Chris Noth and Whoopi Goldberg.

When Chris Noth invites you out on Valentine’s Day weekend, you don’t say no. At least that was the Transom’s theory as we set out Sunday night, looking to get friendly with the actor best known for his role as Mr. Big on Sex and the City—and, oh yeah, with the rain forests—at a benefit auction for the Rainforest Action Network hosted by Mr. Noth at his Midtown East venue, The Cutting Room.

Casually dressed in blue jeans and an untucked white button-up, Mr. Noth made his way along the red carpet, sneaking sips of dark liquor. Love or something was in the air, and the Transom caught Mr. Noth’s eye from across the way. Drunk on good intentions, if not yet on booze, the strong-browed actor, like every other man in attendance, had only one thing on his mind: the environment.

Mr. Noth was sounding a bit like some Glengarry Glen Ross character—if that character were frothing at the mouth over green energy, that is. “We have to do radical transformation of energy and find ways to make people understand that green energy isn’t some archaic, eccentric idea,” he said, “but a place people can profit from, and so we make profit, but with principles.”

And then suddenly Mr. Noth morphed into some red-faced basketball coach giving a halftime speech. He was infused with passion and urgency. “Get up, get active,” he said, now singling out the Transom (be still our heart). “Make your president do what you elected him to do. Stop sitting on your ass and expecting it to come to you. We have to fight for it.”

For our part, we were ready to grab climate change and deforestation by their ozone-ruining necks and squeeze them into submission. Or at the very least hit our foul shots. Alas, as man of the night, Mr. Noth had to run off to pose for some photos.

Feeling a little stood up, we watched then as guests piled in, stopping at the bar for glasses of red before being escorted to their assigned seats. Flirtation and friendly bidding were in order. And over by the paparazzi section, in the exposed brick lobby across the room, the Transom was awarded a full glass of positivity—or maybe it was bourbon.

Underneath the shadow of a guitar-entwined chandelier, we managed to chat with the unmistakable Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of the evening, who for some reason was holding a Starbucks cup that read “Gary” on the side. Unlike Mr. Noth, Ms. Goldberg took a more self-reflective tack when discussing the theme of the evening.

“The younger generation doesn’t need to be told, they’re already on top of it. It’s us,” the 57-year-old actress said. “We’re not dinosaurs. It’s just reminding ourselves not to be too lazy, and it’s hard to do, because we work our asses off and we get lazy.”

As if to defend her record, Ms. Goldberg listed off all the projects she is currently part of, including her work with AIDS awareness and pro-choice organizations. “I do a lot of shit,” she said. And then she began to sound an awful lot like some sidewalk doomsayer.

“Crazy shit is happening,” she said. “Now some of it is because of global warming, but asteroids are falling out of the sky, the fucking pope left. We’re dealing with a lot, so I kind of think it’ll just take a minute.”

The gavel sounded as auctioned items—like Sting’s autographed guitar and a wild art piece painted live on stage by Jessica Gorlicky—found new homes. We soon found ourselves near R.A.N. founder Randy Hayes, who said he has already been arrested 19 times for civil disobedience.

“You have to deliver tough love sometimes to these governments and these transnational corporations that are cutting down the rain forest,” he said, with the hint of a delinquent smile. What else was in store for the Rainforest Action Network, we wondered?

“We have a series of house parties across the country,” said Mr. Hayes. “Well, some of them are really quite fun.”

Hmm. Transom does love a good house party, but whatever would we talk about?

A Hong Kong taxi. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty)

A couple weeks after I moved to Hong Kong, I had coffee with a British woman named Margaret.

Margaret had lived in Hong Kong for many years and was the director of business for a communications consultancy. When I lived in New York, I had occasionally worked as a corporate trainer, and wanted to resume that work now that I lived in a financial capital again.

A friend recommended me to Margaret, and I liked her immediately, even though she told me I talked too much. “But that’s okay,” she said. “We can work on that.”

She took a nibble of her biscotti and flipped her Hermès scarf over her shoulder. “You’re just the kind of person we’re looking for. So let’s talk compensation. We pay $5,000 a day.” I clamped my lips so as not to spew English Breakfast all over her.

