SoulCycle

As in, once you're on, you are not getting off.

When we arrived at 83rd and 3rd Avenue for our 9:30 class, Ms. Drescher greeted us with the warmth of someone who hadn’t played the villain all last season on Bravo’s hit series. We knew SoulCycle devotees were "cultish," (the word appears throughout the torrent of articles about the specialized spinning class since Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler opened their first location in 2006) but we were not prepared for all the happy-souled customers who rushed to tell us their stories of enlightenment.

Like Isabelle Cheren, a 73-years-old former nurse who's been riding doubles (2 back-to-back, 45 minutes classes) since the East side location in 2010. Or Deb, a 60-something psychiatrist whose knee surgery prevented her from walking for two years. When physical therapy didn't help, she turned to SoulCycle. Now she's gained 6 percent bone density and her legs are toned and sinewy. "Here," she said, flexing her arm. "Feel that." We were impressed: Deb had the kind of insane biceps you’d expect to see on an action star. Upper East Side social fixture Danielle Anderman told the Transom that she started SoulCycle after she had a premature baby. "I was going through such a dark place, and it was Stacey, it was really all Stacey and her positivity, that helped get me through it," she said, her eyes sparkling.

Ms. Anderman was referring to Stacey Griffith, the cropped blond, tattooed miracle-worker/SoulCycle teacher whose classes are booked weeks in advance. The former DJ has so many socialite clients that she's blurred the ranks. As the subject of profiles in both Page Six Magazine and Vanity Fair, she is usually the third or fourth most famous face in her classes. The boldface names one might find in the sign-in sheets, at the Upper East Side location alone, include Chelsea Clinton, Brooke Shields and Kelly Ripa, just to name a few.

There was a moment of trepidation as we walked into the darkened room and locked our shoes into place like contestants in some dystopian game show. "Don't worry, you'll love it!" chirped Hamptons fixture Cassandra Seidenfeld as we passed her exiting the class. "It's easy."

Well, no. That is not true. SoulCycle is not easy. It could be fun, potentially, with the blacklights and the Rihanna/Daft Punk/Hip-hop soundtrack. But it is hard. The only thing that pulled the Transom through the first ten minutes were Ms. Griffith's yogi-like affirmations. (Unsurprisingly, she's been a student of both Tony Robbins and the late Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, whom she studied with in India and who is widely considered the generation's master of ashtanga yoga.) "Don't drink too much water!" Ms. Griffith exclaimed at one point, despite the heat wafting through the unventilated room filled.

The Transom, however, was dying.

Half the class was spent hovering above our seat, in a sort of half-run, half-crouch pose. It was hard enough, and then Ms. Griffith announced it was time to pick up our towels and perform a synchronized, Fosse-esque dance move. Three beats behind everyone, we were about to ask for help unlocking our “lock-in shoes,” until Ms. Griffith crowed: "Pretend like you are doing a show! And all your parents and family and teachers are there! The ones who said you'd never be a dancer, or a singer, or an actress. And now show them! Show them how good you are!"

Suddenly, we were (almost) keeping pace with the up-left-up-right-down-right-down-left coordination. Nothing motivates the Transom like revenge fantasies.

The session over, we freed ourselves from our bikes, with a little bit of help from Ms. Griffith, who encouraged us to come back and bask in the light that was SoulCycle. "I've never had a student that said she wasn't coming back," she said. Ms. Griffith recently her 800th class, and now teaches about 20 a week. "Not one."

We didn't want to break Ms. Griffith's pretty remarkable streak, so we just kept our mouths shut.

Michael Haneke

The Austrian director Michael Haneke is in a very exclusive club, having won the Palme d’Or for best picture at the Cannes Film Festival for both of his last two films, the Nazi allegory The White Ribbon (2009) and the end-of-life drama Amour, which will be released in the U.S. this month. Late in his career—Mr. Haneke is 70—the onetime provocateur (whose earlier films contained graphic violence and a strong sense of dread) has come to be embraced by the critical establishment. Amour, and its 85-year-old lead actress, Emmanuelle Riva, are considered front-runners in the coming Oscar race.

“It would be hypocritical of me if I said I didn’t like awards,” Mr. Haneke recently told the Transom, speaking through a translator. “Someone liking my work doesn’t make me sad. Every prize improves your working conditions.” Mr. Haneke was dressed entirely in black and occasionally laughed, not quite derisively, at the questions posed. At the beginning of the interview, he got up and turned the thermostat in the hotel conference room down. His answers were to the point.

