The weird thing is that Disney doesn't actually have a store there. But it will soon.

The company has finalized its plans--reported by Dana Rubinstein last month--to open one of its Apple-inspired stores at 1540 Broadway. Steve Jobs helped the company re-think their franchise last year, which explains all of this high-tech child bait, detailed by the Times back in October:

Theaters will allow children to watch film clips of their own selection, participate in karaoke contests or chat live with Disney Channel stars via satellite. Computer chips embedded in packaging will activate hidden features. Walk by a "magic mirror" while holding a Princess tiara, for instance, and Cinderella might appear and say something to you.

It's your birthday? With the push of a button, eight 13-foot-tall Lucite trees will crackle with video-projected fireworks and sound. There will be a scent component; if a clip from Disney's coming "A Christmas Carol" is playing in the theater, the whole store might suddenly be made to smell like a Christmas tree.

Being Disney, they're considering calling these "Imagination Parks," and their president said he wants the stores to be "the best 30 minutes of a child's day."

And apparently Disney is part of yet another Times Square. The president of the Times Square Alliance, Tim Tompkins, told the Real Deal:

"[Disney will be in] the very spot where Virgin made a major statement," Mr. Tompkins said. "Virgin was the beginning of the retail transformation of Times Square, which led to the Toys R Us ferris wheel and other entertainment-oriented retail."

What's going on here? Call us crazy, but we remember a time when Johnny Depp actually made movies, and not just giant gimmicky FX spectacles based on theme park rides and television shows. When Mr. Depp made the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, everyone loved it and him. What a novel concept it was! A real actor taking his craft and using it to improve upon a genre effects film. The results were wonderful. The first Pirates film is a gloriously entertaining romp, but the last two were exponentially more terrible. In fact, the third one was so disjointed and confusing, that, to this day we still don't have a clue as to what happened.

We had thought Mr. Depp's diversion into action star land was over. He's playing John Dillinger is Michael Mann's Public Enemies and will also appear in Mira Nair's next film, Shantaram. But after that he's doing another Pirates film and playing Tonto? Think about it: he'll be locked into the House through 2011! We appreciate that the man wants to get paid, but it feels like there has got to be better projects for one of our best talents (though, we are kinda psyched about a Burton/Depp Wonderland).

If, like us, you think Miley knew more or less exactly what she was doing with her Vanity Fair spread, it’s probably safe to say she knows the deal here, even if the execs at Disney wouldn’t know a thinly-veiled sexual allusion if it hit them in the face (or appeared on the cover of their own movie). Of course, since she’s only 15 and all, Miley knows the importance of taking things slowly. Hence, the helpful label on the package, “Individual Pouches for Portion Control.”

Tuesday: Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares
In America, Scottish celebrity chef is best known for his cartoonish, abusive outbursts on the Fox reality cooking competition Hell's Kitchen. But across the pond, his far superior television show, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, showed a softer side of the rough-and-tumble chef. That program, which follows Ramsay as he tries to help failing restaurants, has also been remade for a U.S. audience (also for Fox), but skip that and DVR the BBC America reruns of the original. Today, Ramsay travels to Paris to help a Scottish woman who's opened up a vegetarian place—with an uncontrollable chef, a bratty waitress and terrible food. Expect tough love, and Ramsay's signature short fuse. [BBC America, 1 p.m.]

Wednesday: Hand Behind the Mouse
This documentary about Ub Iwerks, one of the early geniuses of animation technology, offers a sort of alternative history of early cartoons, focusing on Disney's 'go to' guy rather than the more recognizable names associated with our early animated friends. The film also features tons of old cartoons that, despite an entire cable channel devoted to Disney productions, are rarely broadcast on tv. [Ovation, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: Stand By Me
Oh, Corey Feldman before he was a mess. Wil Wheaton before he became a computer nerd. Jerry O'Connell before he got skinny. And River Phoenix before he became an icon. The Observer can still quote this 80s classic, based on Stephen King's short story "The Body," about four boys coming of age in the 50s who set off on a day's journey in search of a teenager's dead body. Scary, hilarious, and unbelievably sad. [AMC, 12 p.m.]

Friday: Doctor Who
We're totally obsessed with the remade Doctor Who series, which stars adorable, foppish Scottish actor David Tennant as the well-dressed time lord (bespoke suits! Chuck Taylors!) who zips around in a police box fighting aliens and rooting out bad extraterrestrials. Today, the first part of one of our most favorite episodes airs on the SciFi channel. In it, the Doctor and his season 3 companion, Martha Jones, appear in Britain in 1913 where the Doctor has been forced to forsake his time lord self and become human in an attempt to evade some alien pursuers. There are also scary scarecrows. Trust us: this is not the Doctor Who of your youth. [SciFi, 5 a.m.]

The brothers agreed to temporarily retain some oversight of the Miramax imprint when they left Disney in 2005, in order to properly follow through on all the books they’d signed up before they left.

According to Weinstein Books president Rob Weisbach, he and his staff moved out of Miramax’s offices at 99 Hudson Street on September 30^th and are now operating out of a new location at Cortlandt and Church Sreets.

Their deluxe apartment in the sky, you must admit, boasts quite the view. Rockets whiz past condos the shape of flying saucers. Stars flutter and flicker, and below the clouds are frozen like rivers.

Tonight’s another of George and Jane’s keycard parties. Pretty swingin’. Cosmonauts show off their ray guns to space oddities, Judy’s spiked the Tang, and a couple of Miss Solar System runners-up are busy moving plastic couches this way and that, tugging on unitard sleeves, trying to get everybody dancing the Saturn Snug. Be sure to grab a food pill or trans-dermal nutrient patch when the robot maid rolls by. Dig that theremin on the hi-fi. Plenty of futurific fun to be had, here in the 21st century.