Even as a moderately successful actor—I portrayed “Mr. Pussy” on Sex and the City—I’d rarely made more than $5,000 a month, let alone in a day. I resisted the urge to fist-bump Margaret.

She told me that her company would train me for three months, and that I’d coach business leaders in presentation and negotiation skills about four times a month, for five grand apiece. “But this is a full-time job,” she said, scrutinizing me. “We’ll need you in the office the rest of the time, ringing up potential clients. We want someone who is fully committed.”

I calculated my annual salary: over $240,000. “Do you want me to sign in blue or black ink?” I asked.

She looked me square in the eye and sighed. “You’re an independent spirit. I fear a corporate role may be too restrictive and dull for you.”

She wasn’t wrong. I’d worked the last six and a half years as a magazine editor and hated the 9-to-5 life. I couldn’t understand the appeal of rush-hour commutes, vapid office chatter and having to wear pants to work. When I quit in August, I vowed never to do it again. I wanted to be my own boss again, like when I was an actor in New York. But still ... $240K?

“I can change,” I said extending my fist for a bump.

“From what I see on your C.V.—actor, writer, radio producer, teacher—flexibility is what you want. Be honest with yourself and get back to me in a few days, alright love?”

And with that she kissed me on both cheeks and exited down the shopping mall’s polished floors. Margaret really had a flair for the dramatic. I collapsed into my chair and thought: Okay, doofus—if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. 

The first time I visited Hong Kong was in 2001. Back then, I was a proud New Yorker living in a Park Slope railroad apartment that tilted at a 15-degree angle. Despite the funhouse accommodations, I loved the city: popping into Stromboli for a slice, making wacky experimental theater with friends and trying to predict what The New York Post’s headlines would be. Wacky Jacko Backo? New York was the grad school I never attended, a place where I was constantly stimulated and pushed to be more inventive, clever and competitive. It wasn’t the greatest city on earth—it was the only one.

Growing up in Pennsylvania, my parents took my brother and me to the city a couple times a year. We’d make the usual tourist rounds, but what really captivated me were the skyscrapers, with their lighted windows at night. Riding up Madison Avenue, I’d look out the window of our Ford Escort and wonder what people were doing in those offices and apartments. At that hour in my hometown, people were calling it a night. In New York, they were just getting started. Ten days after I graduated from college, my bus pulled into Port Authority. It was January 1995. I was 23 years old and my dreams were big.

Being a struggling actor wasn’t easy. At first, I shared a cramped Hell’s Kitchen walk-up. My room looked out onto a shaftway flecked with pigeon poop, and I slept on a grubby single mattress that had once belonged to my great-uncle when he lived in New York in the 1920s. Later I moved to a 105-square-foot shoebox on 71st between Central Park West and Columbus. The bathroom was so tiny that to reach the shower I had to step over the toilet. But I was willing to make these sacrifices. After all, I lived in New York, and I was certain that if I stuck it out, I could make it.

By the time I moved to Park Slope, I was fast approaching 30 and wondering if I’d ever experience anything remotely close to a civilized life. While my living situation was bleak, I had all my teeth and most of my hair and was scratching out a living acting in film, TV, theater, commercials and corporate diversity training programs. Those last were the gigs that first took me to Hong Kong.

Here’s how they work: rather than asking employees to sit through a training video, companies invite actors into their offices to perform scripts designed to help participants better communicate with people from different cultures. After the scene is over, the actors stay in character and interact with the audience. In 2001, one of our clients liked what we did so much that it asked us to train its employees across the globe.

In Hong Kong, I played “Patrick,” a young ex-pat investment banker who botched Cantonese names, pried too deeply into his Chinese co-workers’ private lives and bossed around his dutiful but suffering assistant “Suzie.” It was a fun role to play—jerks always are—and during my three weeks there, I got to see the world as a privileged Westerner. I was flown over in business class, put up at the Shangri-La Hotel and treated like a rock star in a city known for its superior customer service.

Like Patrick, I knew little about Hong Kong. Unlike him, I loved it. There, it felt like the natural order of things had been dialed up to a furious speed. Restaurants served food fast and hard, slamming down bowls on tables and whisking them away as soon as you’d eaten your last grain of rice. Hong Kongers hustled and talked away on their mobile phones at all hours. This was a place where business got done. 