Amour is about a long-married couple who hit turbulence as the health of the wife (Ms. Riva, legendary for her work in Hiroshima, mon amour) begins to falter. In some ways, it’s a story about health care; its methodical documentation of physical breakdown is as frightening as the white-gloved killers in Mr. Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games. But its title is appropriate—there’s more love in this film than in most of Mr. Haneke’s work. Asked if this film represented an attempt to break free of his reputation for cruelty, he laughed. “No. Not at all. Each theme has its own appropriate form.”

“I don’t have a list of themes. It’s not a question of themes,” he elaborated. “Rather, it’s about stories that occur to me. The story of Funny Games occurred to me, just as The White Ribbon did. I’m not looking to make stories about issues.” Indeed, Amour is hardly a polemic. “The starting point was the suffering of someone I love very deeply, but it has nothing to do with the specificities of that case,” he said.

The promotional duties for Mr. Haneke will likely include a spin at the Oscars, where he was last nominated for Best Foreign Film in 2010. “Up until now, all the reactions I’ve heard are that people have been moved. It’s some comfort to them. That said, I can only base my judgment of its success on the people who come up to me,” Mr. Haneke said.

Yet despite the success of his past work and the universally comprehensible nature of Amour’s script, he had to fight to get the film made. “Every production company was afraid of making Amour,” he said of the film, which was a co-production between French, German and Austrian companies.

But he was undaunted. “I think fear is a good theme for art,” he said. “Fear is a good motivation.”

Kim Stolz and Amanda Leigh Dunn, co-owners of The Dalloway

"We've met before," purred Kim Stolz, an impish grin on her face. The Transom was standing in a dark corner with the most famous lesbian to come out, as it were, of America's Next Top Model. We were at the launch party for  The Dalloway, a bar/restaurant Ms. Stolz co-owns with fellow reality heroine Amanda Leigh Dunn, of The Real L-Word fame..

The Transom couldn’t recall previously meeting Ms. Stolz , though we remembered her infamous kiss with a curious competitor during Cycle 5 of ANTM, as well as her time as a VJ and correspondent on MTV News. Even in her new role as Citigroup vice president and part owner of the hottest lesbian spot to hit New York in decades, she was unmistakable.

"I feel like the New York lesbian scene was kind of different, more diverse when I was growing up," said the Manhattan native. "But recently it's been confined to dive bars and clubby atmospheres."

The Dalloway, on the other hand, is a gorgeous, two-story affair on Broome and Thompson. The downstairs is a mix between a lounge and a club, where every Thursday night one can find the "Girls Party"  downstairs, where gyrating models and bookish butches dance with abandon.  The night the Transom attended, Samantha Ronson was DJing, and the area around her raised booth served as the dance floor.

But it’s the upstairs that makes The Dalloway unique. It’s a restaurant with freestanding antlers on all the tables and the kind of hipster-meets-high-end vibe that makes it difficult to place on the Kinsey Scale. (OpenTable.com resorts to the tortured locution "lesbian implied.")

"We never planned to have food, originally," said Ms. Stolz. "But we were approached by Vanessa Miller, and she told us that she loved our idea, and that we should at least agree to a tasting. And who turns down a free tasting?"

Ms. Miller, a 24-year-old with elfin features moved from Boston to work at The Dalloway, was clever to offer an introductory freebie, since, as we learned over the course of the night, she just might be New York's next gastronomical wunderkind. As silver trays bustled by, we snatched small spoonfuls of delicately crafted fare: a take on fried chicken and mashed potatoes that featured a small cube of lightly-battered poultry on top of a cloud of fluffy polenta; an arugula salad with a dollop of avocado in a mysterious dressing that made our mouth almost decide to switch sides and become a vegetarian; and a parade of finger foods that put other holiday party catering to shame. Another guest, we noticed, had posted herself  near the kitchen so she could get first grab at the savory treat before they quickly disappeared into the mouths of The Dalloway's guests.

"Obviously, we couldn't say no once we tried the food," Ms. Stolz said. So they decided to broaden the idea of The Dalloway, to make it a place where one could "go bring parents from out of town to eat." While the 29-year-old Ms. Stolz said the door policy downstairs certainly didn’t demand queer credentials, the scene would be appeal to the "very LGBT community."

