Full release after the jump.

NYFOS@Juilliard

A Modern Person's Guide to Hooking Up and Breaking Up

Free Concert

January 16, 2008

Peter Jay Sharp Auditorium

The Juilliard School

Songs of mating, dating, betrayal, desire, and true love by Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Bruce Springsteen, Jacques Brel, Adam Guettel, Jerome Kern, Paul Moravec, Cy Coleman, William Bolcom, and many others. Artists: Jennifer Zetlan, Meredith Lustig, Renee Tatum, Rebecca Jo Loeb, Paul Appleby, Alex Mansoori, David McFerrin, Paul LaRosa, and Marc Webster; Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, pianists; string quartet TBA.

Join NYFOS founders Steven Blier and Michael Barrett and the students of The Juilliard School’s Vocal Arts Department for the concert that culminates our third annual installment of NYFOS@Juillard. This collaboration between NYFOS and The Juilliard School celebrates the creative energy and superlative vocal talent of tomorrow’s brightest stars, building on NYFOS’s distinctive programming and performing style. Alumni of the joint program have already begun to participate in NYFOS’s season concerts alongside our more seasoned artists.

“I encourage the NYFOS@Juilliard students not to bring me just a single song, but to think in groups of songs: What story does a song tell, and what other songs would set up that story? I am continually impressed with the level of commitment with which the students have approached the process.”—Steven Blier

A few Fridays ago, Danny the Wonder Pony co-hosted a birthday party for Ivy Nicholson at CroBar.

Ms. Nicholson has recently returned to New York from Montana. She has new digs at Chelsea’s no-frills Hotel Allerton. She has a good friend in Vincent Potter, a stylist at the Robert Kree Salon, whose birthday gift was to reshape her bangs and frost her hair a honey-blond. The birthday was her 73rd.

Ms. Nicholson is a former Vogue model; she appeared in a few Andy Warhol films, including Couch. (Time magazine, 1965: “Such ‘underground’ films as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Andy Warhol’s Couch feature transvestite orgies with masturbation and other frills …. ”)

Now she is making films herself. “I’m hoping,” Ms. Nicholson said, “that my movie is picked up by some producer and turned into a modern soap opera. Also, tomorrow we’re going to Massachusetts. I found a woman there who reminds me of Janis Joplin. She’s going to wear a wig. It’s a love scene where she’s trying to forget someone, because she gets into someone else’s soul—not sexual, just mental. Every time she puts herself in another man’s arms, he’s there and he’s dead. So she finally realizes she cannot forget him, that she’ll have to forgive him for trying to get into another woman’s soul.”

Her host, Mr. Pony, was also cantering on the comeback trail—although he was returning from a different era. He had been an iconic member of 80’s-era promoter-cum-murderer Michael Alig’s eccentric ensemble. Back then, he’d saddle up four nights a week, at $150 per gig. But a lot has changed: the Giuliani regime; the Limelight went dark.

That night, an attendant was overheard muttering, “This place sucks!”—but when a lady mounted Mr. Pony, the crowd oooh-ed. When he bucked, a sort of hunched-over hopping effect, they cheered. Mr. Pony then eased into his trademark gallop simulation, bending at an angle over a specialized stool and thrusting his muscled rump to the music.

“It felt like a real horse. I really felt like spanking him,” said Pam Grispell, an athletic, braided clubgoer. During her ride atop Mr. Pony on the dance floor, the outgoing 25-year-old had administered several slaps to her ride’s spandexed and gyrating hindquarters.

“There is no typical reaction,” gasped a very sweaty Mr. Pony between rides. (He only goes by his stage name—and “the Ponyman has no age.”) “Sometimes it takes a while for people to loosen up, but you can always tell the ones who are going to eventually want a ride.”

“It kind of feels like I just had sex,” said a blond 26-year-old Vassar graduate after peeling herself off the Wonder Saddle. “I’m a little weak in the knees.”