When I returned to New York, the city felt positively Schenectady. Times Square’s neon lights and billboards looked small and dim, and walking along Madison Avenue at lunch hour felt like a leisurely stroll down Main Street. Hong Kong was taller, brighter, busier and more exciting. It was, as my dad would later put it, “New York on steroids.” When I was there I felt like anything was possible.

I loved this so-called “Asian Manhattan,” but more than anything, I loved Suzie—or rather Wendy, the actor who played her. Two and a half years later, we got married. I wanted to move to Hong Kong immediately. But I knew that wasn’t practical. I was an actor, and the clock was ticking on my career. If I was ever going to have a successful film career and live in an apartment larger than a storage unit, I felt like I had to go to L.A. I moved there in 2003. Wendy joined me a year later. My New York dream was over.

I quickly soured on the L.A. acting scene. Driving an hour to audition alongside 50 guys who looked exactly like me felt like an utter waste of time. I transitioned to writing and radio producing, in large part because I wanted to be flexible, to work anywhere. Now and then I thought about moving back to New York, but it was a great place to be when you’re poor and in your 20s—or when you’re rich.

While living in L.A., I constantly dreamt of Hong Kong, and after the U.S. economy tanked, I thought about it even more. I knew that if I quit my magazine, I’d have little chance of landing another job. And yet I couldn’t stand the lifestyle. I wanted to live in a land of opportunity again. This past summer, we packed up our things and headed to Hong Kong.

Wendy arrived two months before me and found a 417-square-foot apartment in the North Point neighborhood, an area once ranked the most densely populated place on earth. We live on the 18th floor in a newly refurbished two-bedroom. There’s no pigeon-poop shaftway, and our mattress is firm and new. Still, the building has its quirks. Recently, the Filipino maid upstairs hung the children’s Snow White sheets so low that they blocked half of my office window. It’s a local neighborhood. Very few Westerners live here. In our building, I’m one of two white guys. And that’s just how I like it.

I feel like I’m in the center of the action, a pasty-white gweilo observing Hong Kong’s uncomfortable transformation from former British colony to bustling Chinese city. Before Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, the city-state was a bastion of free enterprise, long rated the most economically free place on earth. A place with no sales tax, a capped salary tax of 17 percent and few unions of any significance.

Today Hong Kong is booming, with an unemployment rate of 3.3 percent, helped tremendously by China’s rise and the 77,000 mainland tourists who pour into the city, a place one writer deemed the “Great Mall of China,” every day. Hong Kongers may deride these “Strong Country People” for wheeling large suitcases through department stores (and packing them with everything from Louis Vuitton handbags to baby formula), but they contribute to a strong economy that continues to draw Westerners to this South China Sea archipelago.

Some 55,000 Westerners call it home, many of us sponsored on work visas arranged by banks and architecture firms. We come from New York, London, Paris and Sydney to escape gloomy economies and to join the workaholic workforce. It is, to most I’ve talked to, a relief from the bleak climate back home.

Here the air, while not great, is better than on the mainland. The taxes are low, and people enjoy personal freedoms unheard of in China. Of course it’s not as culturally rich as New York. You won’t find witty tabloid headlines or a capella singers on the subway, and nobody comes here for Broadway shows. But hurrying down Hong Kong’s sidewalks, you’re surrounded by something else equally electrifying: opportunity.

I turned down the gig Margaret offered me, along with the $240,000. I continue to write and produce radio spots for the U.S. market, but what I never expected was that I’d return to the acting I’d given up years ago. It only took me a couple weeks to get back into it here. Now I’ve not only returned to corporate diversity training, but I’m recording voice-overs and dubbing movies and TV shows. And while these gigs may not be as glamorous as a memorable appearance on HBO, it’s steady work. In the past five months, I’ve worked more days in a recording studio than I ever did in New York.

Hong Kong is, despite its urban density and exorbitant rent, far more liveable. Old buildings are (sadly) torn down and replaced with efficient, modern ones. Heading to the airport? A bus will cost you $5. Public transportation is blissfully smooth, efficient and cheap—a ride costs anywhere between 30 cents and $1.25. Lunch at a Hong Kong-style restaurant will set you back as little as $2.50. I could barely save a dime in New York. Here I’ve already saved three.