"And foodies," she added. Though obviously the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Mr. Young’s new book is titled Cross Roads and is published by FaithWords, a division of Hachette Book Group. He’s promoting it with a weeks-long tour, as well as events like an interview with Michael Flaherty, the president of Christian entertainment company Walden Media. (Mr. Young estimated that the web-stream of that event would garner 10 to 15 million viewers, and said not entirely humbly that he never received questions in advance of public appearances.) That company produced the film adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia, by Mr. Young’s favorite author, C.S. Lewis. “I have no grandiose ideas about carrying anybody’s legacy forward,” said Mr. Young. “I have six kids. I’m trying to create a legacy inside those relationships.” He acknowledged Lewis as well as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as influences.

Mr. Young’s work may be the most popular Kierkegaard-influenced oeuvre of all time; The Shack, his first book, ended up with 18 million copies in print (it’s just above Peyton Place, and significantly above The Cat in the Hat, on Wikipedia’s anecdotal “best-selling books of all time” list). The book, a story of a man whose daughter is murdered by a serial killer and who then goes on a journey of self-discovery, meeting various manifestations of God, began life as something even less than a self-published text. It had been Xeroxed for his family as a Christmas gift, coming to publication and great success only through word of mouth. “You do it for friends and family—they’ll love you anyway,” he said. “That’s low-risk.”

After that book’s success, Mr. Young bought his family a house (he lives in northern Oregon) but kept his 2008 Honda Accord. “All the things that matter to me were in place before I wrote The Shack. That hasn’t changed.” And he had little critical to say about New York, despite the fact that his new book’s protagonist is an arrogant go-getter of the sort familiar to most city denizens. (Though Mr. Young rather gilds the lily: the protagonist is seen in the book’s opening guzzling scotch and looking at whiteboards.) “City and country—each has its own beauty and its own pain,” he said. “Some of the smallness of small towns—cattiness, everybody knowing everybody’s business—that can be challenging. And cities can be challenging, because no one can connect except electronically.”

A studio where an author is filming interviews over the course of a day is a lonely place. After we left, Mr. Young went back to speaking to local news anchors for a series of taped pieces, staring into a monitor that showed his reflection back to him.

Did Mr. Young consider himself a missionary? the Transom had asked. (“There is only ... hear me carefully: There is only one God,” says Jesus, a character in Cross Roads who helps the tough urbanite open up his heart.) He did not, no more than he thought he was the next Lewis. “I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That’s not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be.”

Lena Dunham (Getty Images)

Lena Dunham was having a bad Friday night. The Girls star and director was filming an exterior scene in Williamsburg (observers described it as—spoiler ahoy!—a fight between her character and her love interest played by Adam Driver). But a nearby house party—a birthday celebration attended by the sort of early-20s liberal-arts graduate Brooklynites whose lives she was attempting to chronicle on film—was making a great deal of noise and interrupting her shoot. She took to Twitter: “Dear party preventing us from shooting in Williamsburg- I get it! Your party seems so fun! I hate having to be such a kill joy! [sic] I am young!”

Fifty-nine retweets and 78 favorites couldn’t stop the birthday bash, though, and Ms. Dunham tweeted twice more about the party, first asking “why’d you throw a bottle and call us commies?” Then, 42 minutes after first mentioning the party, the HBO auteur wrote: “We monstrously appreciate the quiet you have given us you cool kids. Just found out the function of the party- HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARIA!”

But the quiet was not easily won. Two guests at the party indicated to Transom that Ms. Dunham’s producers had bought the party’s silence by setting up a bar tab for the revelers at the nearby Pedros Kitchen and Brew on Hope Street. To strike the deal, a producer entered the party—“He had a walkie-talkie on and, like, Crocs and cargo shorts,” said a male guest. “He kind of stuck out.” At first, the producer simply asked for the partiers to keep the volume down out of courtesy.

“That lasted about a minute,” said the male guest.

After the producer returned to the party to plead, cajole or yell, Maria the birthday girl negotiated the terms of the bar tab. “There was an idea of trying to inflict monetary harm on HBO for ruining our fun,” said the male guest. And once the group of about 60 got to Pedros, “People were just ordering cocktails. You could watch the bar tab go up. It was an incentive to drink, to beat up HBO’s American Express.”