Some 20-odd years ago, while managing a dude ranch in the Catskills, Mr. Pony seized the opportunity to fashion a formfitting “babe magnet” out of Western-style horse accoutrements. Over time, his saddle evolved. His getup now includes self-adjusting bungee-cord stirrups, a synthetic bit, a thick layer of gelatin padding for his back, reins and a seat vibrator (which, he is quick to point out, has an on/off button).

“New York got really bland,” said Mr. Pony, who long ago relocated to Orange, N.J. There, for the last 10 years, he’s been the weekly entertainment at Tequila Joe’s. He augments that income with a steady flow of bachelorette parties and the odd children’s gig. “For the kids, I do silly. For the ladies, I do sexy.”

The past decade has had its moments, such as an appearance on Jerry Springer. But there have been lows as well. A broken ankle from a non-Pony-related accident put him out of commission for six months. And last year, a bachelorette party in Harlem was more than Mr. Pony’s back could bear. “When they would bring these girls up,” he said, “I thought they were joking. I was like, ‘Ha ha ha ha.’ But no, they weren’t joking. It was bad, man. These were some real Harlem Globetrotters, man. They destroyed my stool. Then I was holding onto a wooden table, and I went right through the table!”

Mr. Pony’s goal is to return to his former glory in the nightlife pasture, where his G-stringed buttocks were once synonymous with sublime times.

“I think New Yorkers are starting to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, we want the strange, we want the avant-garde,’” Mr. Pony said. “I think it might have something to do with wartime, you know—people want something a little less serious.”

—Spencer Morgan

Lighting Out

Not too long ago, Katie Gardner had a vision as she lay sleeping. “I used to teach,” she said. She was sitting in a banquette in her soon-to-be-former restaurant, the West End, on Broadway by 114th Street. “I had this dream the other day that I was in this classroom, and the entire school was black except for me. And I was teaching these children—this was never a problem, not a problem. But then I had ‘parents night’ and I had all these parents in there, and I was the only white person.”

She took a bite of the spicy chicken enchilada before her and chewed meditatively on it.

“They were very hostile, as you can imagine—this was in the dream—and I looked at them and I said, ‘What is the problem here? What separates us here?’” She plonked her bare forearm down on the hard oak table. “‘This is my color,’” she said, and giggled. “‘This is your color. Does it really matter at all?’ It was so vividly ridiculous for people to be divided because I am this color and you’re that color. And it was a great dream.”

The dream was a nocturnal playback of the big question that Ms. Gardner, an athletic-looking woman of 59 with a degree from Columbia’s J-school, has been entertaining in her wakeful hours of late: What to do next in her life?

Ms. Gardner announced that she has sold the Columbia University area eatery that she and husband Jeff Spiegel have owned and operated since 1990. The restaurant has stood on the same ground and had the same name for over 90 years.

“When we came here, it literally was an empty space,” she said. It had been vacant for more than a year. “Whatever happened before we came, the West End as everybody knows it—or think they know it—no longer existed. There was nothing. There were no booths. There was no bar. There was no wall. There was nothing. And when we rebuilt it, we rebuilt it with the idea that we wanted to re-create the West End. So the idea for me and for my husband was that we wanted to create a place where people came in who’d been going to the West End for the last hundred years—” She surprised herself and shouted out again, “Literally, the last hundred years! They would walk in here and say, ‘Ah, I remember the West End’ and that we would elicit that kind of response, that people wouldn’t walk in and go, ‘Oh, God, it doesn’t exist anymore’—because when we came in, it didn’t make sense; it was gone.”

The spot is set to reincarnate yet again, this time into Havana Central, which is a chain. “We are scheduled to have the handover happen on Friday—this coming Friday,” Ms. Gardner said.

After that, Ms. Gardner and Mr. Spiegel will turn their attention to other pursuits. For Mr. Spiegel, this might mean a job at the Peace Corps, an organization with which he has former affiliation. And for Ms. Gardner, there’s that dream again.

