This guy knows what time it is!

Used to the more snug confines of downtown boîtes, The Observer approached the hulking Park Avenue Armory with trepidation last Wednesday.

We were there for what turned out to be a very manly party celebrating the birthday of a watch: the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak (starting price $10,500) was 40 years old, and some real guys were there to make sure the timepiece did not feel slighted on the momentous occasion.

Now, the nature of time is a subject we contemplate often—particularly as the sun creeps up over the ragged eastern edge of the city’s skyline—but never have we been confronted with it quite so literally.

Upon entry, we noticed that everyone, truly everyone, was wearing a conspicuous timepiece. And while they weren’t actually looking at the time, the crowd gawked at their watches often enough to give the impression of a room full of Mad Hatters: Were we late, late for the very important next party?

But no, it was soon clear that this was the place.

We first ran across the Cheshire grinning ex-pro running back Tiki Barber, whose gleaming pate caught our eye. With his blonde-bombshell companion, Traci Johnson, in tow, he smiled through the crowd, an umpteen-thousand-dollar hunk of Swiss machinery toggled to his wrist.

We asked the retiree about the recent NFL scandal in which players for the New Orleans Saints were offered bonuses for injuring opposing players.

“Tiki, do you reckon you could afford that watch with some of the bounties that used to be placed on your head?” we asked.

“Oh, man, I should certainly hope so,” he answered gamely.

We spied über-producer and Alicia Keys soulmate Swizz Beatz, wearing what we assumed was a minor Transformers character on his wrist.

What had he been up to? we asked.

“I’ve been up to some fun stuff lately man,” came the response.

Sounds fun lately, Mr. Beatz, really.

(Meanwhile, hockey player, ex-Vogue intern and LGBT activist Sean Avery, whom we later saw inside, slipped past us in much the same stealthy way he slipped out of the NHL.)

Making a lap of the room, we felt a strange force, a kind of glowing magnetism of masculinity pulling us ever closer to some as-yet-unknown source—until we found ourselves face to face with the Caucasian column of dude that is Tom Brady. As we shook his massive mitt, we could nearly hear the collective Sméagol of every postpubescent woman in America whispering in our ear, “My precious!”

“Look at you all dressed up,” he remarked. “Who said press shouldn’t look dapper at these things?”

We didn’t know who had said that.

What of the bounties on his handsome head? we asked the three-time Super Bowl champion.

“Look, it’s a bummer to think of anyone purposely trying to put anyone else in a wheelchair,” he said.

We nodded in agreement, as we gazed into his Tahitian blue eyes.

“These club bounties have been getting a lot of press lately—which is good, to expose them for what they are—but if you’re asking if you could buy a five-figure watch with some of the bounties placed on my head, "I’d like to think so,” he said with a seven-figure smile.

Struggling to escape Mr. Brady’s gravitational pull, we had barely enough time to dive out of the way as the most famous living Austrian barreled down the red carpet: Arnold Schwarzenegger had arrived.

Patrick McMullan, the Shetland sheepdog of party photographers, immediately began plying his trade and managed to corral the Governator into a pose.

Soon enough, Mr. Schwarzenegger spied Mr. Beatz, and implored him for some face time.

“Swizz, get ova heeuh!” he commanded. “I vant to see vhat vatch you are vearing!”

Mr. Beatz obliged.

The Meat from Mitteleuropa then meandered over to Mr. Brady, whom he congratulated on his new dwelling, the proud new owner of a modest 22,000-square-foot Brentwood bungalow, directly across from Mr. Olympia’s hideaway.

“Nice house,” offered Mr. Schwarzenegger, in the understated, nuanced parlance for which he has become known.

The party spilled over into the main room, where cocktails were doled out and floor-length evening dresses shuffled about the floor. On hand were two horologists, laboring away in a miniature Audemars workshop. Next to a reflecting pool, we contemplated a 60-foot-tall morphing projection of Michelangelo’s statue of David. (More manhood!)

Soon enough, president and CEO of Audemars North America François-Henry Bennahmias took the stage. All we heard was, “To break the rules, first you must master them,” before we began checking our own watch.

“And to drink the wine, first you must pour it,” remarked one of our tablemates, seemingly more interested in Dionysian pleasures.

Another fellow reveler was inordinately taken with the furniture. “The last time I was at a table this long, it was at a wedding in Versailles. I shit you not,” remarked the private-equity looking guy.

Fascinated, we turned away; Mr. Schwarzenegger was taking the stage.

In something of an odd reverie, he brought The Observer’s mind back, once again, to matters temporal.

Addressing the topic of 1972, the year of the Royal Oak watch’s origin, he strayed into familial matters—to our surprise, considering the news of late.

“I’m a little bit concerned when you talk about celebrating 1972. My in-law [Sargent] Shriver lost to Agnew. Watergate was a mess,” he remarked.

“But, oh, yes, that’s right,” he quickly added. “I won my 10th Mr. Olympia title.”

As the aging beefcake finished up, dessert was served. We indulged in the chocolate delight, wondering if Tom Brady was enjoying it as much as we were.
editorial@observer.com

Ms. Mulligan, Ms. Williams, Ms. Dunst.

“Wow, this is it, this view, New York City!” Michael Fassbender said after opening the door to the roof of the Standard, where the glass buildings lining the West Side bound forth from the meatpacking district toward midtown.

It was Friday night, and The Observer had just watched the New York Film Festival’s screening of Shame, a sexually violent fantasia in which Mr. Fassbender beds scores of random women in every dirty corner of Manhattan—including a few times against the floor-to-ceiling windows in the rooms of the hotel we were standing atop.

What better venue for the after party?

“This hotel …” the actor said. “I was staying in the rooms, once, and was told, ‘Beware! People can see inside.’”

Mr. Fassbender lit a cigarette and sat down at the table next to three of his oldest friends—buddies from his youth in County Kerry, Ireland. He had insisted on a roundtable conversation.

“How much of the sex was real?” we asked.

Here’s some context: Shame’s tamer scenes, which conceal nothing from the camera, find Mr. Fassbender engaging in sex under the Williamsburg Bridge, sex with prostitutes, sex with random men in a cavernous clubs, and of course sex in rooms at the Standard, for the entertainment of pedestrians on Little West 12th. (Don’t worry—things get wild toward the end.)

“Um, next question,” Mr. Fassbender said. “Now you gotta ask my mates one!”

