Niki Cheng and Shaokao Cheng at their Chelsea BoConcept store. (PMc)

The first time The Observer met Niki and Shaokao Cheng, it was July, during the opening night of Julio Gaggia’s art show. Mr. Gaggia, the boyfriend of the plastic surgeon Mark Warfel, was preparing his work “Living Art: Chelsea Boy Apartment,” during which he would live for five days as a window display model at the BoConcept furniture store on West 18th Street. He spent the week eating, sleeping, working—and performing other, less-mentionable activities—in a showroom that divided him from gawkers outside with a pane of glass.

While we lounged about on the display furniture, socialite photographer Patrick McMullan brought over a petite woman with short, pixie-cropped hair.

“Niki is one of the few Power Asians in New York society,” he loudly whispered, flourishing Ms. Cheng before us. She smiled shyly and posed for a photograph before excusing herself.

It would be two weeks before we realized that Ms. Cheng and her husband owned the store where we had dropped more than one canapé between the cushions of a $3,000 couch.

In fact, the couple owns all five locations of the Danish furniture store in New York City, and another two in New Jersey. But the stores themselves aren’t the reason Mr. McMullan calls the Chengs “Power Asians.” Rather, it’s the couple’s seemingly innate social instincts, their ability to leverage a fairly cookie-cutter, mid-market design base into a celebrity-filled social whirl. One might say “Only in America,” or (even worse) “Only in New York,” but this wouldn’t exactly cover it. There is a certain type that thrives in Manhattan no matter what they’re selling, no matter where they’re from, no matter how few resources they have upon arriving.

If Darwin were alive today and researching the survival of New York species, he would do well to study the Chengs. They’re not social climbers, per se, but social movers—Gladwellian “connectors” who know everyone from celebrities to the guys with the best drapes in the city. They share their knowledge strategically with other key additions to their ever-expanding Rolodex. For Niki Cheng, 39, and Shaokao Cheng, 41, life is not about climbing a ladder. It’s about traversing the monkey bars that crisscross Manhattan.

“Niki and Shaokao have a wonderfully progressive view of New York society,” said Village Voice scribe Michael Musto. “They mix into their social circle drag performers, club holdouts, top celebrities and the corporate crowd. It’s all-inclusive.”

Last Friday, we met Ms. Cheng for a second time—again at the Chelsea store. While we were there, actress Faye Dunaway came in and had what one could only call a fit of method acting for a sequel to Mommie Dearest. The recently evicted Academy Award winner had come in two weeks ago and bought a piece of art from the store, and now she wanted Ms. Cheng’s help on a new design project.

“I adore this store. I’ve raved about it; they really need to get some of this stuff to London,” Ms. Dunaway told The Observer. “They don’t have anything like it there now.”

Unable to find a confidentiality agreement for us to sign, she stormed out shortly thereafter. (We didn’t get to tell her that there are actually 13 BoConcept stores in the U.K.) It was the kind of scene that no one wants a reporter to witness while writing a profile, but if there was any bad blood, Ms. Cheng didn’t show it.

“Really, don’t be upset,” she told The Observer, rubbing our arm soothingly. “She’ll call back. Anyway, where were we?”

The Chengs are adept at pleasing their celebrity clients, a skill that has come in handy while designing P. Diddy’s home, Jay-Z’s office (bed included), Mary J. Blige’s entire apartment and Estelle’s closet. Susan Sarandon, Lil’ Kim and Patti LaBelle have also used the duo’s interior design services, and Ms. LaBelle sang at the BoConcept flagship store for a Lance Armstrong benefit. They count designers Vivienne Tam, Asher Levine and Zang Toi among their closest friends.

Not that everyone in their circle is a brand name. After Ms. Dunaway left, we rushed over to Astor Place, where BoConcept was sponsoring a tent for a Christmas tree stand run by a Brit named Marco Romero, his girlfriend and his brother. Though he runs a jewelry shop in Greece most of the year, Mr. Romero spends three weeks in December living out of a van selling holiday firs, and Ms. Cheng took it upon herself to decorate the tent that the trio takes shifts in.