She said she’s considering doing “something edgy” with the Girl Scouts, setting up councils in developing countries. And she’s thought of writing to Oprah Winfrey for advice and assistance, “because Oprah sets up these schools all over Africa.”

“I’m not sure they’re gonna go for it, but I have this vision,” said the mother of three, her blue eyes dancing. “You know, I can do this. I’m a teacher—I taught for many years. I’m an administrator. I’ve been a boss. What you do is, you go into countries in Africa, for example, or you got to Iraq, you go to Afghanistan, you go to places like that, and you set up Girl Scout councils in these places. Each council is a separate franchise—they can do what they want. So you could actually set up councils that are incredibly proactive—autonomous and proactive in that community. It would be so fuckin’ cool!”

—Nicholas Boston

1999

Last week, Nylon celebrated its seventh anniversary at Marquee, an evening hosted by Lydia Hearst. The heiress/model posed with the mag’s latest issue blocking her face, to the objection of a photographer.

So what had everyone been doing seven years ago?

Heatherette designer Richie Rich was making T-shirts. “That’s how Heatherette came out of a wine bottle—1999 was a good year. I knew I would do something great, but I didn’t know what,” he said. He sat front and center with his boyfriend and the evening’s host.

“Lydia is like a sister; I love her like nobody else,” he said.

Michael Angelo, of Michael Angelo’s Wonderland Beauty Parlor in the meatpacking district, wouldn’t remember what happened seven years ago until he received his own answer.

“What color was Madonna’s hair?”

Uh … blonde? (Must. Not. Enrage. Stylist.) It was an especially sensitive topic, as he had been “painting my bedroom Ray of Light blue” in 1999.

Evan, a party straggler with serious pride in his South Williamsburg neighborhood, said that seven years ago, he was scrubbing toilets for models: “Yeah—lots of models.”

Joanna Angel, a Brooklynite, porn star and the newly anointed sex-advice columnist for Spin, had an unfortunate incident seven years ago involving 10 pills. “I was walking around this New Year’s party giving everyone a hug.” Promptly thereafter, she read Prozac Nation.

At midnight the open bar ended, bottle service resumed, and Marquee lifted its ropes to let regulars fill the cushy couches. The hipsters in their exodus wanted to return to Brooklyn, only to find that their beloved L train, shockingly, was also roped off.

—Nicole Brydson

Les Fleurs

On Monday afternoon, John Williams sat down in his backstage dressing room at the Juilliard School’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater. It was the second day of rehearsals for a Live from Lincoln Center performance, for which Mr. Williams was to conduct the Juilliard Orchestra. Broadcast time was six hours away.

Two young students, one with camera in hand, paused at his door. “We were wondering if we could possibly take a picture …, ” the girl said. Mr. Williams assumed a position. A flash. The student checked her camera’s memory: portraits of a furry friend on a shimmery duvet. But then up popped Mr. Williams’ picture.

“Always a little nervous at these things,” said the soft-spoken Mr. Williams, who gave the world, among countless compositions, that theme from Star Wars. “We have a fantastic student orchestra. Some of the material is new to them, and they’ve already mastered it, I think, in a day and a half of rehearsal.”

A collection of highly polished champagne buckets, empty mouths agape, rested on a shelf.

“The other thing I love about the presentation,” Mr. Williams continued, “is the diversity of it. We have Renée Fleming, who is just en fleur, you know, in her career.

“And it’s brilliant that it’s being televised— Live at Lincoln Center, which has a kind of sound to it, doesn’t it? It’s got a kind of nice, euphonic thing going there.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Fleming had nearly met disaster in the form of a major cable-news network’s camera. It fell on her shoulder during an interview, a Juilliard spokesperson said. The incident didn’t appear to dampen the soprano’s enthusiasm, though it did get her black blazer.

“I’m just honored to be a part of it, to be honest,” she said, meaning the gala, not the camera assault. “I was thinking this afternoon: ‘Of all the conservatories I could have attended, I feel so suddenly in an extraordinary way humbled by being a part of the tradition and the legacy that is Juilliard. Of course, when you’re young, you don’t think about that. When I was a student here—you’re so self-absorbed in thinking about your own journey.