An HBO employee stood guard outside the bar’s door to ensure no noise got out—a sensible decision, since the deal the production team set up with the bar allowed the revelers to act as DJs and select their own music. A female guest said she asked the door guard how often this happened to the Girls crew. The answer: not often.

The Girls production staff said, in a statement to Transom: “In our best efforts to be neighborly and complete our day’s work we relocated Maria’s birthday party from the loft across the street from our location to a bar down the block. Lena Dunham added ‘we hope everyone had satisfying sexual encounters.’”

As for that thrown bottle? Both guests say that the party interacted minimally with Ms. Dunham and her crew. “There were already so many people gawking at them filming,” said the male guest.

“Someone started a ‘LEE-NA’ chant," said the female guest of the brief walk to the bar, “and someone else tried to start a ‘VOICE OF OUR GENERATION’ chant, but it didn’t catch on.”

The last cast member to be added was “Leela” in the 2008 season. Leela, a laundromat owner on the titular Street, is played by Nitya Vidyasagar, an Indian-American. “Sesame Street has always reflected the diverse population within the community,” said Ms. Parente

It’s vanishingly rare for a cast member to be added to Sesame Street, as witnessed by Sonia Manzano, who has played Maria since 1971, walking the line of potential auditioners to say hello. Once on the show, cast members tend to stay, though that didn’t necessarily seem to be the endgame of auditioner Rebecca Diaz, who said, “It’d be a dream come true! I’d be set! You work with the monsters, the kids, and you get that exposure!”

Auditioners had found out about the call from sources including Univision, the Spanish-language network, and Playbill. Mauricio Marces, a young man with bleached tips and a big smile who’d come in the day before on a bus from Richmond, Va., planned to sing “La Bamba” and “Uptown Girl” to indicate his Spanish and English capabilities. That was if he got to the final round of auditions--the songs happened upstairs at Roseland, after an initial personality interview and the reading of provided sides. Had Mr. Marces watched Sesame Street as a child?

“I was a Barney kid.”

Inside Roseland, a woman close to the front of the line looked wide-eyed, terrified. “¿Nervioso?,” an event staffer asked.

“Un poquito, pero también feliz,” she replied.

One of the first people to audition was a young woman in cowboy boots, toting a rolling suitcase, Longchamp purse, pillow, and sleeping bag. “Yo vivo en Philadelphia--pero soy de México,” she told the casting agent. Then, in English: “I came here last night--but I got my sleeping bag right here!” She’d slept on the street to ensure she was one of the first let in at 10 a.m. As the preliminary interview came to an end, a photographer came to her and snapped her picture. She turned towards it like a sunflower, smiled broadly, and put her arms, bent at the elbows, over her head--a classic pin-up pose. She was invited on to the next round.

“It’s funny,” said Ms. Parente, when asked whether Sesame Street was based on the Midtown stretch near Roseland, or on Harlem, or something else. “Everyone I meet thinks it’s based on their community.”

If you haven't read the New York Times' exceptional obituary of Ms. Ephron do so. Meanwhile, we have been relishing our own small piece of Ephron's legacy: The You've Got Mail character Frank Navasky, played by Greg Kinnear.

Frank Navasky was the boyfriend of Meg Ryan's character in the film. He was also a reporter for the New York Observer.

As IMDB puts it:

Frank Navasky is a columnist for the New York Observer. His columns often feature protests against the effects of technology on society. As a result, prior to the arrest of Theodore Kaczynski, he was sometimes jokingly mentioned as possibly being the Unabomber. He is particularly skeptical about the advantages of computers, and is famous for his pæans to the electric typewriter. He was also a prominent participant in a movement, ultimately unsuccessful, to save The Shop Around the Corner, a children's bookstore.

Frank Navasky comes off, at times, as arrogant, slightly obsessive-compulsive, a narcissist, and an indignant anti-capitalist.

For example, this is the scene in which he meets Tom Hanks' character Joe Fox, for the first time:

In the original script, Frank worked for a paper called "The Independent," but it was clearly modeled after The Observer, which is what they ended up using in the film. A lot of good it did him. Spoiler alert: They eventually split, and Ryan ends up with Tom Hanks.

Ephron was a well-chronicled character in the Observer, especially from the late 80s onward. One of the earliest mentions of her in the paper came in a July 25, 1988 story by Michael M. Thomas ("The Midas Watch: The Punishing Hamptons Social Scene of '88"). She was also a regular fixture in The Transom, the front-of-book column of boldfaced names. 