The comparisons between Manhattan and Hong Kong are endless. They’re skyscraper cities on islands with similar citywide populations (8.2 million in NYC and 7 million in Hong Kong). Hong Kong is often called the “Manhattan of Asia.” The other day, a bus whizzed by me with a real estate ad pasted on its side. It was, like all other new developments here, a gleaming collection of high-rises boasting modern amenities and glass façades. “Iconic Residence, Manhattan Lifestyle,” it read. As exhaust swirled around me, I thought of my Hell’s Kitchen and Upper West Side apartments. They looked nothing like the Manhattan Lifestyle being touted here. I still love New York, but for now I like living in the Manhattan of Asia a bit more. It’s the place I wanted to move to nearly 20 years ago, when I first got off the bus in Port Authority.

editorial@observer.com

AnnaSophia Robb as "Carrie."

The Carrie Diaries, the struggling-upward-teen-in-New-York Sex and the City prequel, is taking the Monday 8 p.m. time slot of the wealthy-teens-in-New-York soap Gossip Girl, once that show goes off-air at the end of the year.

Diaries and its time slot predecessor share executive producers in the form of Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, but hopefully the new show will burn off its buzz a bit less quickly than did the ratings mayfly that was Gossip Girl. We'll find out beginning Monday, January 14.

The ethos of the modern lady.

Earlier this morning, a tormented wail rose up from Magnolia Bakery and spread throughout the city, stopping at Manolo Blahnik's Fifth Avenue flagship before seeping out to the rest of the country.

When authorities finally calmed down the hysterical populace, they were able to determine that the mass cry of despair was not over our national unemployment rate, or even the possibility of giving Ron Paul the keys to the economy. It wasn't Libya, or the fact that the Fast & Furious franchise has just given up on trying to name its films.

No, it was much worse, for a major trade publication had announced that there might not be another Sex and the City movie.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Asked by The Hollywood Reporter if she is hoping for a third film, Cynthia Nixon — who stars in the World Without End miniseries, which debuts Wednesday night on ReelzChannel — replied: “No, no. I think we had a wonderful ride. I think it’s fine to let it go.”

But Nixon isn’t the only star uninterested in another film. Her comment echoes those made last year by Chris Noth (Mr. Big).

“I don’t see Sex and the City 3 happening,” Noth, who now stars on The Good Wife, told Parade magazine. “I’m not disappointed if they don’t. I miss the early days before it became sort of a circus of attention, when it hadn’t become this iconic thing.”

A rending of garments resumed across the nation, and the threat of mass suicide loomed in the air till someone reminded the country that we still had the CW's upcoming The Carrie Diaries to look forward to.

Han Lee, of '2 Broke Girls'

Last season, television’s most anodyne evening got a shot of hipness in the form of Sex and the City executive producer Michael Patrick King’s new series, 2 Broke Girls. The CBS comedy about young ladies in Brooklyn was an instant hit, kicking off a season-long discussion about girl-women on TV (viz. Girls, New Girl) and getting hailed as a slice-of-life comedy by those who thought that a permanent war over the sartorial choices of “hipsters” coupled with the protagonists’ burning ambition to open a cupcake shop seemed an apt depiction of life in the big city.

But there was another element to the show—something we hadn’t seen in a while. The Tiffany Network’s new Monday night sitcom was brazenly, shockingly, unapologetically racist.

Among the tokenish cast of minorities called upon to behave in baldly stereotypical ways are restaurant manager Han Lee (Matthew Moy), who comes in for mockery for his apparent asexuality and his utter misunderstanding of American culture. (Are his hilarious mispronunciations an homage to Mickey Rooney’s unforgettable turn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?) Earl, played by Garrett Morris, is a hep-cat jazz musician of the sort one might encounter if whisked back in time half a century or so, or in the reeaal cool fantasies of a white person who’s never met a black person, while Oleg (Jonathan Kite) is a sexually voracious Ukrainian with a pan-Eastern European accent. “You’re so stinky, my mother in Korea called me and said, ‘What’s that smell?’” Han tells Oleg in a typical moment of sparkling repartee. To which Oleg replies with an unkind evaluation of the boss’s manhood.

It’s almost enough to make you long for the days of NBC’s Must-See TV—or even the springtime debates over Lena Dunham’s Girls—when we all complained that prime time was too white!