“What was it like watching your buddy have more sex than you can ever imagine?” we asked.

“Unfortunately I haven’t yet seen his crown jewels!” one of them said. “I haven’t seen the film.”

“It’s really something,” The Observer responded.

“What is?” Mr. Fassbender asked, taking a last drag. “My crown jewels?”

“Well, I meant the film is really something,” we stuttered. “But, yeah, I have seen them now, I guess.”

“But I haven’t seen yours!” he shot back.

Mr. Fassbender downed his martini—his character, Brandon, was fond of the same cocktail, we remembered—and revealed that he hadn’t been with these guys, his closest friends, since 2001.

“We needed a significant break after we had a go at it,” said one of the friends.

Then they all started chiming in.

“We can only see each other every 10 years.

“I just got over it.”

“The shaking just stopped.”

“But we did a road trip together!” Mr. Fassbender interrupted. “And we were gonna call Marco’s ass up in Italy. Why didn’t we do that?”

“Because we were constantly drunk and we had the memory of a fucking goldfish!”

“Ah, that’s right.”

Steve McQueen, the film’s director, chose the Boom Boom Room for the film’s centerpiece scene, in which Carey Mulligan, playing Mr. Fassbender’s chanteuse little sister, sings “New York, New York” as the camera refuses to waver from her mascara-heavy eyelids.

“A lot of New Yorkers live in the sky, work in the sky, spend their time in the sky,” Mr. McQueen had noted during the postscreening Q&A. And when we spoke with him at the Boom Boom Room, it was up against the glass, with the docks and piers dangling out below us.

“This is the first time I’ve been back since we shot here …” he said. His eyes wandered downward. “The view, the expanse of water!”

After another drink next to a table where Olivia Wilde sat with Zoe Kazan, it was time to go. The cast cleared out too: this was just a small respite from the go-go of anyone involved in the New York Film Festival, where the fall’s slew of Oscar-bait pictures make their first impressions on filmgoers.

Two days later, another bash was underway at the Hudson Hotel in honor of Michelle Williams, who plays the blonde bombshell of the title in My Week With Marilyn.

“Does she pull off Marilyn Monroe?” Harvey Weinstein was asked. He was standing next to an enormous tin water pitcher that decorated the hotel terrace. “Well, see the film, then let me know. Me? Oh, I think she definitely pulls it off.”

Ms. Williams was herself at the party, but at Alice Tully Hall later that night she was Ms. Monroe—My Week With Marilyn is, after all, a film with actors playing actors. As we sat down for the screening, buzzed on a Negroni impetuously purchased from a Lincoln Center lobby cocktail cart, Ms. Williams-as-Marilyn began dancing on the screen-within-a-screen, as Kenneth Branagh’s Laurence Olivier sat in his own theater puffing on cigarette after cigarette. If only!

And all of this after our festival began with the earth caroming into a much larger planet in a deafening bonanza of fire—twice, actually—in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which premiered last Monday. It’s a glorious dismantling of terrestrial cores and emotional cores, an expansive vision set to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

And it wasn’t even the only end of the world going on. Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth, which also premiered at the festival, ends as you’d expect, and takes place on the Lower East Side. Oddly, on our way to My Week With Marilyn, we witnessed a plane etching the words “LAST CHANCE” across the sky.

Yet, despite Melancholia’s global destruction, the cast managed to make it to the Stone Rose Lounge for the after-party. (Mr. Von Trier, who infamously referred to himself as a Nazi when the film opened in Cannes, didn’t make the trip—then again, he’s never been to the United States.)

“I would definitely be with my family for sure,” Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Kirsten Dunst’s doltish (and doomed!) new husband, said to The Observer of his doomsday plans. “Where else would you want to be?”

“I don’t know, man” Ms. Dunst said to us. “I’d hopefully be with my family. It would be nice to be in the forest somewhere, chilling out. It’s such an awful thing to think about. What would you do?”

We told her we’d probably try to have a last night of fun.

First though, there were trays of truffle grilled cheese bites to eat, and DeLeon Tequila apple cocktails to down. The end would have to wait a little longer.

nfreeman@observer.com

"We were a bit dinged up."

The unmarked cop car sped out into the late night cobwebbed streets of Nolita at 3 a.m., bursting through red lights, sirens blaring, and ricocheting around turns that shook us back and forth, east to west. We had to lay low in the back seat, even for the quick trip to the corner of Mott and Houston. We pulled up next to three cruisers, sitting hotly in a giant cough of simmering exhaust, tire tread and the flash of red, white and blue.

Also, there was the pain: screaming molars rubbing up against sore, seared gums, our jawline banged, the burning skin of our neck still raw and throttled. We were a bit dinged up.

Against the side of the building stood three men. Black guy, with a short-sleeve, green, button-up shirt that didn’t quite cover the wired-together torso muscles. Another, this one massive, in a gray T, with a flesh-pouched face. Third black man, with decades on the other two, wearing a Panama hat.

The officers snapped out of the front seats.

“Can you identify who did this to you?” the first wanted to know.

“Yes,” we said. “The man in the green shirt and the big guy next to him. Never seen the guy in the hat before.”

“You heard the kid,” he said. “Cuff ’em!”

A slew of policemen from the other cars roughed the two men against the brick wall and slapped the word-of-God metal handcuffs around their wrists, arms back behind them. They shoved them into the back of a cruiser, but before ducking in, one of the guys, the big guy, swiveled his neck back toward our unmarked car. We locked eyes for an infinite second. With that, we slinked down in that back seat, behind the headrest, ducking our scarlet-laced, hammered-on mug.

The cruisers ahead of us cranked up the sirens and sped off.

“So,” the officer said, as he eased his big ass into the cushion of the driver’s. “What the hell happened to you tonight?”

"PLANS FOR LATER?" ASKED A FRIEND at the other end of the table. It was earlier that night, trouble still a dot on the horizon.

Our long and relaxed dinner at the new, soaring, silver-encrusted Hotel Americano, under the High Line in Chelsea, was winding down, and the hours of whiskey, wine and striped bass were working their woozy magic.

“Not really,” we said, scooping up the last of our shared dessert. A server refilled our flute with Champagne, and did the same for the girl. “Meeting up with a friend. Nothing too crazy.”