Or not. The actual 21st century, our 21st century, has been—not to be put too fine a point on it—a real clusterfuck. As the weather gets weirder, it’s become obvious that the Space Age 60’s and the Mac Age 80’s were less prescient than the Silent Spring 70’s. Like kids outgrowing Santa Claus, we’ve spent the past seven miserable years learning to stop dreaming about the World of Tomorrow.

Why would we? In the continued absence of solar-paneled jetpacks, plutonium-powered time machines or even fully electric (forget flying) cars, most of us still arrive at our still-earthbound offices via that great marvel of 1904, the subway. Which rarely gets faster, cleaner, cheaper or more frequent, but instead everyday further erodes, like the ruins at Troy.

The news isn’t any better above ground: bypass the retro clothes, society dopes and Visigoth frat brothers flooding the gates, and just look at the hole still sitting at Ground Zero—and the monolithic monstrosity we’d like to fill it with—for definitive proof that the cultural capital of the world hasn’t managed to keep its imagination running, that we’ve sputtered to a stop.

Americans have always assumed that one day we’d awaken in our utopian future, like tourists at Disney World wandering happily from Frontierland into Tomorrowland. We envisioned it in books, in movies, on TV, in bedtime stories. But we took the future for granted, as if it were a wife. And maybe it escaped this neglectful marriage, changed its name and skipped town.

The Space Age expired before we were permanently freed from gravity, pessimism and solid foods. But that was just Plan A. Plan B—and it was a pretty good second choice—was Dystopian Nightmare, which we hoped would closely resemble Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video. They were always a matched set of luggage—utopia and dystopia, the populuxe silver briefcase and the black leather duffel—and we just weren’t sure which trip we were going to take.

We haven’t even advanced enough for our favorite old worst-case scenarios: 1984 came and went long ago, and our computers don’t seem any closer to revolt. We still settle disputes in the jury system, rather than the Thunderdome.

On that faded old VHS of 1982’s Blade Runner, our long dark noir of the soul’s already well underway in 2019. Shoot. If we’re going to meet that deadline, the next 12 years would have to be spent covering over a chunk of the earth with nuclear winter and colonizing nearby planets, not to mention inventing Daryl Hannah–looking, electric-sheep-dreaming androids and the economic and political systems to oppress them with. And we’re just not that ambitious.

Novelist William Gibson, that coiner of “cyberspace,” the Kipling of the Internet Age, was altogether too clever to commit his cyberpunk sci-fi to any particular date. But console cowboys, razorgirls and god-like A.I.’s don’t sit around Rastafarian-run space stations, listening to dub, the glow of the earth below instead of a lava lamp to light their way. And Google me a corner of the Internet where just logging on looks like this:

“Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—and flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity.”

You’ll protest that our Information Age has surpassed the best of Gibson’s books, and that his hackers have evolved, like ape into man, into the bloggers who type chattily away all day, who unlock their own secrets before anyone has a chance to break into them. There’s more data available on some failed relationships than the reconstruction of Iraq. Foodies can trade pictures of meals like baseball cards. Pornography produced on a sunny day in the Valley can be instantly procured to warm one up in the darkest Arctic winter.

Each of us will have had our Platonic dialogues, on message boards and wikis, via text or I.M. But will we end up just like Socrates? Frittering away every night procrastinating and bullshitting around the fire? Dead at our own hand, without our Republics built?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Americans seem more excited by the end of our Republic than the birth pangs of any better ones. At least dystopian visions of the future presume that we keep advancing and advancing—just in the wrong direction. In the years since Sept. 11, this country has been acting like one huge support group for suicide cases.

On prime time, in multiplexes and bookstores, you’ll find apocalypses aplenty: enough raptures, freaks of nature, human errors, alien invasions, diplomatic crises, terrorist acts and deus ex machinas to assure you that, don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon.

In The Day After Tomorrow, it’s an ice age that consumes Manhattan in a matter of hours. In 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead, it’s zombies eager to eat your face off. In War of the Worlds, it’s close encounters of the worst kind. In Children of Men, it’s a Biblical plague of infertility. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it’s a conflagration of unknown origin that burns away everything but whatever bits of Mad Max that Mr. McCarthy managed to sit through. In Danny Boyle’s upcoming Sunshine, it’s the dying sun. In 24, it’s been, well, damn near everything, but the highlights include deadly viruses, nerve gas, Presidential coups and at least two nuclear explosions.

This has been mistaken for a religious fervor, but it’s exactly the opposite. There is, in these eschatologies, more of an anxiety about our own achievements’ than about God’s wrath. It’s not fear of a fickle, happy-to-send-a-great-flood-at-any-time Yahweh, but a deep panic about ourselves. And so we approach modernity, science, technology like addicts do their drugs—worrying that what makes our lives easier, livable, worthwhile is killing us slowly, then quickly.

The visionaries of late capitalism—lucky for the shareholders—have gotten pretty good at playing on all our mixed feelings. They know that no matter how much we like to hear about radical change, new world orders or the next big thing, we mostly just want our most trivial, domestic desires well met. So every new gadget, or iPod, or ringtone is sold as the Bolshevik overthrow of the czar. Which is why an alleged utopianist like, say, Steve Jobs devotes himself to beautiful baubles, as if a Fabergé Egg for every consumer was the closest any of us could expect to the shining city on a hill.