When asked about 2 Broke Girls’s use of stereotypes, Mr. King offered up his own homosexuality as a sort of license to offend.

“I’m gay,” the producer said at this year’s Television Critics Association press tour. “I put in gay stereotypes every week! I don’t find it offensive. I find it comic to take everybody down, which is what we are doing.”

Gay male humor has historically been predicated on an irreverent disdain for propriety—which, in this day and age, has apparently come to include the gleeful bashing of ethnic minorities. After all, if you’re gay, you’re a minority too: it’s a rainbow-colored “get out of jail free” card, per Mr. King’s argument, entitling the bearer to say whatever he likes. “What is or isn’t acceptable as funny in 2012 seems to be a very abstract idea,” Mr. King wrote in a recent essay in Entertainment Weekly (not online). He added that the way he knows that his gags about race do not cross the line is that the live audience at 2 Broke Girls tapings laughs.

The argument makes you wonder where exactly the show recruits its live audience. Just because idiotic racial humor has a fan base doesn’t mean it belongs on prime-time television.

Besides which, there’s a difference between laughing because something is funny and laughing because it is shocking or transgresses certain boundaries of taste. Take the new NBC comedy The New Normal, whose title refers to gay male parenting but could also be taken as an allusion to the increasingly racy and race-conscious television landscape. The show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, whose other current network series is the racially diverse, often irreverent Glee, seems to think that bigoted humor is the fabric that knits a family together. In a recent episode, a racist lady-of-a-certain-age played by Ellen Barkin finally comes to accept the gay man (Andrew Rannells) for whom her daughter is acting as a surrogate. They bond over an ethnic joke—something about adopted Chinese babies coming with egg rolls. It’s sort of a heartwarming moment, but not quite. The family that mocks Chinese babies together stays together?

The series’s sole regular minority character is Mr. Rannells’s assistant at his haute TV-production job. She’s a brash, aggressive black woman of the sort that’s been sassing up the small screen forever, or at least since the heyday of Jackée.

Interestingly, the assistant on The New Normal is played by a Real Housewife of Atlanta, NeNe Leakes, meaning that she came to national attention under the watchful eye of Andy Cohen, the Bravo executive. Mr. Cohen, who also happens to be gay, seems to have his own blind spots when it comes to racial humor. A recent leitmotif of his talk show, Watch What Happens, involves the host, lovingly or not, replaying for laughs a local news clip of a heavily accented black woman talking about her house catching on fire. It’s not impossible for ethnic humor to be funny—far from it. But there’s a certain humanity missing from these shows, where the object of humor isn’t other characters but simple stereotypes. And while gay producers certainly didn’t invent narrow-minded humor, they have lately made it their own.

Should we just come right out and call them the Gaycists--those who hold what Lauren Bans of GQ first defined as "the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere"? Let’s. A further definition: Out gay men whose knowing, ironic appropriation of racist tropes, and whose self-aware frankness about their own prejudice, sashays right across a line the rest of us have come to respect.

Race and gay culture have always made for an uneasy mix. The black drag queens of Paris is Burning—exiled even from white gay culture—have birthed generations of gay men who’ve picked up the vocal intonations and mannerisms traditionally associated with black women. (Think of Project Runway champion Christian Siriano, for example, or Will & Grace’s Jack in full finger-snapping dudgeon.) For white gay men, a group perpetually exiled from the mainstream, identification with blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups goes hand-in-hand with a sort of mockery that’s as much about the jokester’s outsider status as it is about the target’s. This isn’t new—using the women of Sex and the City as his mouthpiece, Mr. King set an episode of the show in the milieu of black drag queens, with Carrie Bradshaw, known for her love of “ghetto gold,” screeching in faux African-American patois about her drag-ball-style “twirl.” And the camp humor aesthetic, from Paul Lynde through Will & Grace, has always used its practitioners’ outsider status as a pass for universal derision. It’s all in good fun—isn’t it? But the combined airtime given to 2 Broke Girls, The New Normal, the urbane gay couple of Modern Family (who were, admittedly, created by straight people), with their Spanglish-screeching harridan of a sister-in-law, and Andy Cohen’s bickering Atlanta Housewives (whose antics are somehow always more GIF-worthy than those of their white counterparts in other cities) adds up to a troubling conclusion: Now that gay marriage is a reality, any gay man with some disposable income and a sperm sample can become a parent and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is consigned to the history books, affluent white gay men have finally been granted admittance to the majority culture, and as such, they are seizing on a privilege long-beloved of their straight counterparts: trashing minorities!