It was late, around 1 a.m., so we thanked the owner and lit out into the post-rain haze that had tucked its way into that ancient corner of 10th Avenue where Marquee still squats empty as sin. It was warm in the fog, the air so dense whole people could hide in it. Surprise people, dangerous people, obscured by the relentless frieze of shadows.

The cab zipped downtown, and we parted with our friend at Broadway-Lafayette, before heading to the neighborhood place where our pal was already nursing a Stella. We arrived, circulated, chatted, danced—it was a Wednesday at Kenmare.

“I think I’ve got to head out,” we told him later, gulping down the rest of a vodka and soda. Sure, we had a good booth—a French kid in leather who said his band was “big in Europe” clutching a young blonde, a jolly 20-something who worked in public relations—but it was late, a school night.

We were out: handshakes, cheek pecks, a stroll down Kenmare Street, past bodegas where men glanced at video keno screens over sandwiches and past other drunken kids counting on muscle memory to get them home. We had the routine down, all of us.

But perhaps there was something off. Who is that, lingering on that corner? How odd. And XIX, a posh lounge under Travertine—man, it seems awfully packed. And all those hissing shadows. No matter, we thought. The light was red, so instead of crossing we continued onto Delancey, across Bowery, to a dim pitch of sidewalk flanked by a park and a railing.

Suddenly fast footsteps behind us—thudding pitter-patter in a wave, rubber soles smacking like jazz snares, loud, louder, nearly here, bent arms and fists cutting the air. We swiveled around on a pivot and saw. The two men were barreling forward, a vortex, a dolly zoom, and as the bigger one pounced on our back, razorblading his tree trunk arms around our neck, the smaller one bashed the side of our face as we fell helplessly the ground, and two certain words went through our head.

Oh fuck.

“Give us everything!” the smaller one shouted. “Money, wallet, cell phone, everything!”

Our cheek bitten by gravel, we splayed our arms trying to get at our pockets, as the bigger guy squeezed tighter around the top of our spine, our ass scraping across the ground. Did they have a gun? A gun?

Oh fuck.

“I don’t have any money,” we spat.

Of course we didn’t have any money. In fact, of the many men and women leaving chintzy places that night, we must have been the last demin-jeans-and-tweed-jacket fast walker they’d want.

The smaller man hit us again.

“Give us everything!”

Out came the wallet, and the cracked iPhone, and the keys affixed to a simple key ring. We had nothing, they took everything. There was little left for them to do, then, but run off into the same dewy mist, leaving us busted and defeated on the ground, squinting to see them dive into that damp mystery that once made the city seem so damn romantic.

"AND SO WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?" the hulking detective asked as he scribbled into a notepad.

We had been taken to the city’s Fifth Precinct house, in Chinatown, for a few rounds of questioning. The two men we had sent away, our assailants, were locked up somewhere in the building. The sole witness to what went down, a driver parked near the scene, sat next to us. And there were the detectives who paced around the room.

We cleared our throat, for effect.

“I found my keys, they must have dropped them or something, so I could have gone home and licked my wounds, but instead I went back to Kenmare, to find my buddy,” we began. The detective was writing furiously, so much that he had begun to sweat fat beads that crested over the ripples of flesh on his forehead. The notebook just might have been identical to the one we carried in our jacket.

“Did they have a weapon on them?” one asked.

“Not that I know of,” we responded.

An officer rubbed at his chin.

“I had a cocktail and a smoke to calm down, and asked my friend to text my phone, because why not, who knows,” we continued.

The text had read: “Hey you have my friends phone ... where are you?”

A few minutes later, a response: “This is the police. We just stopped these two guys with this phone.”

“We received a 911 call from a cabbie and two guys matched the description,” the cop explained. “One had two phones on him. We asked why he needed two iPhones, and he said, ‘That’s how I roll.’ But I was looking at the text messages, and the phone didn’t fit the profile of a black male, it fit the profile of a white male. And then when that text from your friend popped up, it only helped.”

The detective lifted his head out of the notebook. “Look,” he said. “The perps fit the description for guys who we’ve been after for months. Stealing wallets and phones all over here.”

“They work at the Forever 21 on Broadway,” another cop chimed in.

“We’re going to need your help to put these guys away,” said the detective. “Are there any other details you forgot?”

“Actually, there’s one more thing,” we said. “After they got a hold of my phone and wallet, the smaller guy started reaching up in here”—we smacked our palm up our inner thigh—“and started yelling, ‘No homo! No homo!’ as he patted around my crotch.”

Because he wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.

Around 5:30 the detective, along with his no-noise sidekick, had wrapped up questioning the driver, the sole witness. We shook his hand and thanked him—he had mentioned, in a solemn tone, that to hang around in a police station during prime club-departure hours is not exactly the best way to do business. No regrets, though.

“I watched, once outside my house, a young man get stabbed eight times, and I called the police then and saved his life,” the driver said by way of explanation. “I thought, maybe I would have to do this again.”

ANOTHER HOUR WENT BY as the last few loose ends got figured out. Without a wallet—the muggers had tossed it in the sewer or trash when they found it empty—we had no way of getting back save for walking. Even we didn’t want to walk home after a night like that.

A police escort would be the only solution.

“You’ll have to get in the back,” an officer said after handing us our phone. “Sorry about that.”

We climbed into the cage, the same type of crate that held the perps a few hours before. They would be in that jail for at least a week, when the prosecution would bring the case before a grand jury.

He cocked the gear shift and the cruiser shot out into the end of the night, through the Nolita streets that led to our haunted section of Delancey Street, and up back toward Houston, until we arrived home.

“Thanks for the ride,” we said. “Do you have a light? The guys grabbed our lighter, too.”

“Stopped smoking years ago,” he said, opening our door.

“Probably smart,” we said, scootching out of the back and onto the corner of Allen and Houston.

There were footsteps behind us, and we spun around. No one was there.

“Never been in the back of a cop car, actually,” we said.

The policeman hopped back in the driver’s seat.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s hope it never happens again.”

nfreeman@observer.com //  @nfreeman1234

Mr. Brill, Mr. Curry

“There aren’t many dissenters in the room,” said another young man at the party Monday night for Steven Brill’s new book, Class Warfare, about education reform in the United States. The young man, blond, worked with one of the schooling organizations celebrated in the book.

“But, us two,” he continued to The Observer. “We’re certainly in the lowest income percentile in the room -- unless you inherited wealth, unless you come from serious money.”

The Observer said we had not.