We shouldn’t expect Marxism of our moguls, but how about some can-do spirit? For a point of comparison, try plugging “Walt Disney’s Plan for Epcot” into YouTube. He actually wanted to build his own real-life Magic Kingdom enclosed safely under a giant bubble, given over to green spaces, pedestrian pathways and electric trains. For his residents—mostly his own employees, natch—there would be no property ownership, allowing Disney to sneak into homes and replace all the appliances with better, more modern designs anytime he liked. Disney knew that any community of the future worth its futurism needed constant upgrading.

It’s fascism, sure, but of a dreamy, earnest, adorable sort. At least Disney’s plan for Epcot began with the assumption that the future must be worked at, not just waited for at the station, like it’s some out-of-town guest coming in on the next train. Where’s today’s Disney imagineering a Better Tomorrowland?

Instead, our economy seems steered by those who would rather squeeze the last life out of the status quo than make money as the innovators and tycoons of whatever’s next. It begs the question: Was there a Bronze Lobby—Big Bronze?—that tried to prevent the transition to the Iron Age?

Everyone’s complicit. Ours is the New York of greenmarkets, of boomers in designer glasses wandering the farmers’ stalls, fondling fruits and sourcing proteins, like they’re Tuscan peasant grandmothers. Buying carefully and locally is a fine solution to our shitty stewardship of the planet, but it’s also a kind of denial, a retreat into centuries past, as if we can take a Mulligan and the industrial revolution and 20th century can be played over like a couple holes of golf. Progress not having lived up to all the hype, we’ll try regress instead.

Those Luddites who haven’t yet tossed out their flat screens should adore CBS’s post-apocalyptic Jericho, which returns tonight after a winter hiatus. The show is an ode to Mayberry Utopianism: 17 nukes across the country might pretty much decimate the United States, but a small Kansas town will remain virtually untouched. It’s Lassie, except instead of kids falling down wells, millions die in the war on terror. The fallout’s done wonders for the sunsets.

And sure, the beer taps in the local bar are just ornamental now, but the patrons all grimly and gratefully sip the moonshine from the still out back. And every night, no-longer-estranged families sit down around the table together, say grace, and dig into their meals of hastily harvested corn, boiled well water and canned soup. Everyone’s happier than the pilgrims at the First Thanksgiving.

Starting over from scratch: That’s the new utopia, a Republic of Second Chances. Daydreaming flu pandemics, asteroid strikes or all-out zombie attacks is significantly easier than hoping for some new Robert Moses with the vision, time and inclination to re-engineer our Manhattan into The Jetsons. Who will dig up our fossilizing subways and tear down our lovely prewar buildings and build us an Orbit City where enlightened astronauts pilot their ecologically sound flying saucers between the flowering rooftop gardens of gleaming white skyscrapers? Besides, all the Fountainhead types are too busy reducing their carbon footprints.

Nowadays, everyone just wants to play a shepherd in their own pastoral poem. So let’s all grow beards, learn to fish, find rivers far away from one another to sit down beside and wait. Don’t worry. We won’t be Amish.

We’ll come up out of the woods and amble up through the high grass toward our little house about the size of an Ikea kitchen cabinet. The Fresh Direct truck will be idling noisily and wastefully outside, ready with our order: Bentzy’s almond slices and Vanns rubbed sage for the fresh-caught trout; vegetable-medley hobo packets on the side; some fair-trade coffee for the morning; maybe an organic syrah for tonight. The solar panels on the roof will keep the PowerBook powered while this week’s Lost downloads. We’ll live like castaways. We’ll do no harm.

Tomorrow will come, eventually.

Ms. Ross was 28 at the time the picture was taken, in June 1981, at the Vacaville State Medical Facility in California. She was preparing Mr. Manson for his first TV interview, for the Tomorrow show with Tom Snyder—executive producer, Mr. Ailes. In the picture, Mr. Manson has Ms. Ross in a headlock. He is pressing his thumb against her throat, pretending that it’s a knife, and all three are laughing uproariously.

“Oh, Charles,” Ms. Ross had said right before the photographer snapped the scene, “you’re such a kidder!”

“This ushered in the current era of controversy,” Ms. Ross said on the afternoon of Dec. 4. The veteran ABC producer, who is 53, was packing up. It was one of her last days at the Disney-owned network, where she has worked for 17 years.

Ms. Ross helped invent the form of journalism that is popularly called tabloid TV news—born of that first interview with Mr. Manson and honed to a fine point with Judith Regan’s recent abortive efforts with O.J. Simpson—and revived Good Morning America from the brink of death. Her contract is up on Dec. 31, and the network is not renewing it. ABC had no comment. Ms. Ross declined to say what she plans to do next, although she is taking meetings.

She does have regrets. “I just hope one thing you can convey is I don’t like where my innovations have wound up any more than you do,” she said. (That was on a voicemail message, left the next day.)

“Even though I believe I pioneered this kind of news, there was always a reason, a uniqueness, a philosophy, a storytelling/human-behavior core to it. Now I really feel like I watch the murder of the month, the murder of the week, the murder of the day. I just see garden-variety murders without anything interesting,” she said. “The balance is off.”

Ms. Ross has been a polarizing figure at ABC throughout her long and lucrative career there, butting heads often with News president David Westin and former anchor Peter Jennings, whom she eulogizes now as a “keeper of the flame.”

She reflected on what it’s like to be a high-powered woman in the entertainment industry—“You get caricatured as a bitch,” she said, “which everyone already knows.”

Ms. Ross began her career as a cub reporter in Florida in the mid-1970’s. In 1976, she became an editor at the National Enquirer, where she worked with Judith Regan, the publisher of the O.J. Simpson faux-confessional If I Did It, and Pablo Fenjves, the book’s ghostwriter. Ms. Ross is widely considered to be the premiere living “O.J.-ologist,” in her words. She signed a confidentiality agreement regarding If I Did It and its associated television special and declined to comment on the topic for this story.

