people The Observer interviewed, few wanted their names used, saying that they did not want to seem self-obsessed or made fun of for exaggerating something that wasn’t really that big a deal—even though most of them had in fact made a big deal out of it.

“The whole thing was tongue and cheek in a way, a touch of irony there to laugh at ourselves for having a 30th birthday party. We were playing up the cheesiness of Miami, with a stretch limo picking us up at the airport,” insisted a friend who did not want his name used because he was embarrassed by the excess of it.

He said that he remembered when his dad had turned 30—or maybe it was 35. “I remember a birthday my mom threw for my dad,” he said. “They had a really tight-knit group of friends and they had a cool adult party.”

Ms. Karwas, for her part, said that there was a way in which 30 felt like a “phantom turning point.”

“I think when I was 31 I freaked out and bought a bunch of face cream—I think that was my cultural reaction to whatever 30 is,” she said. “I believe 30 is a decade where big things happen to people, big career things, big family things.”

In the meantime: “Hey, I have no kids. I don’t have a mortgage, whoo!” she said. “Let’s celebrate!”

ewitt@observer.com

Even famous health fanatic Rupert Murdoch was seen to grab a few while standing with his wife Wendi, who wore tremendously fetching turquoise blue sheath dress. The cocktail party was held outside the State Supreme Court House and the crowd milled around enjoying the balmy late spring weather.  

Christopher Walken is well-known for his ability to play crusty, stern military men, most notably in the Pulp Fiction sequence about the consequences of hiding the family jewels in...well... the family jewels. But has he served his country for real? Walken was put on the spot about his military career by friends and ex-marines Scott Glenn and Harvey Keitel. Mr. Keitel and Mr. Glenn, wearing exactly the same black shirt and black blazer combo, shared a moment of man love and had a hearty hug before Mr. Keitel shouted, "A fellow Marine - we have to stick together!"  Mr. Keitel called out to Christopher Walken standing nearby, "Hey, Walken were you in the Marines?" Taking a long sip of red wine, the slightly ashen actor replied with a smile, "I was but no one ever believes me."  (The Observer had a look and it appears that Walken never actually served in the armed forces.)

His friend and fellow actor, Scott Glenn did serve, and told us he was discharged from military service on November 22^nd 1967, "Which was a pretty interesting time to be in the marines." Mr. Glenn was both a judge at the festival and as well as promoting a movie he was featured in called Magic Mountain.  "I was in three movies this year, one had a budget of $100 million, another was $35 million and the one at the festival was just $600,000." When asked if he preferred Independent movies or studio ones, Mr. Glenn replied, "If money wasn't an issue, I would always choose Independents but studio films pay the rent."

Grayon Carter presided over his party in a natty green-checked spring tweed coat for the occasion. Other attendees included: Salman Rushdie paying hooky from his duties as the president of the PEN awards, Oscar award winning director Tom Hopper seen leaving with new squeeze Tara Subkoff and Robert de Niro surrounded by a huge and immovable crush of fans.

dprince@observer.com