Despite a franchise that traffics mainly in large-scale items, Ms. Cheng has a burgeoning obsession with “micro-units”—apartments that are between 250 and 300 square feet.

She wanted to prove that it was possible to use BoConcept furniture to decorate a very small space, and the Romeros provided her with an interesting challenge. Their tent was about seven feet long and seven wide, and the guys had to hunch over even when standing at its tallest point. Empty, the space seemed minuscule. But after Ms. Cheng put down an orange rug, a short shelving unit, an ottoman, a table and two chairs (as well as several well-placed decorative objects), the tent looked like a living room on the Lower East Side.

It’s never quite clear why Ms. Cheng decided to treat Romero and his tent like VIPs, but when it was revealed that a $3,000 lamp from the store broke on the ride over, Ms. Cheng gasped, then turned to Mr. Romero. “We’ll have to get you another one.”

Shaokao Cheng, Cienna Cheng and Niki Cheng. (Patrick McMullan)

Perhaps the random act of kindness was a viral marketing ploy, or stemmed from her own back story of struggle. (Probably a bit of both, if we’re being honest.) Niki Cheng—née Chong—was 25 when she moved to New York in the mid-’90s. She had an architecture degree from the University of Malaysia and a visa that was only good for one year. She was scraping by as a coat-check girl at Von when she met Mr. Cheng, a young banker whose father had given him a $90,000 loan to buy a single-bedroom apartment on Madison and 32nd.

The two were introduced by a restaurant co-worker of hers, and she began relocating her belongings to his apartment after the first date, she said. After a heady three months of dating, Mr. Cheng invited her to move into his place permanently. “He didn’t realize I already had,” she laughed.

But there was a catch: his apartment in Murray Hill would be undergoing extensive renovations for two years. They made a pact: if they could live through the 24 months without breaking up, they would become a pair in the business sense as well. Mr. Cheng also pushed his girlfriend to get a job at a furniture retail outlet that would give her a three-year visa.

One day while working there, Ms. Cheng came upon a catalog that featured a coffee table identical to the type she sold. Except that Ms. Cheng’s outlet was selling her model for $2,000, and this unheard of Danish brand was selling its at $299.

The brand was called BoConcept, and its international franchise operation was just getting off the ground. The Chengs approached the company with the idea of opening a New York store on Madison Avenue, but were turned down. BoConcept’s owners thought that space in the city was too expensive and there wouldn’t be enough room to show the big items. In their view, New Yorkers were not the target market for their oversized aesthetic.

But the duo were undeterred. “We had spent a year putting together research that proved that this store could be opened in New York,” Ms. Cheng said. They also showed their plans to a friend they met at Bungalow 8.

Their friend turned out to be designer Max Azria, who spent 10 minutes calculating the figures the couple had acquired during their research, sketched a number down on his pad, and told them to go for it.

In 2003, BoConcept agreed to let the couple try their hand at a New York flagship for $300,000. “We had everything to lose,” Ms. Cheng said. “They had nothing to lose.” Niki was 28 and Shaokao 30. They had recently gotten married in Hawaii after three years of dating because, as Mr. Cheng put it, “My wife went to three different psychics who told her that marriage would bring us good fortune.” Mr. Cheng and his father remortgaged their houses to pay for the initial investment.

They barely survived the first two years; they couldn’t figure out the computer systems, and there were issues with shipping. Their business model might not have actually worked had Mr. and Ms. Cheng not been so socially ambitious.

With his degree in engineering and hers in architecture, they were able to use their conjoined home-decorating skills for seemingly un-BoConcept-related purposes. When one big-name celebrity client called, nothing from BoConcept would fit in their closet, so Ms. Cheng happily suggested shelves and fixtures that did. Soon, the singer was calling the couple to redesign her living room, and this time they used items from their Dutch catalog.

The fact that BoConcept’s furniture design is somewhere between IKEA and West Elm is somewhat beside the point. What the Chengs have done was take a relatively bland furniture store from a not especially popular Danish franchise and parlay it into a personal calling card.