“I don’t know that people would’ve bought the book,” she said. “But I think they would’ve tuned in” for the TV special.

Ms. Ross, who earned a reputation in the press for being an occasionally tyrannical boss, had prepared a green file folder with copies of 69 admiring e-mails from former employees and colleagues, most sent in the spring of 2004, when she was unceremoniously dumped as the executive producer of Good Morning America. The authors lean heavily on the language of battle to express their sympathies.

“You bled for ABC News,” wrote one former senior-level producer, “and I have marvelled at all you have done to keep this place in business.”

“[A]s you soldiered on,” wrote another, “you made me … all of us … leaner fighting machines in this early morning war.”

The circumstances of Ms. Ross’ departure from Good Morning America have never been clear. After seven years as the executive producer of the show—during which she rose at 2:45 every morning and often worked past midnight, and slowly but surely increased the viewership of the morning show by more than a million viewers—Ms. Ross was removed from the job and sent whence she came, the newsmagazines.

There had been concerns in the executive offices about her relationship with Charlie Gibson. There were doubts about whether she still had Diane Sawyer’s support. There were fears in the upper echelons of Disney management that Ms. Ross was too rough with her staff.

“I was reassigned,” Ms. Ross said.

Ms. Ross—always taut and intense—took it very personally. “All of this was playing out in the paper,” Ms. Ross said. “I was calling up Lloyd Grove”—then a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News—“every day and saying ‘Why don’t you get a new job? You’re a junk-food journalist.’ But he was right. Eventually David Westin asked me to his office, and he said, ‘Something’s come up and I need to reassign you.’ I was, you know, not happy about it. I can’t hide any of that.”

She has spent the last two years riding out her contract with the network. She changed the subject. Look: a small stuffed peacock, over by the window.

“I got this when NBC copied us and did their own job-switch day,” she said, recalling a 2003 gimmick when Katie Couric and Jay Leno swapped hosting duties for a day. Ms. Ross lifted the bird to reveal two pins protruding, voodoo-like, from its flank. She removed one and jabbed it several times into the stuffed animal’s beak, a reference to Mr. Leno’s ample jaw. “I call it the chin-pin,” she said.

There are three David Blaine “Drowned Alive” posters in the office, from the last major prime-time special Ms. Ross produced for the network. On a small glass-top table nearby, there is a bronze statuette of Mickey Mouse, doffing his hat in a theatrical bow. The inscription reads: “15 magical years.”

“Can you believe this?” she asked, pointing at the Disney gift.

She pointed to a series of stills from Murder in Beverly Hills, a prime-time special she produced on the Menendez brothers’ trial and her first foray into popular journalism for ABC. “Two young men may have killed their parents in Beverly Hills,” she said in a monotone. “See? I didn’t put one adjective in that. I didn’t pump it up at all.”

“Within the network, there was some embarrassment by some people,” Ms. Ross said. “Culturally.”

In 1994, in one of her most notorious coups, Ms. Ross booked the first network interview with Paula Corbin Jones. She arranged the interview for Sam Donaldson, whom she considers a close friend. To secure the interview, she said, she met with Ms. Jones and urged her, woman to woman, that there was only one way to tell the story of what led to her lawsuit against Bill Clinton and be taken seriously.

“I said, ‘If you want people to believe you, don’t tell it to Diane, Barbara, Katie, Connie or Leslie,’” Ms. Ross said.

She remembered most fondly a story she did for Primetime about AIDS mom Elizabeth Glaser and her two best friends, the three of whom would take a shot of tequila at the end of every day.

Ms. Ross and Ms. Sawyer brought the tradition to Good Morning America. At the end of every week, whatever staff members wanted to would gather for a shot of tequila before going home for the weekend.

“It was a really big bonding thing,” Ms. Ross said. It got so that producers would donate bottles of tequila for Christmas and bring back decorative shot glasses from their holiday vacations.

“I knew the people in A.A.,” she said. “They would get Snapple or Coke.” The same went for the pregnant women and the underage interns. The tradition continued until the day that an executive whom Ms. Ross declined to name found out.

“They said, ‘You can’t do this on the premises,’” she said. “So. It’s a shame.”

The indignities of corporate life. Ms. Ross looked almost on the verge of genuine emotion. “I still get tequila memorabilia,” she said and changed the subject.

Over the course of three hours, Ms. Ross polished off most of the smaller half of a turkey wrap purchased for her (“You’re buying”) at the Café Europa opposite Lincoln Square. She planned to bring the rest home to her husband, David Simone, a successful record-industry executive who has just purchased the complete catalog of Hall and Oates.

Mr. Simone and Ms. Ross share an apartment in the Bloomberg Building and a manse in Connecticut. Among his most successful career acquisitions is the catalog of a little-known Trinidadian songwriter. Hidden in the catalog was one particular gem, Ms. Ross explained. She pointed to her left ring finger, atop which sat a brilliant-cut yellow diamond about the size of a quarter. “This is courtesy of ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’” she said, meaning the 2000 mega-hit by the Baha Men. Ms. Ross declined to provide the diamond’s carat weight for the record, although she did describe the day she passed the ring around the predominantly female Good Morning America staff, to a chorus of admiring oohs and ahhs.

“There weren’t many women in the business who showed you can have it all,” she said.

Ms. Ross was 28 at the time the picture was taken, in June 1981, at the Vacaville State Medical Facility in California. She was preparing Mr. Manson for his first TV interview, for the Tomorrow show with Tom Snyder—executive producer, Mr. Ailes. In the picture, Mr. Manson has Ms. Ross in a headlock. He is pressing his thumb against her throat, pretending that it’s a knife, and all three are laughing uproariously.