They laugh at themselves, sure, but with the apparent belief that their flaws are cute. The gay men of The New Normal are gently chided for their affectations, particularly Mr. Rannells’s fastidious dresser—but they hardly come in for the worst of Ms. Barkin’s slurs. Those are reserved for random bystanders, like a black schoolteacher of whom she asks “Hablo English?” Sure, Mr. Murphy’s trademark nihilism means that he mocks just about everyone through her character—but isn’t it all a bit wearying? “It’s very clear that I have great affection for her,” Mr. Murphy told Vogue of Ms. Barkin’s character. “It’s like what I said about the [Christian advocacy group] Million Moms: Watch the show! I get that you feel marginalized and on the outside too! We have more in common than you think!”

Indeed. But despite the fundamental conservatism of much of the entertainment industry, no one’s granting the Million Moms the clout to produce a television show casting themselves as the heroes of their own story. Whatever happened in Mr. Murphy’s past, he’s now the consummate insider, with the social cachet to do whatever he likes in his career or his personal life; that Vogue interview notes that Mr. Murphy and his husband are, like The New Normal’s protagonists, considering having a child through surrogacy. He’s portraying the world the way he sees it—with minorities as window-dressing around gay men. (This seems to be a pattern: On Mr. Murphy’s Glee, Chris Colfer’s gay teen embarks on a lovingly portrayed relationship with a fellow singer, while two Asian students’ relationship gets the derisive nickname “Asian Fusion.”)

Mr. Murphy and some of his colleagues don’t mean any harm. And the shows are far from unwatchable: The New Normal earned a rave review from Slate’s television critic, June Thomas, who happens to be a lesbian. “When the whole of America is listening,” she wrote, “it’s tempting to deny the humor. But I admit it: I laughed.”

Meanwhile, 2 Broke Girls’s ratings success, and the availability of Oleg and Earl one-liners immortalized by YouTube users, indicates that there’s a large constituency who enjoy such ethnic sketches as filtered through Michael Patrick King’s tin ear.

That said, not everyone’s so forgiving of The New Normal and its ilk: Salon’s Willa Paskin wrote that the Ryan Murphy show’s jokes “can be momentarily bracing—this show is going there!—but they’re also unremittingly nasty,” while Asian-American cultural critic Andrew Ti wrote on Grantland that “The pervasive crime of [2 Broke Girls’s] Han Lee really boils down to his infantilized speech patterns, thrown in, I assume, just in case his Asian face didn’t drive the message that He Is Not Like You home enough, and you were starting to think of him as some kind of human being.”

But maybe it’s not just the gays who are taking their seat at the table and ingratiating themselves with a rude blast of ethnocentric realness. Take Mindy Kaling’s new series, The Mindy Project, which debuted Tuesday night, featuring the Office star as an obstetrician. While the Indian-American actress, who is also the series’s creator, doesn’t mine her own background for humor, she tosses stones at a Serbian character (a “war criminal”), Gabourey Sidibe (she’s still a punchline?) and her character’s immigrant patient base (“This office is not an inflatable raft!”). Characters like Ms. Kaling’s on The Mindy Project or the gay couples of Modern Family and The New Normal or the two broke girls may belong to groups that have been underrepresented on television until recently, but if they see any irony in their easy mockery of other marginalized groups, it’s not making it to the screen.

That said, The New Normal shows signs of growth; though its most recent episode has Ms. Leakes’s character talking about how black people are always late, and a deeply unsettling joke about Tiger Woods’s lust for white women, the plot, in which the central couple wonder why they have no black friends, manages to play on the edge and actually say something about privilege, rather than throwing jibes at those who don’t have it.

It may not be normal, but it certainly does feel new.

Dr. Schiller.

“Have you ever been handcuffed to a radiator?” A young man in a laboratory coat introduced himself to The Observer last Friday evening as we took our seats at the opening of the fall run of alternative singles night, Never Sleep Alone. Our reaction, or lack thereof, must have been transparent. “Sorry, I just need to ask you some basic erotic questions.” Oh, alright, get on, then.