When the two aren’t peddling 12-piece sectionals, they can often be found at yoga or otherwise getting fit. At 12:54 a.m. Saturday morning, The Observer received a text from Niki, who asked if we wanted to attend a 10 a.m. Bikram session with her. (We pleaded out.)

Later that morning, Ms. Cheng was at the Madison store, dressed from head to toe in brown Juicy velour. She helped hunk real estate agent Ryan Serhant from Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing find items for his move from Pine Street to Chelsea ... which of course will be documented on Bravo’s website. After he left, Ms. Cheng rushed out herself for a private second yoga session of the day, but not before inviting The Observer over for a home-cooked meal the next night with “some friends” that included Ms. Tam and Mr. Musto.
http://youtu.be/JjI2SwrGnHs
A 2010 BoConcept commerical featuring Mr. Musto and Ms. Cheng.

In 2006, the Chengs moved with their baby daughter Cienna from Murray Hill to a $1.7 million, 2,200-square-foot artist’s loft with 12-foot-high ceilings on Fifth Avenue at 29th Street. This is the space, apparently, where you can keep two six-foot ottomans without it feeling cluttered.

Cienna is now 6, their son Eden 3; when we arrived Sunday evening, their mom was running around the gigantic apartment, scooping them up for bed. Ms. Cheng looked ready to fall asleep herself, after making a feast: home-cooked dishes with pork belly, chicken, eggplant and fish, and a lotus soup for dessert. Ms. Tam was there, and Mr. Musto showed up for dessert. Mr. Levine wasn’t able to make it, but the table was more than full.

Mr. Cheng explained that she had rescheduled her meeting with Ms. Dunaway, but was too busy cooking to make it down to the store. So she had the actress come up to her apartment and multitasked.
As we were leaving, Mr. Cheng asked sincerely if we would come back and have dinner when we weren’t on the job. Ms. Cheng had already invited us to their Christmas party and a luxury garage sale they were co-sponsoring this week. They were so nice! How could we decline when they were so generous?

Another rung added to the monkey bars.

She looks good in purple, but she doesn't like it.

Fran Liebowitz, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, Thurston Moore and John Zorn—many are the successful artists and intellectuals who have spoken up (unsuccessfully so far, it must be said) against NYU's Greenwich Village expansion plans. Now, Susan Sarandon has chimed in, or rather tweeted in, her support, specifically for the show Messrs. Moore and Zorn are hosting tonight at Le Poisson Rouge.

GREAT show tonight at Poisson Rouge, to stop NYU's plan to crush the Village - lepoissonrouge.com

—
Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) October 10, 2012

If only the NYU faculty could get Derek Jeter or Robert DeNiro on their side, they might have a serious chance of winning this one.

It should be noted many of the stars speaking out against the project are themselves residents of the Village and thus acutely concerned about the university's expansion and their quality of life—and property values. In that case, Alec Baldwin might be the next logical get. If he runs for mayor, maybe he can even reverse the plan

Jason Segel and Ed Helms in 'Jeff Who Lives At Home'

"You and I can get started and Jay will join us,” Mark Duplass told The Observer, so we began the interview. “You’ll realize we share the same brain anyway.”

The Louisiana-born Messrs. Duplass, who now live in Los Angeles, direct films together; they are perhaps the most prominent Americans who fit that description since Joel and Ethan Coen. With the Coens, the Duplasses share a finely honed quirkiness and an ability to create worlds that seem hermetically sealed. Their first feature, 2005’s The Puffy Chair, has a glacial pace—very little happens as a pair of brothers (one played by Mark) go to pick up an upholstered armchair for their father. There is little dialogue, and yet comedy and unexpectedly moving drama are wrung out of long silences and stares and the sense of a rich, unelaborated history. The film’s presence at the 2005 South by Southwest festival alongside similarly inexpensive, slackerish works heralded the arrival of the “mumblecore” genre.