“Oh, Charles,” Ms. Ross had said right before the photographer snapped the scene, “you’re such a kidder!”

“This ushered in the current era of controversy,” Ms. Ross said on the afternoon of Dec. 4. The veteran ABC producer, who is 53, was packing up. It was one of her last days at the Disney-owned network, where she has worked for 17 years.

Ms. Ross helped invent the form of journalism that is popularly called tabloid TV news—born of that first interview with Mr. Manson and honed to a fine point with Judith Regan’s recent abortive efforts with O.J. Simpson—and revived Good Morning America from the brink of death. Her contract is up on Dec. 31, and the network is not renewing it. ABC had no comment. Ms. Ross declined to say what she plans to do next, although she is taking meetings.

She does have regrets. “I just hope one thing you can convey is I don’t like where my innovations have wound up any more than you do,” she said. (That was on a voicemail message, left the next day.)

“Even though I believe I pioneered this kind of news, there was always a reason, a uniqueness, a philosophy, a storytelling/human-behavior core to it. Now I really feel like I watch the murder of the month, the murder of the week, the murder of the day. I just see garden-variety murders without anything interesting,” she said. “The balance is off.”

Ms. Ross has been a polarizing figure at ABC throughout her long and lucrative career there, butting heads often with News president David Westin and former anchor Peter Jennings, whom she eulogizes now as a “keeper of the flame.”

She reflected on what it’s like to be a high-powered woman in the entertainment industry—“You get caricatured as a bitch,” she said, “which everyone already knows.”

Ms. Ross began her career as a cub reporter in Florida in the mid-1970’s. In 1976, she became an editor at the National Enquirer, where she worked with Judith Regan, the publisher of the O.J. Simpson faux-confessional If I Did It, and Pablo Fenjves, the book’s ghostwriter. Ms. Ross is widely considered to be the premiere living “O.J.-ologist,” in her words. She signed a confidentiality agreement regarding If I Did It and its associated television special and declined to comment on the topic for this story.

“I don’t know that people would’ve bought the book,” she said. “But I think they would’ve tuned in” for the TV special.

Ms. Ross, who earned a reputation in the press for being an occasionally tyrannical boss, had prepared a green file folder with copies of 69 admiring e-mails from former employees and colleagues, most sent in the spring of 2004, when she was unceremoniously dumped as the executive producer of Good Morning America. The authors lean heavily on the language of battle to express their sympathies.

“You bled for ABC News,” wrote one former senior-level producer, “and I have marvelled at all you have done to keep this place in business.”

“[A]s you soldiered on,” wrote another, “you made me … all of us … leaner fighting machines in this early morning war.”

The circumstances of Ms. Ross’ departure from Good Morning America have never been clear. After seven years as the executive producer of the show—during which she rose at 2:45 every morning and often worked past midnight, and slowly but surely increased the viewership of the morning show by more than a million viewers—Ms. Ross was removed from the job and sent whence she came, the newsmagazines.

There had been concerns in the executive offices about her relationship with Charlie Gibson. There were doubts about whether she still had Diane Sawyer’s support. There were fears in the upper echelons of Disney management that Ms. Ross was too rough with her staff.

“I was reassigned,” Ms. Ross said.

Ms. Ross—always taut and intense—took it very personally. “All of this was playing out in the paper,” Ms. Ross said. “I was calling up Lloyd Grove”—then a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News—“every day and saying ‘Why don’t you get a new job? You’re a junk-food journalist.’ But he was right. Eventually David Westin asked me to his office, and he said, ‘Something’s come up and I need to reassign you.’ I was, you know, not happy about it. I can’t hide any of that.”

She has spent the last two years riding out her contract with the network. She changed the subject. Look: a small stuffed peacock, over by the window.

“I got this when NBC copied us and did their own job-switch day,” she said, recalling a 2003 gimmick when Katie Couric and Jay Leno swapped hosting duties for a day. Ms. Ross lifted the bird to reveal two pins protruding, voodoo-like, from its flank. She removed one and jabbed it several times into the stuffed animal’s beak, a reference to Mr. Leno’s ample jaw. “I call it the chin-pin,” she said.

There are three David Blaine “Drowned Alive” posters in the office, from the last major prime-time special Ms. Ross produced for the network. On a small glass-top table nearby, there is a bronze statuette of Mickey Mouse, doffing his hat in a theatrical bow. The inscription reads: “15 magical years.”

“Can you believe this?” she asked, pointing at the Disney gift.

She pointed to a series of stills from Murder in Beverly Hills, a prime-time special she produced on the Menendez brothers’ trial and her first foray into popular journalism for ABC. “Two young men may have killed their parents in Beverly Hills,” she said in a monotone. “See? I didn’t put one adjective in that. I didn’t pump it up at all.”

“Within the network, there was some embarrassment by some people,” Ms. Ross said. “Culturally.”

In 1994, in one of her most notorious coups, Ms. Ross booked the first network interview with Paula Corbin Jones. She arranged the interview for Sam Donaldson, whom she considers a close friend. To secure the interview, she said, she met with Ms. Jones and urged her, woman to woman, that there was only one way to tell the story of what led to her lawsuit against Bill Clinton and be taken seriously.

“I said, ‘If you want people to believe you, don’t tell it to Diane, Barbara, Katie, Connie or Leslie,’” Ms. Ross said.

She remembered most fondly a story she did for Primetime about AIDS mom Elizabeth Glaser and her two best friends, the three of whom would take a shot of tequila at the end of every day.

Ms. Ross and Ms. Sawyer brought the tradition to Good Morning America. At the end of every week, whatever staff members wanted to would gather for a shot of tequila before going home for the weekend.