I'd heard from a Observer editor a few years ago that the character of Frank was based on Frank DiGiacomo, the former Vanity Fair writer (and soon-to-be-former Gatecrasher editor) who oversaw The Transom for a number of years while at The Observer. After all, the character was named Frank, and is a slightly cantankerous wiseass (which is an apt description of many an Observer reporter and editor over the years).

As it turns out, though, that tip was probably a decade-old bit of pranksterism passed down to me. The character was actually a sweet tribute to Observer writer Ron Rosenbaum, the man who reportedly inspired Steve Jobs to start a little company called Apple Computers.

Mr. Rosenbaum, who currently writes The Spectator at Slate, shared Ephron's views on many a topic: An avowed love of Charles Portis as well as the erstwhile Upper East Side watering hole, Elaine's (the setting for Rosenbaum's novel Murder at Elaine's, which Ephron once attempted to adapt into a musical with Roy Blount Jr.). Mr. Rosenbaum and Ephron also worked together on [MORE] Magazine and a satirical conference named for A.J. Liebling that Time once called "Journalism's Woodstock."

So what did Rosenbaum think of the character? Ironically—at least as it regards Rosenbaum—the answer was, while a little buried, already out there on the Internet, not too long after the movie had been released.

In a 1999 column for Slate about adapting to new technology, he wrote:

So, I may not be a Luddite, but I play one on TV, or I'm played as one if you rent and watch You've Got Mail. If you can get past the chirpy sentimentalizing of terminally insipid e-mails by tragically insipid stars Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, you'll find in the film a relatively benign caricature of a New York Observer writer with arcane literary and philosophical preoccupations who crusades to save an independent bookstore from being crushed by a big chain store, who rejects computer culture and rhapsodizes over his typewriter--an Olympia Report Deluxe electric. Now, it just so happens that I am a New York Observer columnist (click here to download me) with arcane literary interests (see the interview with me posted in Feed last month, if you care) who launched a crusade to save an independent bookstore (called Books & Co.) and who wrote a column rhapsodizing over his typewriter--an Olympia Report Deluxe electric--while working on a doomed film project with future You've Got Mail director Nora Ephron.

The column confirms on a intimate level what Ephron was able to capture so well and so often in her work: Two people, with shared interests and creative outlets, one acting as a muse for the other. The Observer’s appearance in the film is an obscure footnote to Ephron's work and life, but one that makes working for this paper a bit sweeter.

The film's larger contribution is the way it made New York feel like a small town. It took an amazing talent and a special kind of insight to do that, and the place hasn't been the same since.

For that, and in so many other ways, large and small, she'll be missed.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The "sleep share" room.

"I had the idea six years ago," said Ian Reisner, co-owner of the West Side’s Out Hotel, which opened in March. "I thought it was a shame. I was out here 25 years ago, and we lost fun clubs like the Roxy, Limelight, Private Eye, the Bank..." He then described a European trip, during which he’d seen establishments describing themselves as "hetero-friendly"—gay-oriented, but not exclusive, flipping the traditional inclusiveness of straight-run right-mindedness on its head.

"But when I think about New York, everything’s bigger and better."

The Out Hotel is, for its function—a boutique hotel—bigger and better than most. The white-walled, curving enteranceway leads, like the hallways of the Guggenheim or like some bodily orifice, towards an elevator bank and towards the first set of rooms. It was in the first-floor "sleep share" rooms where we were to stay, last month, on our mission to get to the heart of exactly in what gay travelers to New York might find at a gay-themed hotel.

"The concept was eighty-twenty," said Mr. Reisner to us after we’d stayed there. "Traditionally, hotels were owned and operated by straight people, built with straight capital, for the majority, and the minority was welcome. We were built by gay capital, we’re gay-oriented—but we are straight-friendly."

The "sleep share" room that we had booked for an economical $99 on a quotidian Thursday night featured two sets of bunk beds, as well as four lockers and four little above-bed TVs. We checked in, stashing our watch in the locker, and waited for the first guest to arrive.

"We have New York modeling agencies taking whole rooms for three months!," Mr. Reisner had told us. "It’s four girls in a predominantly gay hotel—they’re very safe."