We had come to the corner of Fifth Avenue and 63rd Street, a hundred-year-old Upper East Side estate purchased by Leonard Blavatnik in 2005 for $31 million, to discuss Mr. Brill’s problems with the state of the city’s public schools. The townhouse is crusted in ancient stone between the last buildings standing before Central Park starts, a relic with princely marble that leads the eye to a pebbled courtyard, an anteroom, and then several more anterooms.

Copper platters swung around offering steak tartare, truffle grilled cheese mini-sandwiches and goblets full of sloshing red and white wine. Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, Jeffrey Toobin, staff writer for The New Yorker, and John Hickenlooper, governor of Colorado, chit-chatted with members of education agencies associated with Mr. Brill’s philosophy. Ms. Abramson, newly installed atop The Times’ editorial masthead, had a long conversation with party pic legend Patrick McMullan as one of the paper’s Wall Street staffers stood by blurting off exclamations in the direction of Mr. McMullan’s powerful camera.

“Steve’s taken a lot of hits,” Boykin Curry, a money manager friend of Mr. Brill’s and the man behind the party, as he addressed the crowd atop a podium. “The New York Review of Books hired Diane Ravitch to review the book. That’s like having Richard Nixon review All The President’s Men!”

Mr. Brill took the stand.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said.

He began pointing out the people in the audience mentioned in the book.

“Jessica Reid,” Mr. Brill said. He gestured toward a young blonde woman with a buoyant dress and ample smile.

“If you’ve read it, you’ll know she’s dressed the way she is in the book.”

Talk turned serious. When discussing a teacher, he revealed that she was allowed to keep teaching despite an indiscretion.

“She actually ended up passed out drunk in her Stuyvesant High School classroom.”

A few women in the audience gasped.

The speeches ended, and afterward everyone stuck around for another drink, as Mr. Brill had implored.

“It’s all Steve’s friends, he knows everybody, and they do what he says,” Boykin Curry said. “He commands them.”

We went on, and then Mr. Brill walked up to us as we were talking about the dissenters, the people he couldn’t command.

“Did we invite Diane Ravitch?” Mr. Curry asked.

“It’s improper legal etiquette to invite someone who’s threatening to sue you,” Mr. Brill snapped.

We said thank you, and as we walked toward the door, Mr. Brill stepped forward to grab one of the last pigs-in-a-blanket from the server’s silver tray.

“This is so terribly pretentious,” he sighed.

NOURIEL ROUBINI LIVES 62 BLOCKS SOUTH  and five blocks east of the Blavatnik mansion, and when we arrived by cab at Dr. Doom’s house we entered a door on First Street, took an elevator up six floors and opened the penthouse, where a flock of somewhere-by-way-of-extraction fabulous people were dolled-up and watching a projection of Sean Penn intone goodness on the giant screen. Mr. Roubini was a bit obscured behind the columns, but his atrium said it all -- three levels gripped around a staircase that shared its extra space with a helix of floating orbs linked together by golden strings.

“Where did you get those loafers,” a woman said to my friend who we came to the party with.

He looked at her.

“Stubbs & Wootton, 73rd and Lex,” he responded.

“Don’t tell the downtown crew about Stubbs & Wootton!” an eavesdropping woman yelled.

Mr. Roubini is best-known for his position teaching at the NYU Stern School of Business and his morbid -- but often scarily accurate -- predictions regarding the economic climate, which accounts for his “Dr. Doom” moniker. But, he’s also known for throwing great parties.

Where do these Monday night hosts differ, then? Both Mr. Brill and Mr. Roubini are respected academics, yet we can’t remember the Steve Brill blasting Rihanna’s “Only Girl” as guests commandeered the bar from its tenders.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry” Mr. Roubini said from behind a table with empty bottles of booze splayed about.

This was the place where we had met him, moments earlier.

“We’re getting more liquor,” Mr. Roubini said. “And we’re getting more wine.”

The Observer refilled our vodka as the tenant opened a bottle of red with his fist. We finished it and all of a sudden he was right. There was more liquor. And then we drank it.

And as we left we wondered: Was Roubini predicting his doom there on the chilly patio, there on that glowing yellow bench, his arm around a young woman? Perhaps, the only doom we could predict was a hangover.

Every ballroom has a backdoor.

The hotel guests at Dream Downtown had suitcases, satchels and children piled up next to the check-in counter, waiting interminably for a chance at a room, and as they did swirls of fashionable men and women speed-walked by without a word or a look—they were headed to the last big event of the week, the after-party for Marc Jacobs and his spring and summer collection. The hotel guests ventured an occasional glace at the well-attired cohort with the mysterious wristbands, striding confidently toward the tucked-away area in the back, but mostly they slouched on pieces of luggage and scratched at purple eyes, unknowing of the scene unfolding out of sight.

They didn’t know that Madonna was around, that Mick Jagger was having a late dinner in a basement lounge, that Lindsay Lohan was bypassing checkpoints set up to prevent her entry.

Since its opening last May, the Dream Downtown has sprouted party spots so fast it’s hard to keep track of them. There is PHD—as in “Penthouse: Dream”—a skyborne glassy atrium with nooks for bottle service and a shrubbery-laden smoker’s deck. And there’s the beach, a sand-and-palm-tree stretch next to the pool. And because it’s not enough to put Malibu in Manhattan, there are two places you won’t find on the otherwise anything-but-inscrutable website: the pint-size, 100-capacity Electric Room and the Gallery at Dream. Mr. Jacobs, who closed this year’s Fashion Week with a Bob Fosse-inspired collection, was hosting the first-ever bash in the gallery space.

If you didn’t have a wristband you couldn’t come in, and a certain former actress couldn’t get one.

“Lindsay rolled in, and we had to tell all the security checkpoints that she’s not allowed into the Marc Jacobs party,” noted an employee working by the front door, as we stood having a cigarette.

“Because of last night?” we asked.

The evening before, Ms. Lohan had thrown a cocktail at a photographer at a party at the Boom Boom Room hosted by V magazine and noisily uprooted her large group—referred to as “The Family,” even if only her mother and brother were related—after a woman nearby stumbled into a table and gashed up her shoulder, bleeding all over the pristine leather couches.

“Yes,” the person at the door said.

Back at the party in the Gallery, Michael Pitt sat with Kim Gordon and Sofia Coppola, and Mr. Jacobs walked around introducing Dakota Fanning, the face of his campaign, to friends. Trays of Champagne whirled around us, and upon finishing one off a girl to our right let out a horrified shriek.