“It was a really big bonding thing,” Ms. Ross said. It got so that producers would donate bottles of tequila for Christmas and bring back decorative shot glasses from their holiday vacations.

“I knew the people in A.A.,” she said. “They would get Snapple or Coke.” The same went for the pregnant women and the underage interns. The tradition continued until the day that an executive whom Ms. Ross declined to name found out.

“They said, ‘You can’t do this on the premises,’” she said. “So. It’s a shame.”

The indignities of corporate life. Ms. Ross looked almost on the verge of genuine emotion. “I still get tequila memorabilia,” she said and changed the subject.

Over the course of three hours, Ms. Ross polished off most of the smaller half of a turkey wrap purchased for her (“You’re buying”) at the Café Europa opposite Lincoln Square. She planned to bring the rest home to her husband, David Simone, a successful record-industry executive who has just purchased the complete catalog of Hall and Oates.

Mr. Simone and Ms. Ross share an apartment in the Bloomberg Building and a manse in Connecticut. Among his most successful career acquisitions is the catalog of a little-known Trinidadian songwriter. Hidden in the catalog was one particular gem, Ms. Ross explained. She pointed to her left ring finger, atop which sat a brilliant-cut yellow diamond about the size of a quarter. “This is courtesy of ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’” she said, meaning the 2000 mega-hit by the Baha Men. Ms. Ross declined to provide the diamond’s carat weight for the record, although she did describe the day she passed the ring around the predominantly female Good Morning America staff, to a chorus of admiring oohs and ahhs.

“There weren’t many women in the business who showed you can have it all,” she said.

The president of Tishman Speyer Properties has managed Rockefeller Center since he and a group of investors, led by Goldman, Sachs & Company, brought it in July 1996 for $1.3 billion. In that capacity, he has been charged with transforming the world’s most famous office complex into an upscale shopping destination, a place that will dazzle visitors and keep them from scurrying off to spend their money on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

That would be a radical departure. On any given day, hordes of tourists descend on Rockefeller Center and belly up to the skating rink to snap a picture of the gilded Prometheus statue. Then they quickly depart, rarely venturing into the tony shops surrounding them. “You don’t think about it as a place to shop,” said Jane Pearman, a recent visitor from England. “It’s a lot of buildings and a skating rink.”

Changing her mind may be a Herculean task. But then Mr. Speyer, who won a bidding war to buy the Chrysler Building on Nov. 24, has shown he is not afraid to make waves. He has persuaded Christie’s International P.L.C. to set up its American headquarters in what was once a garage on 49th Street. Moreover, he is shaking up the management of Radio City Music Hall and the Rainbow Room, two of the center’s beloved but somnolent Art Deco treasures.

His vision of a sweeping retail face-lift, however, may prove more elusive. Tishman Speyer has emptied out about 20 percent of the office complex’s retail space, and real-estate executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he is mulling over a number of intriguing plans, including a five-story shopping atrium in 30 Rockefeller Center, home of NBC.

But after only a year and a half, Mr. Speyer already is on his second director of retail leasing at Rockefeller Center, and people familiar with the internal workings there said he has yet to come up with the kind of all-encompassing plan he’ll need to compete with 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. “I think they are clueless, retail-wise,” said an industry insider.

Maybe so. But a source familiar with the developer said he has been so successful in cutting costs and increasing office rentals at Rockefeller Center that, when the time comes, he will be able to pick his retail tenants and name his price.

Considering all that Rockefeller Center has going for it, it’s amazing the complex has fallen into such disarray in recent years. The place is hardly a ghost town. About 60,000 people work there. Some 250,000 people pass through the center every day.

Then there are its perennially booming tourist attractions. The Rainbow Room and the eateries surrounding the skating rink are among the city’s top five grossing restaurants, raking in more than $20 million annually. One million pilgrims are expected to pony up a total of $48 million at Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Show this season.

An Unappetizing Mix

Yet while those cash cows prospered, previous managers couldn’t figure out what to do with the remaining retail space, especially the hard-to-rent storefronts in the underground concourse.

The result was an unappetizing mix of dry-cleaners and bank branches for office tenants, and T-shirt emporiums and fast food joints for the tourists. And while Rockefeller Center dozed, Times Square, Fifth Avenue and 57th Street became vibrant urban shopping meccas. “Rockefeller Center still had its fabulous office tenants, but the complex needed an infusion of hemoglobin,” said Mitchell Moss, director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. “It’s been this kind of sleeping giant, and it’s been asleep for 25 years.”

That began to change when Mr. Speyer and his partners--who also included David Rockefeller, the Agnelli family of Italy and the Niarchos family of Greece--entered the picture. They bought the 12-building landmark for $1.3 billion after a partnership controlled by Mitsubishi, the Japanese conglomerate that purchased the complex at an inflated price in the late 1980’s, declared bankruptcy.

Right away, the new partners made a deft move: They sold General Electric’s NBC unit, with its 1.3 million square feet of office space, for about $400 million. That left the partners with $900 million in the deal, $500 million of which was borrowed money. Then Mr. Speyer set out to improve the Rockefeller Center’s ailing cash-flow situation.

The 57-year-old developer is a shrewd operator who has maintained an impeccable reputation while assembling a portfolio of international properties valued at $6 billion--an accomplishment in a business with no shortage of rascals. A source familiar with Rockefeller Center said he slashed operating expenses there from $90 million to $70 million a year, and increased the center’s annual gross revenues from $157 million to $180 million a year. He achieved the latter goal largely by cutting the vacancy rate at the 7.4 million-square-foot complex from 14 percent to 7 percent while increasing rent by 20 percent.

The upshot, said the source, is that Mr. Speyer and his fellow investors have seen the value of their $400 million investment soar to more than $1 billion in less than a year and a half.

Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that Rockefeller Center was awakening from its trance. Earlier this year, for instance, the center announced it was transforming part of a 49th Street office building and garage into a glittering headquarters for Christie’s Inc., the auction house. Now there’s a plan to lure antique shops.

Even more startling, however, are efforts to drag the calcified Radio City Music Hall and Rainbow Room into the 21st century. Mr. Speyer was so concerned that Radio City Music Hall was dark much of the year that he was willing to oust the current tenant, Radio City Productions, owner of the legendary Rockettes, next January, after its lease expired.

He reportedly flirted with the Walt Disney Company and MCA Records before striking a soon-to-be-completed deal with the Rockettes’ owner and with Madison Square Garden (a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corporation) to reinvigorate the legendary hall.

According to people familiar with the negotiations, Madison Square Garden and Radio City Productions will be paying upward of $1 million a month--a huge increase compared to the Rockettes owner’s former $5 million-a-year rent.

New Blood

Mr. Speyer is in the process of pulling off a similar coup at the Rainbow Room, where the food has lagged behind the fabulous décor. Again, Mr. Speyer signaled he was prepared to replace the current tenants--the legendary Joseph Baum and his partner, David Emil, who also operate that other culinary aerie, the Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center--if necessary.

Now, according to sources, Mr. Baum and Mr. Emil will continue operating the Rainbow Room after their current lease expires at the end of 1998. But part of the agreement is that they bring in some new blood: Drew Nieporent, proprietor of Nobu, a super-trendy sushi shop in TriBeCa.

It may be harder, however, to recreate Rockefeller Center’s overall retail persona. Retail space accounts for only 500,000 square feet of the sprawling complex. Nonetheless, the center’s stores, restaurants and theaters are among the most visible elements of Rockefeller Center and have an importance that far outweighs their paltry contribution to the bottom line.

Real-estate executives who have seen Tishman Speyer’s retail plans said they don’t lack for ambition. Along with the proposed shopping atrium in 30 Rockefeller Center, they said the developer is considering installing an escalator in the Channel Gardens to transport Fifth Avenue shoppers down to the concourse area.

Other plans include increasing the size of the doors and windows of its Fifth Avenue storefronts to win over expensive clothing designers and creating an “entertainment zone” on Sixth Avenue.

Meanwhile, a source close to Tishman Speyer said the company has spent the last year clearing out undesirable tenants to create “a critical amount of retail space” needed to truly take advantage of the retail renaissance blooming on Fifth Avenue and Times Square. Indeed, the source said Mr. Speyer will announce a wave of leases with “nationally recognized retail chains” early next year.

But some real-estate executives see signs of trouble. Earlier this month, Geoffrey Wharton, a Tishman Speyer managing director, said publicly at an industry gathering that his company’s plans for the underground concourse and the entertainment zone weren’t “fully developed.” And earlier this year, Tishman Speyer replaced Susan Fine, the center’s original retail guru, with Peter Fair, a former Disney executive. Mr. Fair, who scouted out locations for Disney retail stores for his former employer, is considered an improvement. Still, there are others who wonder if a former Disney employee whose job largely consisted of casing shopping malls is up to the challenge at Rockefeller Center.

Then there is the price issue. Some real-estate executives said the main reason there are so many vacancies at Rockefeller Center is that Mr. Speyer has overpriced some of his most important space. According to sources, he is asking for $500 a square foot on Fifth Avenue and $200 a square foot for the vacant storefronts facing the skating rink.

Retail experts said enlivening the dead zone surrounding the skating rink is a key element of the revitalization effort, and skeptics believe that the high rents have scared off potential anchor tenants.

In the meantime, some rather astute observers are marveling at the way Mr. Speyer has reanimated the once musty office complex. “I think that Jerry Speyer has turned around what was the dreariest and most uninspired piece of prime real estate and has really invigorated the entire complex,” said Mr. Moss of N.Y.U. “The lobby staff used to dress in Nazi brown. Now they are wearing telegenic blue.”

I used to take children to the theater. But now all the ones I know are practically my age, including my own daughter. Furthermore, my adorable little nephews and nieces are at college shagging their brains out, and even my favorite goddaughter doesn’t want to know.

“Angel mine,” I pleaded with Pauline over the phone. “My own little pumpkin pie. Are you up for Mary Poppins, followed by a ludicrously expensive dinner at a restaurant of your choice?”

“John, you know I love you,” she replied in that forbearing way that spells doom. “I’m knocking 30, and I saw the movie at least six times when I was 8.”

She could still sing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (and began to until I begged her to stop). I pointed out that the stage version has some new songs with titles like “Brimstone and Treacle” and “Practically Perfect,” but I still couldn’t change her mind.

Where was I to find a child to accompany me to Mary Poppins? It reached the point where I considered buying one. But I didn’t think it would arrive in time for critics’ night. A happy solution was found, however, during a visit to my acupuncturist and herbalist, Suzanne Farkas, as she was expertly balancing my yin and yang while calming my shen. Suzanne’s enchanting 6 1/2-year-old daughter, Paloma, is stage-struck. Mother and daughter thus accompanied me excitedly to the show.

The vast New Amsterdam Theatre on Broadway was packed with loving parents who had forked out a top ticket price of $110 (no reduction for children). When all’s said and done, this is Disney’s Broadway. “You’re not listening to me, Cassandra!” an irritable mom was telling her restless child in my row before the curtain went up. “The gift shop is out of bounds!”

Mary Poppins would have approved of Cassandra’s mom. When the lights went down and the orchestra struck up the first chords, my young guest—who knows the film version backwards—was grinning from ear to ear. This is the thrilling thing: There are still children who love going to the theater!