“We, as singers, have time on our side,” she said. “We tend to develop later than instrumentalists, certainly than dancers and actors, so we have a little bit more time. But it’s still an arduous road. And ‘the voice,’ they say, is only 10 percent. The rest is elbow grease.”

Itzhak Perlman, the violin master, was zipping around on a motorized chair. “The event this afternoon was very, very festive, very nice,” he reported jovially. “I think it will be a terrific show.”

Mr. Perlman began his career at Juilliard in 1959, when the school was located uptown, on the current site of the Manhattan School of Music. What must the students today think of pursuing a career in what is said to be an always-shrinking field?

“Everybody has such a gloomy outlook for classical music, and I’m always very optimistic,” Mr. Perlman said. “My hope is for us to continue to nurture young talent, and to bring them to a situation where they can really contribute to the musical scene, to the arts scene and so on, and for the arts scene to continue to flourish. And for people to support it financially and politically as well—because sometimes politicians don’t see the importance of the arts, you know. They think it’s a luxury, but it’s not a luxury. It’s a part of our society; it’s an important part of our society. And without it, we are not as good.”

—Nicholas Boston

World Markets

“There are good people here,” enthused a giddy, well-coifed flack. And wasn’t that Michael Milken? Fifteen minutes before the Contemporary Asian auction began, a dull roar of murmurs and ring tones echoed throughout the Sotheby’s auction chamber.

Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s senior curator for contemporary art, mounted the rostrum like a Teutonic throne. His sinewy body in the charcoal suit and pale blue tie, and the dangling forelock, all of it leaned forward, commanding the room to a hush.

Friday’s sale, in which India and Japan were represented but China predominated, was not another sale. It was more the opening bell for a very well-hyped—and, to some Western latecomers, an utterly new and alien—art market.

Mr. Meyer’s forelock snapped left and right with his torso; his arms, slicing left and right, looked something like Jane Fonda meets Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.

Whole lots sailed by, contested only by rival volleys between the phone-ins. They were direct lines to a new base of power in the collecting world. There is also a sense, as with the Asian families perched in the private booths overhead, of a foreign collecting bloc weighing in on the proceedings. “There are a lot of Asians here,” said an audience member.

Thirty-six lots were called before Mr. Meyer took a drink of water.

“Who are these people? Are they dealers?” asked someone on the floor. Well, some of the men, in various stages of disguise using dark sunglasses, looked better disposed to bid on warheads. A woman in a baby blue chubby fur and turquoise jewelry chewed gum, her jaw movements straining her skin taut.

Short, tanned and open-shirted, a vaguely California-louche man perfected his slouch in the front row. A blonde scissored down the aisle from the back to join him. His paddle whipped erect from his waist as the auction’s first big-name lot appeared, a Zhang Xiaogang painting entitled Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 4 (Yellow). The bid started at $50,000 and ended at $419,200. The next painting by Mr. Zhang went for $486,400. The blonde won one.

An hour later, a dizzying bid for the third Zhang piece (Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120) had the audience in a clamor. The $350,000 estimate became a distant memory. People upstairs in the private booths stood up, one woman with a phone dangling limply off her hip, as if in defeat.

“Go, go, go, guys,” said someone in the crowd softly. “They’re already a bargain.” The piece fetched $979,200, from a private collector.

The short, tanned Californian and the blonde fell into a quick embrace. How much had he just made in an hour?

In the afternoon, a new crowd assembled.

An Oliver Stone–Jim Nabors type walked out of a Tide ad with his bright red corduroy blazer. A dolled-up Asian woman, all highlights and fly shades enveloping her forehead, consulted the catalog pages like a flipbook. A bearded Japanese hipster—iPod buds in, wraparounds on, cravat noosed tightly—parked himself in the front row. The third and final auctioneer sported an impressive head of hair and the requisite Sotheby’s forelock.