“We made eye contact and I was, I was ... O.M.G.!” the girl said between fluttering breaths.

She had made eye contact with Ms. Lohan, who had somehow slipped into the party undetected, and beelined toward the roped off area in the back.

“Major security scandal,” the person at the door texted The Observer. “Mischa Barton, too. Someone gave her a bracelet.”

It was over soon enough. In came the guards, and a peeved Ms. Lohan stomped out as a rapt crowd lifted iPhones and iPads into the air to grab a picture. Ms. Barton, another starlet not as in demand as she once was, also ducked through the crowd, and then quickly disappeared. Mr. Jacobs, too—he left his own party before nearly all of his guests.

Where did they go? There was word of an after-after-party in one of the hotel’s many, many liquor-stocked appendages. Another gathering would be a valiant attempt to keep the diversion of Fashion Week going just a little longer.

“I was told they got her,” the friend out front texted, when she got word of Ms. Lohan’s exit. “What a mess.”

Soon enough we located the next party. It was in Electric Room, a tiny, subterranean, blue-glowing box with so few couches that everybody is always sitting next to everybody. It had been just over a week since we first stepped into Nur Khan’s brand new Britannia-inspired space, and with five drop-ins since then, it had begun to seem smaller. We made quite a few sightings in that time—Adrien Grenier, Mary-Kate Olsen, Shaun White, Ms. Lohan, Ryan McGinley, the requisite smattering of models, the requisite crew of men who walk the models arm in arm, the others whose visages flash in a strobe light just as they had the night before—and marked them in our note pad, many names popping up again and again, as if the ink had bled through the pages.

A certain name only appeared once. “Clear the tables, clear the tables!” a security guard bellowed suddenly. He was enormous and accompanied by six colleagues, forming a circle. In the center was a wiry man with full lips and a feline gait, a phenomenal power-feline gait. He was small but he walked like a god. He was Mick Jagger, and when he took his seat on a couch, the few dozen men and women in the room were stricken with fear, or awe.

What’s there to say to Mick Jagger? Nothing. To us, his presence alone trumped the entire spectacle that had unfolded all week—the fierce swagger of the runways, the string of late, late nights, the endless celebrity antics, all waved away like a cloud of cigarette smoke by the arrival of the man who, for us, seemed to have invented and destroyed it all long ago.

And he was surrounded by quite the entourage, giving the room almost a salon feel, or maybe a peek at the energy of Mick’s table at Studio 54 a few decades prior. They would have made quite a band, all of them. Directly next to him sat Daphne Guinness and her shock of white hair and shoes like Malaysian skyscrapers. And Courtney Love. And Owen Wilson (bongos?). And Ellen Barkin (tambourine?). And of course Ms. Lohan, who was sitting a bench over from Mr. Jagger—she was in that same seat the night before, when she recognized us as a writer, pointed at our heart and shouted “You!”

We thought to chat with Mr. Jagger, imagined what we might say, but there was to be “no satisfaction.” When Mick and his crew left, we did soon after, heading to the bar at Tom & Jerry’s to meet a friend. The bartender brought over our Budweiser, and pointed to our arm.

“What’s that silly wristband you got on you?” he asked.

nfreeman@observer.com // @nfreeman1234

Alexander Wang x Busch Light

A few minutes before midnight on Sept. 10, The Observer walked along Pier 40 staring at the impaired skyline of Lower Manhattan, the lights from the buildings reflecting fuzzily on the water. Thus distracted, we failed to notice that  above the door of the pop-up structure that would host fashion designer Alexander Wang’s after-party were two Greek letters, not unlike those marking door frames on college campuses. We hadn’t realized that Mr. Wang had opted to forgo the usual Fashion Week postshow bash for something decidedly more sophomoric.

The most exciting designer in the world was throwing a frat party.

“Chug! Chug! Chug!” a group of well-dressed men chanted as we walked in. A twig-thin model was shotgunning a can of Budweiser, the contents of the beer gushing into her mouth through a slash in its side. A few feet away, an aggressively competitive game of beer pong was underway. It was nothing if not authentic—we had been here before, in a frat house just like this one. Even the fridges were adorably grease-stained (another fitting detail: they were empty). We were instantly transported: a Busch Light haze late at night, circa freshman year, yearning for a girl to talk to ... or at the very least a joint to smoke. Mr. Wang had brought these memories swelling back—and not just for us.

Such antics have never been associated with Fashion Week, where beer is something of an endangered species, a rare artifact to be examined from afar. They don’t serve forties at Electric Room, Nur Khan’s new subterranean joint in the meatpacking district that will come out of the week a surefire hotspot. Sure, the fun Barneys party for Carine Roitfeld was held at a former strip club, and Valentino sang karaoke, but attendees could still haunt the ex-dive with glasses of Champagne to shield them.

Alexander Wang had kegs, and the kegs did not go unnoticed.

“You wanna do a beer bong or a kegstand?” said a man holding the wet tap in one hand, his own Bud in the other.

“Kegstand,” said the tiny, pretty brunette standing before the silver, lager-filled barrel.

“O.K.,” the man said as two giant square-jawed model-dudes grabbed her legs. “You gotta open up your mouth. You O.K.? You know what you’re doing? Three … two … one … go!”

Her feet flew up in the air and as the encircling crowd counted to 15 the sudsy stuff rushed in, the cheers got louder and a photographer from The New York Times stood above on a picnic table for the sake of documentation.

Would we turn down the chance to do a kegstand at one of the most hyped Fashion Week parties of the year? We would not. When she finished, we took off our sport jacket, stepped up to the keg and clutched the rim as the guys thrust our ankles upward. Twenty-one seconds. New record for the night.

Even though it was the kind of bash that Anna Wintour couldn’t take for more than a few minutes (she did show up, though), it had by then become obvious why Mr. Wang would want to have a party here instead of, say, the Temple of Dendur.

“Why not!” the designer said to us, standing on the edge of the dance floor, where he had been bopping and flinging around his long black hair with a few of the models from his show. “How often can you go to a frat party in Manhattan!”

We had a small request.

“I’d love to play you in beer pong!” Mr. Wang responded. “Just find me later, O.K.?”

We walked toward the back of the pier, past men with beer helmets, past piles of glow sticks strewn on the ground, past Christina Ricci playing PlayStation with the passion of a dorm resident, when a horrifying noise came cracking over the speaker system.