The pair’s new film, Jeff Who Lives at Home, released March 16, lacks some of The Puffy Chair’s mumbliness. It’s less willing, if slightly, to force the viewer to connect dots independently; there’s a bit more exposition. But it continues where The Puffy Chair left off, telling the story of two brothers, Pat, a workaday fellow (played by Ed Helms), and Jeff, a vaguely mystic stoner (Jason Segel), and creating from the brothers’ relationship a diegetic world that seems two or three degrees removed from our own. The story is a picaresque of sorts, piling incident upon incident over the course of the birthday of their mother (Susan Sarandon). Filial piety—or lack thereof—is an important theme.

The most significant difference between Jeff Who Lives at Home and The Puffy Chair—the difference from which all the other differences stem—is in its provenance. The Duplass brothers’ newest film comes with the support of Paramount, through the studio’s Vantage shingle. It follows on their commercial breakthrough film, 2010’s Cyrus, which Fox Searchlight produced for a reported $7 million, making a small profit on its nearly $10 million worldwide gross. This may seem like small potatoes, but few of their cohort get the distribution the Duplass brothers do, or can woo stars like Mr. Helms, Mr. Segel, and Ms. Sarandon or, for Cyrus, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill.

“Cyrus is the first movie we did that had money and name stars, and we were scared as shit,” said Mark, at 35 the younger of the two—Jay is 38—and the one who acts in projects as disparate as The Puffy Chair and FX’s fantasy-sports comedy The League. “We were scared, a) that we wouldn’t do a good job with it, and b) that the studio system and the whole crew and all the voices were gonna fuck up our movie. We were so scared that we almost overprepared ourselves for how different it was going to be.”

The major difference in working with a studio for the first time, said Mark, was the degree to which the pair needed to loop people in on a process that for them had always been unspoken. The exposition in The Puffy Chair isn’t the only thing the pair leave unsaid. “That nonverbal, brother communication that Jay and I used [to] barrel through those early, fiercely independent films like The Puffy Chair—that stuff needed to be verbal and be expressed to 100 people. In order to do that you can start to kill the magic of the movie. That’s something we’re starting to learn.”

Jay described the set of Jeff Who Lives at Home as a battle to retain the brothers’ autonomy amid a flurry of studio notes: “If you’re talking about throw pillows for thirty minutes, you’re not talking about something else,” he said. “Time is limited. You’re fighting for sleep, you’re trying to keep your eye on the ball.” Mark jumped in. “When the scenes aren’t working, we have to say, ‘Everybody’s going to hate us but we have to walk around the block and rewrite this scene and reconfigure this scene.’ And that’s easy to do when it’s eight of your friends as the crew, but it’s harder to do when the studio wants you to complete your day and all the crew members want to go home and complete their day, and you just have to make really sure you don’t get too into people-pleasing.”

Mark continued: “And you have to focus on the fact that ultimately, when it comes out, they’ll be happy.” Ms. Sarandon agreed to star in the film after the Duplasses reached out to her. “It was very pleasant,” she told The Observer. “They completely flattered me, and I responded to that.” The brothers, she said, are collaborative and trusting. “They talk to you—we didn’t really have major rehearsal for sure, but we talked about it, and if you have something you want changed, you’d talk to them a couple days before.

“We kind of figured out the blocking together,” she said. “They use two cameras and Jay operates one, and once you get what you’ve agreed upon, they just tell you to start improvising.”

Judy Greer, the actress who plays Pat’s wife and who has one of the trickiest scenes in the film—a fight born of a seething unhappiness—found the directors’ willingness to allow her to improvise generous. “It was one of the most collaborative experiences I’ve ever had—and yet they were extremely decisive. They gave you freedom to do what you wanted to do, but they were very clear. It didn’t feel like a free-for-all.” “They want to make a movie with cool, fun, nice, respectful people,” said Ms. Greer, “like when they made movies with their best friends. They liked that vibe.” Ms. Greer said that while shooting—during which she was commuting from Jeff’s New Orleans set to Hawaii, where she was filming The Descendants—she didn’t see the brothers much off-set. “Mark and Jay were in town with their families, staying at their parents’ house.”