More big-ticket items moved. That day, Yue Minjun’s Lions climbed to $564,800 from its $150,000 estimate. A Xu Bing installation fetched $408,000.

Asian contemporary is on the march. You can have your $2 million vase and your $4 million jar. Asia Week’s fairs and sales have long trafficked in the mainstays: ceramics, calligraphy, jewelry, landscape painting. On Thursday, Christie’s had rung up $15 million for Indian modern and contemporary works. On Friday, Sotheby’s—expecting $6 million to $8 million—netted $13 million.

The auctioneer, nearing the end, reported that Lot 209 had been printed upside down in the catalog. “But I imagine the buyer can hang it any way that pleases,” he said.

—Jeff MacIntyre

“I’ve got to really, really get started. I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to sing,” she said in that frank, warm drawl that still bears traces of her native Atlanta. “But I’ve been traveling so much lately, I haven’t even had time to play Texas hold ’em!”

She released a loud peal of laughter that made the soft folds of her cheeks shake.

At 78 years old, Ms. Cook is enjoying a long, crowd-pleasing third act of a career that has unfolded much like a Broadway book. She has sung for the Queen of England and was most recently nominated for a Tony in 2002, for her 14-week Lincoln Center hit, Mostly Sondheim. In 2003, her album Count Your Blessings earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. She lost, cruelly, to Rod Stewart.

For Ms. Cook’s fans, the secret of her singing lies as much in her voice as in her uncanny ability to invest each note with history and personality—or, in a word, autobiography. Her elastic voice combines exquisite technique with a rare soul-baring honesty. The composer Stephen Sondheim has praised her as one of the foremost interpreters of theatrical music now living. An attendee of one of her recent master classes at Juilliard was even bolder, declaring, “I feel like when she performs, she performs naked.” Never mind that Ms. Cook’s still-supple soprano no longer reaches those glass-shattering high E’s. Singers are supposed to retire long before 65, but Ms. Cook’s singing has only become more daring.

“I think I sing, as far as communication goes, better now than I did 10 years ago. I just seem to have more courage,” she said. “I think, generally speaking, people do have more courage as they get older. Finally you get to the point where you say, ‘Look, this is it, folks—it’s not going to change much more than this. Take it or leave it.’

“You know, getting older has some real benefits,” she continued as her parakeets, blue-bellied George and yellow-winged Gilbert, twittered in the dining room. “There’s no way you can have the kind of perspective at 20 that you have at 50. There’s just no way—you’ve just got to live it.”

Ms. Cook has done well by her years, having absorbed enough aphoristic wisdom to make Oprah envious while retaining the jolly energy of someone half her age. An ample Mother Earth of a woman, there is nothing frail or wispy about her, nothing careful or uncertain. She wears the artist’s uniform of black on black, accented by bold turquoise or gold baubles. She sleeps five hours a night. She calls people “darlin’,” as if she were still rehearsing to play everyone’s favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein coquette, Ado Annie.

“You know, some days I feel like I could be 30; some days I feel like I’m 12. My knee doesn’t feel like it’s 12,” she added with a soprano’s tinkling laugh, “but I do.”

Ms. Cook arrived in New York City in 1948, 20 years old, as blonde-haired, button-nosed and determined as one of those dewy-eyed ingénues she would later play in musicals. Her mother thought they were only heading to New York for a two-week visit—but when two weeks came to an end, only her mother returned to Atlanta.

“I had gotten to the point where clearly I was talented. I didn’t know how talented I was, but I certainly realized it would be utterly foolish to not give it a good try,” Ms. Cook said. “I knew that this was where I belonged.”

But beneath Ms. Cook’s bravado there was also terror. Looking back, she still marvels that her doubt-ridden younger self—the self that couldn’t ask an operator to place a long-distance phone call without breaking into a clammy-handed sweat—had the brass and sass to pursue a career under the floodlights. “But I just did it,” she said. “If you’re really passionate about something, you find your way, because that’s all you think about 24 hours a day.”