“Hey guys, I’m Tyler!” said Tyler, the Creator, leader of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. The performance was a total surprise. “We’re going to fuck shit up.”

The crew launched into “Check My French,” Tyler and his hype men rasp-bellowing the violent lyrics. Over the course of the four-song set Tyler ripped off his shirt, hurled his sinewy body into the mosh pit, and launched a wad of spit into a girl’s face. He mutilated his torso with a microphone and rolled back his eyes until they were nothing but ghastly white orbs lodged in his skull.

There was also the matter of the inflatable sex dolls. It’s a bit unsettling, at a fashion industry party, to see guys throwing around naked, skinny inanimate plastic girls with gaping red mouths. And it didn’t help that one hung from a beam overhead by its neck, or that another lay trampled and deflated on the ground.

Tyler was exacerbating the problem. When a dark-skinned inflatable doll made its way to the stage, he grabbed it, raised the backside to his face, and mimed an eating motion for all the crowd to see.

“Fuckin’ Alex Wang!” Tyler said at the end of the set. He repeated it a few times—and even referred to the designer as “my nigga Alex Wang”—before instructing his crew to spray a waterfall of beer and vodka as far as they could, the drops falling onto a sea of extended iPhones.

As a D.J. friend graciously offered us a swig from his bottle of Kanon, Waka Flocka Flame’s “Hard in da Paint” blasted through the speakers like an atom bomb and Mr. Wang incited a riot that brought everyone, including the designer, onstage for a full-on melee.

Suddenly, a sweat-greased shirtless Tyler appeared next to us, by the D.J. booth.

“I go hard in the mothafuckin’ paint, nigga!” he yelled to us along with Waka.

“Can we talk!” we yelled into his ear.

A handler came and led him off the stage, which was at that point filled with beer-soaked attendees jumping enough to produce disconcerting cracks in the wooden floor.

“What are you doing here?” we asked him.

The most controversial person in popular music shrugged.

“I don’t know anything about fashion,” Tyler said, and then smiled. “I snuck in here!”

Then he hopped into a car with a bodyguard, and The Observer walked back to the dock, back to that view of lower Manhattan, to look at the skyline in the early hours of Sept. 11, 2011.

nfreeman@observer.com /// @nfreeman1234

From the flyer, downloaded off the Internet.

Where do we go from here?

It was still the last light of a late August day but the cement courtyard of PS1, in Long Island City, had already been taken over by video artist Ryan Trecartin and his massive DayGlo cadre of manic creative types to celebrate the closing of his show Any Ever, the subject of breathless praise all summer long. The name of the party, hosted by Dis Magazine, was “DIS_RT [REALTIME/RETWEET/RYAN TRECARTIN]”

Mr. Trecartin had brought his crew: the non-actors who populate his films in gloppy, garish makeup, the set-designing collaborators, the pint-sized would-be tween poppers, the female bodybuilders flexing on stone blocks, transvestites draped in velour gripping their cocks for people taking pictures on iPhones, go-go dancers, rotund booty-drop queens, scene kids, bodyguards, curators, men in head-to-toe white spandex spangled with Vita Coco ads no one paid for, kids in snapbacks and Tokyo drag racing jerseys, kids in capes and ski goggles hauling around leather luggage stuffed with nothing but stones, a man with a backward wig and a Container Store bag with a doll’s head poking out, a man slinging around his neck a blinged-out necklace of the YouTube logo and a DJ by the name of Telfar, who is an actor in Mr. Trecartin’s films.

“G-O-O-G-L-E,” sang the unconscionably loud autotuned voice blasting over the speakers. Telfar was behind the decks. “Google me, Google me.”

It was the chorus of a song Mr. Trecartin may have written. He pens all the soundtracks to his videos (call them YouTubeCore—they’re inspired by viral videos, slick as Rebecca Black but catchier). A moment later another Trecartin actor walked by. And then another. But could we be sure? Everyone present reminded us of his films, walking around in get-ups evoking cracked suburban landscapes full of familiar domestic tropes (Mr. Trecartin is from Webster, Texas) skewed and violated to thrilling heights of grotesquery. We had seen these people before. We had seen them in bad dreams.

“Where are the cameras?” The Observer asked a friend.

We were standing by the bar. Lizzie Fitch, Mr. Trecartin’s primary collaborator, had just butt in front of us to order a red wine, triggering flashbacks to scenes where her best-known character guzzles from a box of vino.

We darted our eyes at the corners of the ceiling.

“Surely Ryan’s filming this,” we repeated.

How could he not? All of the elements of his films—a fluid take on gender and sexuality, outre slash-cut female attire suggesting rebellion or perhaps father complexes, the pervasiveness of the Internet, the odd viral kid-pop sensation, reality television, the Mad Lib cut-and-paste of verbal cliché into gibberish—were manifest in real life. Absent were the seizure-inducing jump-cuts, although after enough drinks, you could experience them as well.

The only thing to fear was that maybe there actually were no cameras, that we weren’t, at that moment, helping Mr. Trecartin make art, but simply embodying the very insanity that his art is meant to expose and parody. Were we collaborators or subjects? Or worse, party-goers and nothing more?

“Isn’t this just the greatest time!” Mr. Trecartin, who just turned 30 years old, asked The Observer. He was resolutely sunny, in a burnt orange tee shirt and shorts, with a disposition at odds with the perverse content of his art. His smile never faded. He might have been the most normal-looking person there.

“Oh, can you wait just a second?” Mr. Trecartin said, his arms slung our shoulder. Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind,” her first single, boomed over us. “Lizzie’s lost her bag... Oh wait, she found it!”

Ms. Fitch, his collaborator, who was wearing a conservative denim dress, bounded over.

“This party, isn’t it, isn’t it like a drug?” Ms. Fitch said.

Then, a pasty 15-year-old with floppy blonde hair, scrawny and unsmiling, was boosted up on top of a Cadillac Escalade parked next to the stage. He wore a camo Under Armour tee, a chrome poncho and chunky black boots. His Christian name is William Neibergall, but since he began rapping he’s gone by Glasspopcorn.

“Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo!” Glasspopcorn yelled. He had clearly studied his rap music videos (come to think of it, so has Mr. Trecartin). The crowd chanted in unison and a very large black woman grinded against the chrome rims.