It appeared that the point of this short survey was to detect our sexual energy, translated by the color of a mood mask we were given to wear for the duration of the evening.

The performance took place at Joe’s Pub, the quaint underbelly of the Public Theater—a low-lit, intimate space with a bar at one end, where the more reserved voyeurs sat, and a cluster of tables at the front, where brave singles positioned themselves vulnerably. The champagne flowed, a crucial aphrodisiac for the evening.

It quickly became clear that Dr. Alex Schiller, the sex therapist played by comedian Roslyn Hart, meant business. Dressed in black latex, there was no beating around her bush.

“NSA = NSA” appeared on a screen behind her, the opening chapter of the one-woman cabaret performance coming to life before us. “Never Sleep Alone equals no strings attached,” Dr. Schiller yelled in a broad Texan twang, “this is the number one principle.”

The audience cheered. Sleeping alone was out of the question.

With one in two houses in Manhattan being occupied by a single person, and divorce rates on the rise, an increasing number of people are searching for new and exciting ways to meet others and, as the night evolved, it appeared that Never Sleep Alone was acting as a catalyst to the process. Joel Haberli, a gentleman in the audience, explained how “as a New Yorker, this is a chance to be wacky.” Every person in the room was prepared to go home with someone at some point during the night. And why shouldn’t they?

They were amongst likeminded, young, beautiful people (many of whom had been scouted by Ms. Hart herself), who had been told, or rather commanded, by Dr. Schiller to “give each other the best possible times of their lives because—fuck it!—you’re young. Live!”

When The Observer piled into a limo with a transformed Ms. Hart once the show was over (think an older Audrey Hepburn; long black gloves, draping pearls), we asked why the online dating phenomenon wasn’t sufficient. She instantly referred to it as “bullshit … people build up too many expectations before they meet and when they meet the chemistry is blocked by the expectation and that’s another reason why I created NSA. Chemistry is fate minus logic. It’s about interaction.”

While the audience interaction was high throughout the performance (be very aware if you buy a singles ticket!), this was taken to the next level at the after party where The Observer managed to intercept a few of its revellers. A friend of Ms. Hart, a male actor who would rather not be named for obvious reasons, explained how he used the show to hook up with girls who didn’t expect to be called the following day.

He admitted it was “partly selfish,” but that it was deemed acceptable here.

We were concerned that with so much focus on a no-strings-attached mentality: were people really building their confidence, or rather knocking it down the following morning?

Then we met Joshua Karchem and Liz Lee, who, clinging to each other for dear life, explained how they’d met at a show in June and were madly in love. “The first time I went, I made out with two random hotties. The second time, I met the love of my life,” gushed Mr Karchem.

“We didn’t think they’d approve but we’re in love,” Ms Lee told us, stealing her eyes from Mr Karchem for only a second.

 The Observer mulled over this at the bar, taking in the scene as the dance floor emptied and couples ran up the stairs, hand in hand. Ms. Hart had not been lying when she’d predicted 60% of the club would go home together that evening. We noticed two lonely souls next to us and suddenly found ourselves playing cupid. Within minutes, the pair was chatting, at ease in their liquidated states, before sloping off into one of the discreet booths positioned around the club, and pulling the velvet curtains behind them.

ariley-smith@observer.com

- Rob Lowe, Stephen Colbert, and the cast of Modern Family will be filling in for Robin Roberts on Good Morning America this week while the ABC host undergoes a bone marrow transplant. Hey, we'd take a soggy piece of bread over last week's substitute, Jessica Simpson.

- Would you like to go bowling with Paul Rudd, Rashida Jones, Denis O'Hare, John Oliver, and not one but two stars of a Law&Order franchise? Of course you do. We don't even need to mention that the whole thing's for charity. You were already sold.

- Candace Bushnell keeps having to resettle the same old lawsuit with former manager (and alleged Stanford inspiration) Clifford Streit. She keeps giving him money for his part in helping her get Sex and the City on HBO, and he keeps telling her its not enough. She should just stop and ask herself, WWCBD?