The only other guest in our sleep share was a business traveler from Miami, who informed us he was in the "taxi-TV business" only after taking a thirty-minute business call in the room. After the call, he chose to relax with a portable DVD player, on which he watched the now-defunct ABC sci-fi series FlashForward. We dropped in on the club XL, which took some time to heat up; the crowd was divided in large part between young men lured by relatively inexpensive drink specials, and older gents lured by young men. Everyone had a group of friends with them and there was little mixing. There were no women in sight, unlike clubs further south that tend to draw at least one group of bachelorette-partying looky-loos.

A good-looking employee with an iPad enticed us to give our information so that we could join the hotel’s rewards program. The club’s bathroom was a black-tiled temple of urinals. The grungy, real Limelight this was not.

"The comfortability of you, if you were my partner, going into a space like a restaurant; you would not feel comfortable, 100%, still," said David Lopez, the hotel’s general manager, who noted that the hotel’s clientele has morphed since its opening from cosmopolitan Europeans to Midwesterners and patrons from Quebec and Ontario. "One partner may want to hold the other partner’s hand, but the other one may say ‘you don’t know about this place.’" But given the level of tolerance throughout New York in 2012, gay rights have advanced to the point that the Out Hotel is possible, but it may not be necessary.

Little matter to the crowd dancing at XL or to my roommate, who, contra Mr. Lopez’s suggestion that the sleep shares "layered in something more youthful," simply wanted a cheap spot to crash. We went to bed around two, earning a derisive snort from my long-since-asleep roommate. Lying in our bunk, listening to snores, The Transom flipped through a magazine, wondering how many episodes of FlashForward this guy had watched: it was the most intimate experience we’d ever had with a stranger.

Greenman, spelling champion.

The contestants represented New York’s spelling elite. Many of them had whole careers’ worth of spelling behind them, elevated reputations and steady salaries underpinned by the public’s faith in their agility with words.

Now, sitting in two rows before an audience on the third floor of the Standard Hotel, wearing comically large name tags and sparkly bumblebee antennae that bobbled gently as they fidgeted, they awaited the bloodletting. While this particular group might be upstaged by the children on ESPN every year, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Annual Spelling Bee fundraiser is nevertheless a very serious affair.

Ira Silverberg, the dapper silver-tongued literary agent from Sterling Lord Literistic, was the evening’s host. The judge was Jesse Sheidlower, a man whose pinstriped suit, severely trimmed hair and rimless glasses might have passed as a dictionary-editor Halloween costume, if he were not already editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Warming up the crowd, which had just come from a silent auction, Mr. Silverberg asked his co-host what new words would be coming out in the next edition.

“I’m not on the new words team,” said Mr. Sheidlower, flustered.

“Just give us something from the street.”

“Well, the Concise Oxford Dictionary did add ‘sexting,’” he said, then blushed.

The first contestant at the microphone was Jonathan Burnham, the British-born publisher of HarperCollins described by Mr. Silverberg as “a talented pianist, owner of two dogs and a fantastic speller.” Mr. Burnham fulfilled expectations with a flawless execution of the word “reliquary.”

Nancy Franklin, the recently departed television critic of The New Yorker, came next.

“So,” said Mr. Silverberg. “Did you quit your job?”

“I did!” said Ms. Franklin. “I’m leaving my job to not write. I’ve worked for The New Yorker for 33 years.”

“So you started at age 12?” said the charming host.

Her word: “Genealogical.”

“Oh Jesus,” she said, but then rattled it off without error.

The first elimination, however, was not long in coming.

“James Frey!” crooned Mr. Silverberg. “You publishing provocateur! You don’t even write the books, you get kids to write them at the YMCA.” Mr. Frey’s word was “commissariat.”

“It’s going to be a first round exit this year,” he said, sighing. He was right.

The novelist Julia Glass spelled “commissariat” correctly, then Ben Greenman, an editor at The New Yorker, powered through “nacreous” (“made of or resembling mother-of-pearl”). The novelist Bernice McFadden succumbed to “strychnine,” then Francine Prose, David Rakoff and Elissa Schappell all fell afoul of “antecedence,” which most spelled as some variation of “antecedents.” Only Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand finally chose the correct homonym.

“Oh, Simon Winchester,” said Mr. Silverberg to the next contestant, the British author of Krakatoa. “Fancy-schmancy! You’ve always had this posh thing. I like that.” Mr. Winchester poshly spelled “asseverate.”