“I wrote this next song when I was 12,” he said, now relocated to the stage. A slow but pummeling dub beat, like an irregular heart beat run through a Marshall stack, began.

“My swag piece, my swag piece, my swag piece,” the song went.
He had one more song to play.

“Ed Hardy,” Glasspopcorn mumbled into the microphone. “Ed Hardy, Ed Hardy, Ed Hardy.”

Then he tossed a bucket of red Twizzlers into the mob.

“I’m starting, to not, trust the house,” says a female character, who is holding a sledgehammer, in “The Re’Search (Re’Search WaitS)," perhaps the best of the nine pieces in Any Ever.

Her companion turns to her.

“I’m starting, to not, trust the house!” the other girl says.

The Observer had gone inside to the exhibition, where revelers could witness the madness of Any Ever before it closes this Saturday. But we had seen it before, and it seems everyone else had, too. Many mouthed along with the scatter-shot scripts and laughed before the jokes were deployed. We went back to the party.

#HDBOYZ, a by-the-numbers boy band named for a hashtag, had taken the stage, so we opened the Twitter application on our iPhone and refreshed.

Unsurprisingly the party was being tweeted. "I can't expect your age group to understand my personality!" someone wrote, quoting one of Mr. Trecartin’s films.

"I never say 'they'. I say 'us' or 'we'" #trecartin” wrote someone else.

“Ware be @ PEOPLE ?¿” Mr. Trecartin tweeted (during the party, it appeared he couldn’t keep his iPhone 4 in his pocket for more than a few minutes).

Over in a corner of the outdoor plaza, two women associated with Trecartin’s crew were interviewing random strangers for a faux newscast, inviting them into his work.

Naturally we volunteered.

“This show is called ‘The World of Wonder!’” the fake anchor announced as the light from the camera obscured the crowds below, all of them pouring behind us toward the stage or toward us, to the exhibition.

“Are you having a good time?” she asked.

The microphone was jammed in front of our mouth.

“This is a fantastic party,” we said. “Where do we go from here?”

And then closing fireworks burst into the air, spastic and unexpected, the kids jerking in shock at the noise. A Family Finds Entertainment, Mr. Trecartin’s first film, ends in almost the same way.

Who knows what’s next for Mr. Trecartin, but it’s most certain he’s on a roll. “New stuff is coming!” the artist said to The Observer. The party was to end soon and we were leaving. A walk over the Pulaski Bridge would eventually take us to Greenpoint, but leaving Long Island City we spotted the dancer who had been booty dropping, aggressively, on tiny Glasspopcorn earlier than evening.

“My name is Spicee,” she explained. “S-P-I-C-E-E. Spicee.” The fishnets were a little worn down, and she had thrown a coat over a comically small top.

A few other guys from the show shouted to her as a cab pulled up.

“Goodbye!” they yelled.

“I gotta go, but you can watch me on Spicee TV,” she said. “It’s on YouTube.”

Diner off the tracks!

The general manager of M. Wells, perhaps one of the best-reviewed new restaurants of the year, didn’t want to talk about the sexual harassment scandal.
“The only people that know what transpired would be the server’s butt and the hand,” said Deven DeMarco.

The Observer sweated out the 7 train to Long Island City last Sunday to take in the mash-up of greasy-spoon and gourmand—once an abandoned diner left for dead, just spitting distance from the Pulaski Bridge. Regrettably, the journey couldn’t wait until, say, a brisk September weekend: due to skyrocketing rent after the spot’s one-year lease expired, M. Wells, which was just named one of the top 10 restaurants in the country by Bon Appétit, will close after dinner this Tuesday.

The trip was a long time coming. Fashion editors at Greenwich Champagne lunches had gushed to us about the bone-marrow-and-escargot concoctions. Friends got giddy when describing the well-worn vinyl seats and the hot hiss of fat on spatulas. It all sounded very good.

A steamy article in this month’s GQ, however, made things even more interesting. Food critic Alan Richman had come out to review the place and after his third visit, one of the co-owners, Sarah Obraitis, accused him of giving a female server “a hardy pat on the ass.” Mr. Richman was aghast, ran the whole story in the magazine (along with a full denial of said ass-slapping), and M. Wells’ perfect record was smeared and tarnished.

“On the one hand, it’s nice to have a little negativity,” Mr. DeMarco said as he took a sip of his Rogue Ale. The Observer was attacking a peach cobbler with dragon fruit sorbet, which was excellent by all metrics. “There’s a balance … I have a lot of opinions on that article that I don’t want to offer.”

Mr. Richman treated his experience as emblematic of the entire downfall of service in New York restaurants. But judging by our time at M. Wells, he seemed a little off. We walked in for brunch at 4:00 p.m.—it was a late, late night before—to an offer of lemonade accompanied by Bulleit bourbon.

The place is anything but understaffed. Behind the counter, at least seven young men tended the grill and chopping boards, flinging fist-size hunks of meat onto mayo-slathered rolls, or plopping glistening olive oil onto large crocks of soup, or cutting out slices of pineapple upside-down cake, a dessert that even the sour Mr. Richman spoke of in breathless prose. As closing time came so did the cans of Tecate for the waiters.
For all the hype, and the prices, the place does seem a hell of a lot like a normal diner, or at least a low-key night out. Amid the Boyz II Men blaring from speakers a cell phone rang. No sweat. Its owner slid two towering Dagwood sandwiches into the microwave, pressed the zap button and flipped it open.

“Dude, but last night,” said the cook with tattoos crawling down both arms, into the phone.

The microwave whirring turned off, and without missing a beat the cook slid the massive hoagies out to the counter.

“You know what? Lemme call you back.”

The dreaded “hipster diner” appellation could work as well, though. Affixed above the counter, in no particular order, were, to name a few: an ironic “customer of the week” award, an illustration of St. Francis of Assisi, strips of masking tape with incomprehensible messages, a wooden cross and a postcard that proclaimed “Welcome to Twin Peaks!” When the afternoon downpour that comes like clockwork on August afternoons started, “Dancing Queen” was playing on the stereo.

Too cute, too calculated? Mr. DeMarco tried to dismiss that idea.

“At first we were only open in the morning and people would scoff at us and be, like, ‘Oh, well, it’s only for hipsters who can come here when they don’t have a job,’” he said. “And I’m, like, ‘Do you know how many people come here on their lunch breaks from out of town?’”