-Alec Baldwin's dream Portlandia role: "A meat salesman with all kinds of charts and graphs of the loins and the sections of the pig and the cow and the organs." Just no pig, please...we're keeping kosher this week.

'Sex and the City' ladies find love (HBO)

In 1998, the idea of four single gals out on the town talking about men the way men talked about them seemed scandalous, even for HBO. Yet the last time we saw our favorite foursome from Sex and the City--wearing burkas in Abu Dhabi, we believe--they had all but settled down. (Except for Samantha, obviously.)

But the real-life ladies who portrayed Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda have not been so man-obsessed as their post-feminist counterparts. Only Sarah Jessica Parker has remained married all these years to actor Matthew Broderick. Kim Cattrall has bounced around in three different marriages, including Larry David. Cynthia Nixon liked girls (not Girls) more than bartender Steve, and Kristin Davis' love-life was reduced in the tabloids to an image of her giving a blowjob.

Two years after SATC 2, and the ladies may have finally found their matches. Not that there is anything wrong with being single in the Big Apple...right ladies?

Coming straight off the wedding bells that rang yesterday for Ms. Nixon and her longtime girlfriend Christine Marinoni, the New York Post is now outing the finale two single ladies. Ms. Cattrall is rumored to be cavorting with multimillionaire multi-media artist Clifford Ross, who is in the process of divorcing his wife, Betsy Finkle Ross.

And Ms. Davis, in a very un-Charlotte fashion, has allegedly been spending her energies in the past month on charming Aaron Sorkin, that former coke-and-prostitute lover. Maybe that means a cameo in The Newsroom for the dainty brunette?

Hell, at this point we'd just watch a documentary about the love lives of the actresses from Sex and the City...they are far more interesting than the shacked-up caricatures they ended up as.

The news comes after investor Dan Loeb discovered inaccuracies on the resumes of both Mr. Thompson and Ms. Hart, and published the findings in an efforts to remove Mr. Thompson from the chief executive's office, and to win a proxy battle for four seats on the Yahoo! board.

Lost in the story of Mr. Loeb's broadside, we suppose, is the story of how Ms. Hart, after graduating from Illinois State University with a degree in business administration (not economics and marketing, as Yahoo! SEC filings had indicated), rose through the ranks of Sprint Communications before gaining the chief executive's office at Excite@Home in 2001 and moving on to the top position at International Game Technology, a giant in the world of slot machines and the company that brought you the Aqueduct racino's most famous attraction (pictured above).*

*Most of that according to IGT's investor relations site, which, they may want to update:

Manhattan's most famous stoops

Old-fashioned interiors

After less than a month on the market, a potential buyer has already stepped forward to claim 64 Perry Street, the West Village townhouse that played a leading role in the first three seasons of Sex and the City.

Maybe the new buyer is of the broken-hearted bidders who lost the historic 5-bedroom, 3-bath home when it sold for $9 million in Nov. 2011—6 percent more than the list price—after only 27 days on the market?

The home, which was listed for $9.65 million in early March by Sotheby's brokers Joshua Wesoky and Steve Dawson, has already entered into contract, according to a listing on Streeteasy.

What's the secret to 64 Perry's appeal? Well, beauty always helps: the home's carefully preserved interiors feature ornate crown and ceiling moldings,  herringbone wood floors and the six fireplaces with carved marble mantels. The home was lovely enough to attract the likes of fashion guru Tim Gunn, who lived in an upstairs apartment for 16 years. And Sex and the City wasn't the townhouse's first time in front of the camera: Woody Allen used part of the home to film the interiors of Alice.

But unlike some stunners, 64 Perry also has personality. The home has been inhabited by only two families since it was built in 1866, and as The Times wrote when the house went on the market last year, it was the setting of the six-decade romance between documentary filmmaker Wheaton Galentine and Harold Eliot Leeds, who designed the Paris Theater, the Caribe Hilton in San Juan and Martha Graham’s dance studio.

We're not sure what prompted the current owner, whose identity is hidden behind an LLC, to put the house on the market so soon after purchase. Alas, not all love affairs are long lasting.

At least the new buyer appears to be smitten with the property. And fortunately, the next residents will have a little distance from the cupcake-loving hordes: neighboring 66 Perry Street, used in later seasons, is the more famous Carrie Bradshaw stoop.

kvelsey@observer.com