“It’s common for siblings to have that weird, Siamese sense of humor, where they get stuff no one else gets,” said Mark. “You look at your parents as museum curators on some level. You are both taking in the same content, same movies, making the same family jokes—you’re curated in the same household.” The pair watched HBO as grade schoolers: “At 10 on any given Sunday morning, I’m 5 and Jay’s 8 and we’re watching Kramer vs. Kramer. We kind of for whatever reason watched these adult dramas that got us focused on relationships at an early age.”

And yet the pair’s films focus on brothers who are very different from one another—there’s at first little sense in Jeff Who Lives at Home that the loopy Jeff and the staid Pat can have come from the same curators. Said Mark: “It’s not easy to pinpoint [that] one of us is Jeff and one of us is Pat, but Jay and I have both of [the character’s] in our personalities. Our parents are very different people, and they created a personal conflict in me and Jay—in our DNA, there’s a guy like Pat who’s trying to put his head down and get through life without thinking about it too much, because if you think about it too much, you might just start crying, and there’s a guy like Jeff in us who wants to take things slow and believes there’s a greater spiritual force out there guiding us.

“But they’re both indicative of Jay’s and my questions about happiness, and how difficult it is to be happy. I don’t know why that is.”

It would seem as though the brothers have little to be unhappy about—they’ve made it to the big time without sacrificing their style. The studio backing has made them the world’s ambassadors of mumblecore. But they don’t believe in the genre’s existence.

“Mark and I were just making movies,” said Jay. “Like, we were just coming out of a cave and making movies. It was nice in 2005 when you’re making a $15,000 movie and  The New York Times writes it up and you’re the creator of a movement—but we didn’t create anything other than a movie.”

The quest for happiness continues, then, as the Duplasses seek to define who they are with more movies rather than by digging into genre. “There’s never going to be one ideal set,” said Mark. “It’s going to be looking at a group of years and a group of movies and making sure we do lots of things, because the grass-is-greener mentality always sets in. When we were doing The Puffy Chair, we were like, ‘God, we need more resources,’ and then when we were making Jeff Who Lives at Home and we were like, ‘God, we wish we were doing what we did on The Puffy Chair.’” These days the brothers are developing two projects, Mark said, “one of which is me and Jay and a huge movie star and a crew of about four people. And one of which is a 100-person crew and a bigger-budget movie.”

Ry Russo-Young, a filmmaker who acted with Mark in 2007 in director Joe Swanberg’s seminal mumblecore film Hannah Takes the Stairs, has faith in the Duplasses’ abilities. “Mark is really funny as a dude and he has a confidence that makes you at ease in a sense and a playfulness that makes the world seem like a jungle gym and you want to play on it. He’s so relaxed!” She recalled getting ice cream with Mark and the rest of the cast, who lived together in a Chicago house during filming. Was it possible, we asked her, for a so-called  mumblecore director simply to make the films he or she wanted to make, without getting stigmatized by genre? “I want to think it’s possible!” she said.

In dismissing the mumblecore label, Mark said he and Jay are just making movies they’d want to watch. “We’re trying to make something that gets us off—makes us giggle, makes us laugh, makes us cry.”

After stints in Austin and Brooklyn, Los Angeles is a big change. “For me, it is hard to be in a town where you’re constantly—when you go to your kid’s friend’s birthday party, it’s an industry event,” said Mark. “I’m gardening, right now, when I’m talking to you guys. If you just let L.A. have its way with you but you cultivate your experience, it can be amazing.”

Said Jay: “We realize we have it made and we get to do what we love to do, but it never ends. We wake up in the morning and ask, ‘Are we doing what we’re supposed to do?’ It’s the same as it always was. It’s a little less angsty because we have some money now, so that takes a little pressure off.”

We knocked our first ball into the net; another bounced by as we watched. Not our game, perhaps.

Other matches took place 100 feet away, where tables had been set up inside a squash court, a massive, four-walled glass box littered with ping-pong balls and surrounded by bleachers. Nearby, officials huddled around the tournament's bracket.

The teams spanned the financial sector: J.P. Morgan, The Economist, Angelo Gordon and Co., et al. Two teams no-showed, we overheard. "Do you know who wouldn't peel themselves off a trading floor to play some pong at lunch?" we asked one participant.