Within three years, Ms. Cook landed her first big Broadway role, the romantic lead in a satirical, Joe McCarthy–inspired musical called Flahooley. The play fizzled after 40 performances—it was, after all, a Joe McCarthy–inspired musical—but it earned Ms. Cook enough critical attention that she soon found herself do-si-doing in the City Center revival of Oklahoma!, melting hearts as the lovelorn Hilda Miller in Plain and Fancy, and belting out high C’s (21 of them in one song alone!) as Cunegonde in Leonard Bernstein’s exquisitely impossible Candide. “He was extraordinarily supportive of me,” she said of the legendary music macher. “He was an amazing personality, a very sexy man—oh my Lord!”

But it was her turn as the lovable spinster Marian the Librarian in Meredith Willson’s premier production of The Music Man in 1957 that immortalized her as the blue-eyed everygirl with the silver pipes.

Throughout the next decade, Ms. Cook continued to warble her way across the Great White Way. But during the late 1960’s, as Broadway’s golden age turned to copper and Ms. Cook neared 40, she hit a lost, dark period that she dubs “middlescence.” Divorce, a drinking problem and a struggle with obesity all collided with the curse of being middle-aged on Broadway. Her son, Adam, went to live with her ex-husband, David LeGrant. (They later reunited and are now quite close.) She stopped performing. By the early 1970’s, she had disappeared from Broadway.

“I remember thinking that I didn’t know where to aim myself,” she said. “I think I needed to stop working for a while, sit back and take stock of things. But it would have terrified me—the idea that I was just going to on purpose decide not to work for a while.” She paused. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I didn’t know how to get it together, somehow.”

But eventually, she did just that—slowly and reluctantly at first, perhaps more out of a desire to work than some protean urge to reinvent herself. The transformation began with a 1975 concert she gave at Carnegie Hall along with her late, great accompanist and music director, Wally Harper. It was a triumphant performance, a bravura return from nowhere that earned them a deal with CBS Records and the opportunity for follow-up gigs. For the next 30 years, until Harper died in October 2004, the two were among the most celebrated figures on the cabaret circuit.

In many ways, Ms. Cook found her voice during these decades, the emotional richness that has become her signature in later life. She owed part of this discovery to her partnership with Harper, part of it to her practice of carefully and consciously investing herself in each note of every song. But much of the credit goes to sheer hoary, humble age and experience.

“I don’t sing like I did 20 years ago—but there are other things I do now that I didn’t do 20 years ago, as far as singing goes,” she said. “I think my ability to communicate has gotten stronger, and probably five years from now will be stronger than it is now, because that’s the path I’m on. I don’t consider myself a finished product. It’s a work in progress.”

But Ms. Cook didn’t sound like a work in progress when she stood onstage at Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater on Dec. 1, trilling out the notes to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific showstopper, “A Wonderful Guy.” She was wrapping up a master class, showing the stiff, overtrained students how to transform themselves from “singing machines” into “real people.”

“I expect everyone of my crowd to make fun / Of my proud protestations of faith in romance,” she swooned as her new accompanist, Eric Stein, clanged out the melody. Her voice wasn’t as crystal as the youngsters’ had been, but as she waltzed and strutted about the stage, belting out the love-struck lyrics of a far younger woman, she captured some strange possibility of sound and language that none of her students had done. “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love,” she sang. And for a moment, she was both 78 and 21, wildly in love, unleashing the longing of youth and the wisdom of age—the whole drama of a life—across the quivering air.

Women's Lib to the Bank

As if cabbies didn't have enough on their minds these days, what with the threatened strike over stagnant fares, lousy tippers who want to be taken to Montauk and intoxicated passengers who can't hold their liquor, you can now add bank robbers (of which we've had more than a few lately) carrying exploding dye packs to that list.

Such was the case on Oct. 8, when a trio of female bandits fleeing the Commerce Bank at 85th Street and Third Avenue made a real mess of the inside of a yellow cab.