Thereafter, the casualties came quickly. Meg Wolitzer, author of The Uncoupling, went out on “uncrystallized;” Ms. Simonson fell to “aardwolf;” and Mr. Winchester to “virgule.” Ms. Glass spelled “chary” as “charry.” Both Patricia Marx and Bob Morris misspelled “opprobrium” (although Mr. Morris earned Mr. Silverberg’s opprobrium when he hinted that the host, also Mr. Morris’s husband, would soon be leaving his job at Sterling Lord to a destination as yet unknown). O books editor Sara Nelson succumbed to “wantonness.” Lynne Tillman proved ignorant of “ignoramus.” Finally only Ms. Franklin, Ms. Burnham, and Mr. Greenman remained. The death knell was “pyrosis” or heartburn, which both Mr. Burnham and Ms. Franklin spelled with two “r”s. Mr. Greenman asked for language of origin: Latin. Victory!

Wearing a paper crown decorated with pipecleaners and shaped like a large golden bee and clutching his new copy of the OED, Mr. Greenman looked underwhelmed by his win. “I won before, in 2009,” he said.

Earlier in the evening he had been handing out a small flier for the Occupy Alphabet movement, which read “Why do the top six letters in our alphabet use more than 50 percent of the available space in all spelling? It hardly seems fair.”

Asked if he was a whiz speller as a child, Mr. Greenman said he preferred math. As for his strategy of always asking for the language of origin (including on the word “kibbutznik,” which drew a laugh), Mr. Greenman said, “I just like stalling.”

The next morning, however, Mr. Greenman sent us an e-mail. “I dreamed about spelling, sort of,” he wrote. “I was in some kind of banquet hall and I needed to use the restroom and the doors had M and W on them and the letters were kind of important, there, in the dream. Normally you just find the right one and push on through but I think I had the alphabet on my mind.”

“Simply put,” said  I.A.F.F. general president Harold Schaitberger, Mr. Clinton is “the kind of leader American workers need more of holding office today at every level of government.”Mr. Clinton, not to be outdone, had something more to say about those people holding office today. “I got tickled by watching Governor Perry announce [for] president,” Mr. Clinton said of the candidate from Texas, accentuating his Arkansas drawl for effect. “He’s a good-looking rascal.” The ballroom, filled with fire fighters from across the country and Canada, erupted in laughter, and Mr. Clinton grinned mischievously. He went on to call the anti-federal government rant by Mr. Perry—the longest serving governor his state’s history—“crazy.”

The rest of Mr. Clinton’s 35-minute speech was unremarkable. But the firemen were tickled to have the former president at their biannual event, and tried finding a suitable way to say thank you. They presented him with a particularly pedigreed golf club. “We were able to locate one of 12 clubs [legendary golfer] Bobby Jones had made, nine of which are in museums, three which are privately held,” said Mr. Schaitberger, counting the one being gifted among those three.

Mr. Clinton scratched his chin and offered an open-mouth smiled. He put on his glasses and inspected the head of the putter. Then, he bent over to try it out. “Wow,” Mr. Clinton muttered softly, sounding truly impressed.

By the time Mr. Clinton walked off with the rare and priceless putter, the fireman had also heard from City Council Speaker Christine Quinn—a leading mayoral candidate for mayor in 2013 who is credited with blocking Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to shutter firehouses. Local union leaders thanked her and she thanked them and there was a general air of good feeling in the room.

Later that morning, one of Ms. Quinn’s likely rivals, New York City Comptroller John Liu, had his turn. Mr. Liu, who holds a degree in mathematical physics from Binghamton University, told his blue-collar audience how much he learned the previous weekend when he had the chance to take part in a day of fireman’s training.

Mr Liu was wearing a dark suit and a tightly configured tie, and his pin-straight black hair was neatly brushed to the side. He recalled wearing “close to 100 pounds of gear as well as 300 tools that were necessary.” Then, he recalled, he entered the first room designed to simulate a real fire.

“You could see the smoke coming out,” recalled Mr. Liu, “and I was standing there, going, ‘Holy shit.’” The fireman applauded and laughed.

Reflecting back on the experience from the comfort of the podium, Mr. Liu said, “I don’t think people get it, that that’s what [you] fire fighters put up with.” The firemen then presented Mr. Liu with a honorary fireman’s helmet, which he gamely donned.