For M. Wells, moving out of the diner space means losing some of the charm, but perhaps the schtick will fade too, and the food—which, despite any complains regarding service, is probably worth the wait, price and time spent in L.I.C.—will be the only point of conversation.

The last night for M. Wells will be Aug. 30. The owners, who had been out of the restaurant Sunday celebrating Ms. Obraitis’s birthday, are scouting locations nearby and hope to open in two to four months.

In other words, it appears that a scandal and high rents will not be stopping M. Wells.
And Mr. DeMarco has a loose plan for the final night in the diner.

“Rather than mourn, come celebrate. It’s sort of like an Irish Wake—it’s fucking terrific,” he said, polishing off his beer. “From the opening we always joked that we would do shots when the Pulaski Bridge went up. I can guarantee you we’ll be watching intently for it to go up that night.”

Then, we looked out toward the bridge to find the rain had stopped, and when we looked down at our plate, not a speck of the cobbler remained.

nfreeman@observer.com

'Savage Beauty' late at night.

"BUT HOW DID HE DIE?" said a young man to the girl standing next to him in an outsize dress.

The couple was looking at a blossoming, red-feathered, evening-wear creation, the first taste of the Met’s hit exhibition “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” The deceased in question, of course, was the designer.

“You don’t know?” she said.

He shook his head.

The two had come to the exhibit at a time that would seem appropriate but, given the mammoth crowd now populating the hall of Rodin, saving their visit for the last night turned out to be folly. “Savage Beauty” was closing at midnight, the latest the museum had ever stayed open. At 11 o’ clock, many line-standers had been waiting to bid McQueen adieu since early that afternoon.

“Really,” came a whisper. “How did Alexander McQueen die?”

She leaned in and told him.

“That’s pretty serious,” the young man said.

The Observer ducked into the compound’s side entrance, on 81st Street, at 10:00 p.m. Sunday night, and upstairs we witnessed the feared line that snaked through the halls, engulfing statues on display into the theme park-caliber queue.

We had bypassed it all, though, and so we witnessed the collection before many, and we found it an aggressively brilliant fever dream played out in silk, all the frocks cut with daring.

It was one of the most successful exhibits in the museum’s history. Hence, the line on that final night was very, very long. We had heard horror stories: six-hour waits, irate groups turned away feet away from the entrance, not to mention the claustrophobic hell once you do get inside. At one point during the week, a young child was rumored to have wet himself while on line. The parents did not want to risk losing their place.

“What did we do all that time?” said Simon Barros, a 21-year-old student, of the afternoon-to-night stretch. “I tried to download the app, but, I dunno, talking to people in line, talking to my friends, I’m thinking it’s definitely going to be worth it.”

Her voice trailed off.

“I’ll see when I come out.”

“Well, I thought this would actually be an event,” said Cole. He’s 26 and works for the United Nations. It’s not so often that a exhibition of this scale and importance has its last hurrah at the going-out hour, and it seemed many had joined The Observer in having a few cocktails beforehand.

“And it is an event!” he went on. “Some people were getting angry a lot, cutting in line … ”

Speaking of cutting the line, it was time for us to take in McQueen’s final show.

“I haven’t seen it yet either!” Anthony Haden-Guest, the writer whom we walked in with, exclaimed as we approached.

Those were the last words we exchanged with him, or anyone, for the rest of the time inside. The clothes were draped on mannequins with iron skulls for heads, the bare eye sockets and deep-sunken cheeks often deprived of breath by a suffocating cloth. And blindly they peered down at the masses.

“One of the mailroom guys told me yesterday how much he enjoyed the show,” Anna Wintour told The New York Times a few days earlier.

Some share her surprise, but they shouldn’t. Yes, even those poor souls who work outside the Vogue editorial department can enjoy the video of the fragile, 17-year-old Shalom Harlow—in a pure white dress girded outward and affixed above her chest with a belt—cowering swanlike on a giant revolving lazy Susan. Then she wriggled in horror as the danger crept closer. As she spun, two robotic metal appendages darted at her, sniffing her neck, before bursting at the tip and sullying the muslin fabric with yellow and black splatter. The paint-stained dress hung below the video display.

McQueen’s vision evolved with each room. In the next, Tartan garb evoked the Scottish heroes whom McQueen worshipped. And in a glass box a fuzzy ball of pixie dust melted into a hologram of Kate Moss, a tiny ethereal vision twirling in a dress made of fog and light, fabric of milky cloud-sinew, to the theme from Schindler’s List.

“I knew he killed himself, but I didn’t know too much about him,” said Mary Adams, a nurse practitioner who was leaving the show. The elderly woman had driven from Boston that morning. She had been in line since 2:30 and the clock was edging toward midnight.

“Did he have a troubled life?” she asked The Observer.

We leaned in and told her.

As we left, a new batch of people huddled by the front of the line got nodded in. The line still flowed from one gallery space to another, but they would be among the last of the groups. With entry gained, the people raised their arms, let out a vigorous whoop of anticipation and walked under the ghostly photograph of Alexander McQueen—the fashion show, for them, about to begin.

nfreeman@observer.com @NFreeman1234

Sorry, Snooki, you're not on the list.

If you've been indulging too much in the world of Manhattan clubs, that never-never land on a perpetual Thursday night as someone once called it, perhaps there's something in store for you besides a vicious hangover. Instead of waking up with an empty bank account, you could parlay your partying into small-screen stardom!

Later this month, MTV will begin casting a new show in the Jersey Shore/Hills vein called Culture Club, an OnSet Productions listing announced. The potential show -- who knows whether this thing will get picked up -- would chronicle the escapades of different kinds of club kids as they hopscotch around the city's hotspots, drinks and drugs in hand.

The listing doesn't play coy about the type of people they're looking to cast.

Do you go out in the city every night? Do you not wait in line? Are you the baddest bartender in town? Do you only buy bottle service? Do you only go to the hottest clubs? Then MTV is looking for you.

This new show is looking for many different types of people who live in the nightlife scene. Those selected will have camera's follow you around the club in one night to see what the night will bring.

A representative for MTV confirmed to The Observer that this truly is a legitimate MTV pilot, citing the relationship the network has with the production company.

As indicated in the graphic below, the show will feature The Bartender, The Dancer, The Model, The Flirt, The Player, and The Waitress.

Let's just hope there aren't any nightlife reporters lurking around in the back.