"Yeah, but I'm not telling you," he snapped (we later heard that Third Point Capital's Daniel Loeb—a known ping pong fan—was a no-show, though some employees subbed-in for him).

Inside the court, Harlem-based ping-pong pro Wally Green grinned, playing against Team Verizon using his BlackBerry as a paddle, dissembling them with ease. The streak didn't last.

Mr. Green's pong partner—a sub-in for a finance friend, Kip Gould (of New York City's theatrical play clearing house Broadway Play Publishing)—took a few volleys.

Mr. Gould backed up for one, smacking the glass wall, the loud thud echoing throughout the terminal. Mr. Green suppressed a laugh, watching the ball miss the other side of the table.

The Verizon Guys high-fived.

Later, Mr. Green was found recapping with the victors. "A few times, he could've put us away, and he didn't," a Verizon player admitted.

He shrugged off the compliment, but later divulged: "I went nice on 'em."

Mr. Green plays on the International Pro Tour, and is a legacy player at downtown pong club Spin. Had he ever hustled any finance folks there?

Naturally.

"This cocky hedge fund guy came in with his girlfriend." The man started harassing Mr. Green, who then accepted a challenge to play with his phone. "He bet me $200 a game. I won $800. The first mistake he made is when he walked into my club, and didn't see the big painting of me hanging there."

We had to ask: Was Susan Sarandon—an investor in Spin along with business partner/rumored boyfriend Jonathan Bricklin—a decent player?

"Whenever she's not doing work, she's at the club," Mr. Green confided, with a lilt of secretiveness in his voice. "She's learning. She gets nervous at times. She's not a pro, but she understands: this is a top spin, this is an underspin. She's not bad."

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The home was built around 1915, exactly three decades before Ms. Sarandon was born.

Brooklyn has basically turned into one big celebrity orgy. With a recent influx of Hollywoodians, the borough has become the new Soho, Tribeca and Chelsea combined.

Today, we stumbled upon yet another star-studded transaction: Susan Sarandon has just purchased at 334 Grand Avenue in Clinton Hill. And, believe it or not, Ms. Sarandon isn't the only bold-faced name on the deed. The home was sold by Danny Simmons, a poet, artist and older brother to Russell and Rev Run.

It's unclear exactly what Ms. Sarandon intends to do with the 2,500-square-foot condo. (Reps for the actress were not immediately available to comment.) She purchased a penthouse in the Village for $1.75 million last June, and paid ex-hubby Tim Robbins $3.2 million to keep their Chelsea duplex the same month. This will be the third property she has purchased in the past seven months, and her first in Brooklyn. Neither of the other two properties are on the market.

And unlike the other apartments, the Brooklyn abode at 334 Grand Avenue is nothing terribly grand, though it does have that most rare and coveted of city amenities, a parking garage. The Academy Award winner spent just $900,000 on the two-bedroom, two-bath place. According to the listing from Corcoran broker Toni Martin: "Lights, camera, action… direct your own lifestyle and live according to your own design in this spacious 2500 square foot condo loft."

While the outside of the building is, well, hideous, the home does boast a 2,000-square-foot roof deck and is located in the "hip and happening Clinton Hill," as Ms. Martin puts it. The home is located above the Corridor Gallery, so Ms. Sarandon can keep pretending like she's 30 again and host some cool art parties in her Brooklyn pad!

So why Brooklyn? Perhaps her beau Jonathan Bricklin needed some space to perfect his ping pong serve? Or perhaps he just always dreamed of being a Brooklyn Bricklin.

eknutsen@observer.com

The rapper Talib Kweli at Occupy Wall Street.

Last night, Talib Kweli stopped by Zuccotti Park for a rhyme. "Here with the 99 percent," Mr. Kweli tweeted. At the protest, he used the human mic to amplify a short speech. "They want to know what the end game is?"

"THEY WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE END GAME IS," echoed the crowd.

"This is the end game."

"THIS IS THE END GAME."

