Wednesday 27th
Have you ever wondered why New York is always teeming with Oscar parties, but you never hear anything about Grammy parties? We’ll tell you why: Rock stars can’t dress! Their idea of a snappy outfit is a shredded T-shirt over some tights, and maybe some kind of big shearling coat. Also: The Recording Academy is still handing out an award for “Best Polka Album.” Tonight on the other coast, The Daily Show ‘s Jon Stewart hosts the Grammys as vastly overrated R&B singer Alicia Keys goes up against mellowing proselytizers U2 …. Meanwhile, back home, the Museum of Modern Art previews an exhibit of amateur photos of our town called Life of the City , a tribute to the city post–Sept. 11. “Of course, if the museum just opened its doors and said, ‘We’ll hang everything anybody brings us,’ we wouldn’t be doing our job,” said curator Peter Galassi . “But if you’re in the mood to help us, we need more pictures by ordinary people: a corner deli, the nutty friend at the party …. They’re going to be put up-not casually, but they’re going to be put up with pushpins.” O.K., Pete, you asked for it: A pic of our nutty friend at the party is on its way to you!
[Grammys, CBS, 8 p.m.; Life of the City , deliver your photo in person to 11 West 53rd Street, exhibit opens to the public tomorrow at 10:30 a.m., 708-9400, push 7 for information on submitting.]
Thursday 28th
Heimel maneuvers: If you’re like us, you’re completely sick of the whole single-woman-whining-about-her-plight-over-Cosmos genre-and when, exactly, did the feminist ideal morph from the sensibly randy Simone de Beauvoir to the bubblebrains on HBO’s version of Sex and the City ?-but way back in 1983, when most of those tootsies were still in tube socks, Cynthia Heimel wrote the seminal Sex Tips for Girls and, we swear, it’s one o f the best books of all tim e , right up there with Anna Karenina ! Now she’s publishing Advanced Sex Tips for Girls , and so we tracked her down in Los Angeles, where she was visiting her 31-year-old son, Brodie, a producer. “I’m just so sad I ever left New York,” she told us between deep drags on an American Spirit Light. “It was just such a mistake. I left because I lost my job at Vogue , there were crackheads every night screaming on my block-and it was a good block- and all my friends had disappeared because I had stopped going to nightclubs. I was lonely and scared and depressed, so I thought, ‘ I’ll go to L.A. because it’s sunshiney .’ Big mistake-what can I say?” Now she lives in Oakland with her four dogs and 6-foot-2 younger boyfriend , who is six years older than her son. Oakland, she said, is “a really nice place to live if you’re a woman of a certain age, which is 47, something like that. There is a lot of intelligence . The cons are, they are a bunch of control-freak maniacs who are really serious about being politically correct . Since I left New York, I feel underappreciated, if you must know the truth.” Tonight Ms. Heimel reads and signs in Chelsea, after a mad dash through Loehmann’s shoe department.
[Barnes & Noble, 675 Sixth Avenue, 7:30 p.m., 727-1227.]
Friday 1st
It’s March, and everyone’s dancin ‘! Just try to avoid getting trampled tonight! Nancy Karp and her Dancers are flying in like a bunch of reindeer from San Francisco (uh-oh) to premiere Kalasam , which was inspired by India. Meanwhile, Savion Glover (tap, tap, tap) is M.C.’ing the ” World’s Best Tap Dancers Aged 21 and Under” in midtown …. Also, the Heather Harrington Dance Company is out in Williamsburg, which Th e New York Times has finally discovered, rapidly dooming it to become the next Upper West Side.
[Nancy Karp and Dancers, Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Street, 8 p.m., 334-7479; Savion Glover, Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, 8 p.m., 307-4100; Heather Harrington Dance Company, 205 North Seventh Street, Brooklyn, 8 p.m., 718-599-7997.]