The incident began around 7 p.m., when the suspects entered the bank-which is open late-and passed a note to a teller. It stated, "If you know what's good for you, listen carefully. Hand me all the money and no one will get hurt."

To that one of the ladies added, "Don't touch anything-I'm armed."

The teller forked over $4,225, some of it contained in the dye pack. The suspects then entered a waiting cab. But the cabby apparently wasn't in on the scheme, as evidenced by his reaction when the dye pack-intended to make the identification of crooks easier for cops by covering them in red dust-detonated as the cab pulled away from the curb, causing him to stop.

"He's extremely upset and irate and angry," explained Deputy Inspector James K. Rogers, the 19th Precinct's commanding officer. "I don't know if he knew what happened, but he definitely knew his cab was now full of red, smoky dye dust."

As luck would have it, the commotion was noticed by a member of the Patrol Borough Manhattan North scooter task force, who was across the street handling a vehicle accident. At about the same time, the bank robbery came over the cop's police radio, and he put two and two together. As the officer approached the cab, one of the suspects fled on foot, while the other two-a 22-year-old and a 44-year-old-were apprehended.

Both had prior arrest records, though none of their crimes included bank robbery. Inspector Rogers noted that female bank robbers are a relatively recent phenomenon, and mentioned another holdup that was committed by a perp of the fairer sex in the 32nd Precinct in Upper Manhattan on Oct. 14.

The inspector had a simple theory for why the ladies may be getting into the bank robbery game: "I guess they felt left out," he said.

Sleeper Car

Some people are heavier sleepers than others. But few could achieve the near-comatose state experienced by the 23-year-old gentleman who was riding the No. 4 train at an unknown time of day (due to his condition, the fellow couldn't be quite sure of the time-or much of anything else) on Oct. 11. Among the few things he does remember is that he'd previously visited a nightclub somewhere in Manhattan, where he'd apparently enjoyed himself thoroughly and contributed to the establishment's bottom line by drinking there steadily for several hours before he caught the subway.

Once he boarded the car, he descended into a sound sleep-so sound, in fact, that while he has a vague recollection of the train stopping at 86th Street and Lexington Avenue (where he disembarked), he remained unaware that, en route, someone had cut off his right front jeans pocket with an unknown object and stolen his wallet.

There were no injuries or witnesses, and the victim didn't report the crime until 11 a.m. the next morning. Among the contents of his wallet were $100 in cash, a Citibank A.T.M. card, a New York State identification card, a pocket knife, a photocopy of his Social Security card and what the cops described as a "Poland green card."

This Ain't Belgium

It may be that in Antwerp, world capital of the diamond trade, bling-bling is so commonplace that people can walk around wearing their baubles without watching their backs. But not in New York. This cultural difference may explain why one Antwerp resident visiting our fair city proved easy pickings for a bicycle thief on Oct. 9. The bicycle thief to whom we refer was not the sort who's in the business of stealing bikes; rather, he rides them to make a quick getaway after preying on the hapless ladies who lunch, which was apparently the case here.

The 54-year-old victim was standing at the northeast corner of 63rd Street and Madison Avenue at 1:55 p.m. when the perp rode up behind her and expertly swiped the diamond pendant that she was wearing around her neck. Then he fled eastbound on 62nd Street.

A canvass by the cops turned up negative results, and the lady declined the invitation to visit the 19th Precinct station house and have a go at their mug shots. The square-shaped pendant was valued at $10,000.

Ending on a Sad Note

You'd think if there was one place a violin would be sacrosanct, it would be the Juilliard School of Music. Think again. On Oct. 16, a 19-year-old female Juilliard student visited the 20th Precinct station house to report her $32,000 Nicholaus violin missing.

She told the cops that she'd left the instrument in a practice room at the music school, located at 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, and departed for her dorm. When she returned about 20 minutes later, the violin was gone. Though she was unable to provide the cops with any leads as to who may have thrown this roadblock in the way of her brilliant career, the case remains under investigation by the 20th Precinct detective squad.

Ralph Gardner Jr. can be reached at rgard135@aol.com.