The protest at Occupy Wall Street is drawing random acts of celebrity from Richard Simmons to Susan Sarandon to Lupe Fiasco and Immortal Technique. Yesterday, actress Justine Bateman and musician Ted Leo were there. On Wednesday's march, Mike Meyers attempted to blend into the crowd. On Tuesday, the reclusive Jeff Magnum from Neutral Milk Hotel appeared.

Unlike the bars and clubs one might normally stalk for celebrity sightings, the protest is easily accessible and there's no cover charge, no dress code and free coffee to sustain you as you wait for Alec Baldwin to put his money where his tweets are and show up in person. Perhaps this is why we've seen an influx of Texans and Japanese tourists of late.

Talib Kweli Addressing Occupy Wall Street from Colin Jones on Vimeo.

"It's so important, and also increasingly difficult, to expose people to roller skating these days," said Mr. Casalino, who has skated two or three times a week since 1988.  "There are so few good places to skate."

But, until September 26th, there is one new rink, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations. Situated on "The Lot," the Highline's temporary 40,000-square-foot plaza on 30th street beneath the Highline, the roller rink joins food trucks Rickshaw Dumplings, Eddie's Pizza, Coolhaus, La Bella Torte, Korilla BBQ, and Red Hook Lobster.

The Highline split the cost of constructing the rink with UNIQLO, a Japanese clothing company with a SoHo flagship.  Two UNIQLO cubic booths stand in front of the rink, filled with t-shirts and cashmere sweaters.  But in yesterday’s heat, UNIQLO couldn't attract the long lines away from Coolhaus, which served gourmet ice cream sandwiches, or La Bella Torte, which was advertising its iced cappuccinos.  The store had only sold two sweaters, a saleswoman told The Observer-- both to Susan Sarandon, who dropped by for the ribbon cutting early in the morning. "I think it's too hot for anyone to buy cashmere," said UNIQLO's store manager.

Tripping over their rental skates, couples skated around the rink with ice cream sandwiches from the Coolhaus truck.

But they were amateurs, implied Kathy (who didn't want to reveal her last name because she had taken a personal day to go skating). The serious skaters were boogieing in the center of the rink.

A class of summer campers marveled at the Central Park Dance Skaters' Association, which had decided to assemble for an inaugural spin around the plaza.  "You have to practice for many years to get that edge, that flavor," said Steve Love, a member of the Association and founder of Love Productions, which has produced, among other things, a roller skating show that toured the world.

"Roller skating is my heart," he said. "I was rockin' it out there!"

"I used to play a lot of basketball, but there's just no competition within my age bracket," said Robert Clarke, 60, who wore a red shirt with "Swag" written on the front in giant letters. "This uses all the muscles in your body, so all the impurities leave, and you maintain a youthful appearance."

Although the Highline offers rental skates, the Association skaters brought their own. "I cheat," said James Singley. "I put roller blade wheels on my roller-skates, which makes for much sharper edges."  He hoisted his foot onto the railing to show off his skate/blades.

But most skaters were concerned with remaining upright, let alone creating sharp edges to their turns.  They stumbled into the railings, reveling in the nostalgic goofiness of the activity. “It’s been so many years since I’ve roller skated,” said Tami Laifer. “I’m so excited!”

And Jeremy Bent, a comedian who has worked as a roller derby referee, said that the rink fills a void. New York once had many rinks, but most closed due to lawsuits, gang violence, and a lack of demand. He’s thrilled with the new rink. “In the summer, there’s nothing better than skating,” he said.

According to city records, Ms. Sarandon just paid $1.75 million for what may be the perfect bachelorette pad, a one-bedroom penthouse at 61 West 9th Street.

Like a true prewar top-floor spread, it features as much terrace as living space, though there is plenty of privacy, per Paula Allen's Sotheby's listing. "French doors from both the living room and the bedroom lead to a large and totally private planted terrace that wraps around the apartment with unobstructed panoramic city views north, east and west," she writes. The only privacy concern might be that the bathroom can only be accessed through the bedroom.