Saturday 2nd
Remember Wonder Woman? And trying to dress up like her for Halloween when you were little , except your half-heartedly bohemian mom wouldn’t fork up for the Underoos (“too commercial”), so you wound up pasting gold stars on a T-shirt?… Tonight, Chicago comic-book artist Alex Ross – not the secret alter ego of New Yorker music critic Alex Ross (we think )-headlines a charity event featuring an exhibit of art from his new graphic novel, Wonder Woman: Spirit of Truth . What it benefits: Sept. 11 charities. “Wonder Woman’s special quality is that she’s coming from an idealized society,” said Mr. Ross, “somewhere better than here. The Amazons are completely at peace with each other, their society is a utopia of sorts , and she comes to us representing the peace and wisdom of the Amazons.” But screw the philosophy-when’s the big splashy Hollywood movie ? “So far as I know, Sandra Bullock has the rights to do something with it , but they’re very shy of trying, because they fear the character coming across as ludicrous in today’s times-which is a misleading conjecture, because if you think about it, the character was reinvented almost in totality as Xena .”
[CB’s 313 Gallery, 313 Bowery, 8 p.m., 677-0455.]
Sunday 3rd
Oscar heat is building … but first, it’s the dulling vapors of the Stony Awards , the Oscars of High Times magazine, which we hear humiliated the New Yorker team on the softball field last summer. Celebrity wattage: Snoop Dogg. Interestingly, Stony nominee The Anniversary Party is better than an awful lot of this year’s Oscar-nominated films . “We’re moving it uptown,” said High Times senior editor Greg Casseus. “We kind of felt like we wanted the show to be a little more glamorous. In terms of attire, I don’t really care-when I say ‘glamour,’ I mean sort of a soirée along the lines of the Golden Globes, as opposed to a glass of wine and a slice of hemp pizza.” Does he and his staff ever get busted? “Why should we? We’re not the only office in New York that has pot smokers!” True-one of our cubicle mates smells like the lower decks on a Colombian banana boat!
[B.B. King’s Blues Club and Grill, 243 West 42nd Street, 8 p.m., 387-0500.]
Monday 4th
More proof that baby boomers just aren’t going to roll over and go quietly into that dark Westchester: My Generation , kind of the Sassy to Modern Maturity ‘s Seventeen , throws a party (celebrity wattage: um, Pete Seeger ) to celebrate its first anniversary and 3.8 million subscribers, who get it free with AARP membership (AARP used to stand for American Association of Retired Persons , but because boomers don’t retire-they just become consultants-it now stands for nada ), and something called the Genny Awards that they’ve conferred upon Julia Child, the Pill and Muhammad Ali. “There’s a new executive director and a whole new branding campaign!” said My Generation editor in chief and peppy boomer Betsy Carter. “Boomers have sort of changed aging, and are changing how we’re aging. First of all, they don’t think they are – we all think we’re 35 . Also, we tend to be in kind of better shape , and we know more song lyrics ; we’re much more in sync with a younger group of people. I’m going off to Costa Rica for a week on Friday!” Cra-zy! Meanwhile, Grammys aftershock in midtown as dusky pop singer Nelly Furtado does her strange, lurching dance at the Hammerstein Ballroom.
[Genny Awards, Museum of Television and Radio, 25 West 52nd Street, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 255-8455; Nelly Furtado, Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 West 34th Street, call Ticketmaster.]
Tuesday 5th
Level III chef groupies, the truly desperate breed ( house husbands with house accounts at Williams-Sonoma and big, well-oiled butcher blocks ), descend on Lincoln Center, where they’ll watch cuddly Babbo celebri-chef Mario Batali narrate a piece called The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine by composer Aaron Jay Kernis , played by one of those modern-music chamber groups with ladies in billowing Yohji Yamamoto black skirts and men with prominent Adam’s apples.
[Alice Tully Hall, 65th Street and Broadway, 8 p.m., 721-6500.]
Wednesday 6th
Even the circus is falling prey to the “girl power” scam . “Never before has the Greatest Show On Earth featured so many women headliners in such dramatically divergent displays of derring-do, ” boasts the press release for the 132nd edition of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Here comes Sara, the famed Tiger Whisperer ; Circus Siren Sylvia Zerbini; and, of course, Mei Ling the Motorcycle Maiden ( vrooom )-umm, is this the circus, or the Penthouse Forum? And tell us something else: Since they have all these babes on their roster, why on earth did they send a picture of T.M., the “Gator Guy”? (See off-putting photo.)
[Beat the crowds-the circus comes to Madison Square Garden on March 21-and schlep ironically out to the Continental Airlines Arena, somewhere in New Jersey, tonight; www.Ringling.com.]