Mary Poppins ends at about 10:50—at least a half-hour too long for me, but not for Paloma and lots of other youngsters, though at the end of the show, some of the smallest were being carried out asleep, wrapped round their fathers’ shoulders like sacks of potatoes.

The show’s controversial new song, “Temper, Temper,” was the one my young guest enjoyed the most, and she gave it an enthusiastic round of applause. It has reportedly caused some concerned American mothers to shield the eyes of their whimpering children from what’s happening onstage: Because thoughtless Michael and Jane have had a temper tantrum, during which they criticized their troubled father, Mary Poppins has punished them by confining them to their room with no milk and biscuits. Whereupon a doll crawls out of their dolls’ house like a creepy renegade from Shockheaded Peter, and all the toys in the room spring to menacing life and chant in song, “Children who refuse to learn will not return!” It was about as disturbing as any Halloween parade.

There are scholars of Mary Poppins who treat P.L. Travers’ original text like the Dead Sea Scrolls. The 1964 Julie Andrews movie sentimentalized the novel, while the London stage version, which opened in the West End two years ago, restored some of the original rigor out of respect for the author’s dying wish. In the Broadway production, the stern severity of Travers’ magical nanny has inevitably given way to Disney’s spoonful of sugar. The result is that almost everything is practically perfect, and everyone is trying much too hard.

The plummy vowel sounds of Ashley Brown’s admirable Mary Poppins, for example, are more like Julie Andrews than Julie Andrews. And no one—I give my word as an English gentleman—has ever possessed vowel sounds like Ms. Andrews in the entire history of spoken English. (It’s also true that in the same movie, Dick Van Dyke’s cockney chimneysweep virtually invented a grotesque new language.) Gavin Lee’s genial vaudevillian Bert could scarcely be better. Mr. Lee is the only member of the London cast in this production.

God save us from perfectly horrible stage children. They grate on our nerves with their loud, knowing cuteness and awful professionalism. One longs to kick the little darlings into the wings. A word of thanks, then, to Matthew Gumley for his terrific performance as the Banks child, Michael. He’s so good, he sometimes tunes out of the show in his relaxed way, apparently uninterested in the action around him. Mostly, he’s exactly, lovably right. Master Gumley is a stage rarity: a completely natural child actor.

Disney’s shrewd strategy for its modern mega-musicals is to hire the best creative artists that money can buy in the hope of forging a bold partnership between commerce and art. Julie Taymor’s The Lion King, pillaging the world’s traditional cultures for the benefit of the masses, remains its most successful venture. Tarzan doesn’t work nearly as well because its novice director, the great set designer Bob Crowley, couldn’t see the flaws in the whole picture—a de-sexed Tarzan story with yet another Julie Andrews sound-alike, a blah score by Phil Collins, and lots of athletic performers pretending to be monkeys bungee-jumping all night long on jungle vines.

The artistic team in the engine room of Mary Poppins is of the highest order—Sir Richard Eyre, formerly artistic director of the Royal National Theatre (who also directed the West End production); his co-director and choreographer, Matthew Bourne (of the sensational all-male Swan Lake); the magical set designer Mr. Crowley; and Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Gosford Park, who wrote the book. Together they achieve remarkable things, keeping a massive spectacle afloat—not least when the children’s attic descends onto the set’s giant Edwardian home at the stately pace of a space rocket docking with the mothership.

And yet I would swap all the multimillion-dollar hydraulics, the miraculous flying on wires and pretty video work, for a measure of unmanufactured wonder and a simple, direct connection to open hearts. Mary Poppins, after all, is about the confusion and wonderment of innocent childhood. Is it too late for us?

Mr. Eyre does best with the seamless, intimate inner story of the unhappy marriage of the Banks adults, and he’s got fine performances from Daniel Jenkins as George and Rebecca Luker as Winifred. The loss is that the focus of the show has shifted away from the children and made them seem secondary.

There are serious lapses in Matthew Bourne’s overrated choreography. British musicals have never really known how—or when—to burst out of their shell and dance. A big number like “Supercalifragilisticwhatsitsname” cries out for choreography. But here it takes place, for some weird reason, in what looks like a cramped tent in Trinidad, where each word of the tongue-twister is spelt out for us in mime like a frantic spelling bee.

Our irrepressibly sunny chimneysweep, Bert, defies gravity by dancing on the walls and ceiling—a magical wired moment, unless you recall Fred Astaire’s legendary, gravity-defying dance sequence in Royal Wedding over half a century ago. Mr. Bourne’s first-act ballet during “Jolly Holiday” resembles a pretentious Las Vegas floorshow: Near-naked mythic statues come to life, including a child statue apparently in search of its daddy. His major second-act dance sequence, “Step in Time,” goes for broke with a kind of rooftop Riverdance for chimneysweeps. But in the Broadway of dance legend—the Broadway of Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett—Mr. Bourne’s promised showstopper, which longs so much to please, never lifts off quite enough to have us cheering on the edge of our seats.

Most unexpectedly of all, this new psychological version of Mary Poppins preaches Dr. Phil–like wisdom about bringing up children right. (It turns out that Mr. Banks, the show’s dysfunctional, miserable father, was raised by an evil nanny.) The texture of Travers’ story has been reduced to a simplified Disney cartoon in a paean to sham miracles entitled “Anything Can Happen”:

Anything can happen if you let it

Sometimes things are difficult

But you can bet it

Doesn’t have to be so ….

Never mind what I think. I’m glad to report that the outing to Mary Poppins proved a success where it mattered most: My young guest and new friend, 6 1/2-year-old Paloma, enjoyed every minute of it.

How wonderful, I thought. How wonderful to be going to the theater as if for the first time.