So is Ms. Sarandon really abandoning her 7,000-square-foot duplex loft? The Observer has reached out to her agents for comment but not heard back. On the one hand, the place had plenty of room for ping-pong tables. On the other, there was plenty of room for old memories.

Should Ms. Sarandon need to decorate her new space, she need look no further than the seller, Anya Larkin, who makes high-end, handcrafted wallpaper. She now lives in Stonnington, Conn., an old sealing port.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the price as $2.26 million. The Observer regrets the error.

So beautiful, so propertied.

1991 was a good year for Susan Sarandon. Thelma and Louise came out, landing her on the cover of Time magazine with Gina Davis, and she and long-time partner Tim Robbins, who had finished shooting Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, had just purchased a Chelsea loft at 147 West 15th Street, near Seventh Avenue. As the couple moved up in the world, they moved up in the building, eventually owning the entire eighth floor and the northern half of the seventh.

2011 has been an O.K. year for Ms. Sarandon. She's still talking about her year-and-a-half-old split from Mr. Robbins, but at least she can do it from their huge loft.

(Property Shark)

According to city records, Ms. Sarandon paid Mr. Robbins $3.2 million for their duplex co-op. Two years ago, a full-floor spread on the second floor sold for $5 million in the doldrums of the recession, so this is a steal on par with Emma Thompson robbing Ms. Sarandon of the Best Actress Oscar in 1992.

Details on the home are scant, but if the second-floor unit is an "industrial strength 4765 square foot" home, as its listing claimed, that gives Ms. Sarandon a bachelorette pad pushing 7,000 square feet. Plenty of room for a ping pong table or two. Not that she would need to. Her beloved SPIN is just a few blocks away.

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mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Also at Desert Flower, we happened upon Rula Jebreal, the gorgeous Palestinian journalist whose novel, Miral, was recently adapted into a Weinstein Company film directed by Julian Schnabel, who is also Ms. Jebreal's boyfriend. The title character is played by Freida Pinto, who does look quite a bit like Ms. Jebreal up close. To prepare for the role, "Freida lived with me in the house," Ms. Jebreal said. "Freida came three months before the start of the shooting, so we sent her everywhere to train her and she came back and she was not anymore Freida, she was Miral."

We remarked that we've seen Miral described as "semi-autobiographical." How much is true? "Everything is true. There's no place for fiction in the Middle East," Ms. Jebreal said -- hard to argue with that. "Whatever you see is whatever you live, whatever you live is what you write about. It's a true story, a totally true story."

Jack Goes Boating, meanwhile, is not a true story -- it's a quirky, sweet little tale of New York romance's beginnings and endings. In addition to directing the film (originally a 2007 play by Bob Glaudini), Mr. Hoffman stars in it, as a lovestruck limo driver. Mr. Hoffman says he sought guidance from some powerful friends for his first venture into film directing, in order to ward off unpleasant surprises. "I've been working in both mediums in one way or another for a long time -- longer than I care to remember," he told The Observer. "I was loaded up with experience and stories from the people who are directors who are my friends. So nothing really came up that was like, 'Oh my God, that happens?!'"

We also glimpsed Mad Men's Cara Buono, who plays psychologist Dr. Faye Miller, the most compelling Don Draper love interest since Rachel Menken. To hear Ms. Buono tell it, creator Matt Weiner's famed type-A personality means Mad Men doesn't require a lot of research from its actors. "I researched for myself, but Matt Weiner gives you everything you need as a character. So I kind of did stuff on my own, but basically, you can just surrender yourself to the genius of Matt Weiner and he gives you what you need," Ms. Buono said.

And when Susan Sarandon breezed by, we had to stop her to ask for Ping-Pong tips; she, of course, has been boning up on her skills since she began (allegedly!) dating Jonathan Bricklin, her thirtysomething business partner at SPiN, a hipster table-tennis club in the Flatiron district. How, for example, might we cure a wobbly backhand? "I think it's all sense memory. I haven't played in absolutely, like, six months or something, so I'm not really up to speed -- but I would say it's all just muscle memory, so the more hours you put in, the better you get," Ms. Sarandon said, probably not-coincidentally making an excellent case for buying a SPiN membership.