Wednesday 24th
All rise! Fall is now in session! Which means New York women drop their standards a full two notches in search of a “winter boyfriend” before the first icy blast of November causes city-wide shrinkage …. Speaking of which, we haven’t eaten since Saturday, when a swain took us to Mikhail Baryshnikov’s restaurant, Russian Samovar , and stuffed us with Beluga caviar, Pâté Russe, horseradish-flavored vodka (don’t ask), poached salmon topped with salmon caviar and apple cream cheese pie. Keep at it, sir, maybe you’ll get a peek one day soon …. Moving on, Richard Yates’ biographer , the dashing Blake Bailey ( A Tragic Honesty ) , hosts a downtown symposium on the author whose books make John Cheever’s suburban novels read like Dr. Seuss. “That’s the Waldo choo-choo,” Mr. Bailey told special Eight-Day Week correspondent Elon Rafael Green as a train whistle hooted. Where’s Waldo? Northern Florida, pop. 821. “It used to be a very big railroad depot,” said Mr. Bailey. “As you can hear, it’s practically running through my backyard. Otherwise, it’s pretty bucolic.” The Ivy League eggheads never got Yates, said Mr. Bailey. ” Most academics are philistines. To non-writers, Yates’ style is so seamless, they don’t get it. To them, Revolutionary Road is just another realistic novel about the suburbs-but he’s the most depressing major American novelist of the entire century.” As the sun sets, Central Park becomes home to the soft-rock stylings of Dave Matthews , the guy everybody likes one song by. Meanwhile, residents of Soho, Little Italy and Nolita breathe easy now that the San Gennaro festival has packed up its sausage carts and blaring megaphones and left. Got to wonder who greased City Hall’s palm to allow an entire section of Manhattan to be trashed for two weeks ….
[Richard Yates: An Evening of Readings and Reminiscences, Housing Works Used Book Café, 126 Crosby Street, 7 p.m.]
Thursday 25th
O.K., people, the dog events have got to stop . Understand? Tonight, Tiffany and Co. invites you to put on something fancy (but not furry!) for “Diamonds in the Ruff, ” an ASPCA benefit. The pooches and their owners will actually dig for a Tiffany diamond -and yes, we’ll be there taking pictures with our cell phone. Too scary? Head to the Benisty Salonand hear Barbara Marco read from The Little Book of Courage: An Illustrated Guide to Challenging Our Fears , with proceeds to benefit cancer patients. Then click “feminism” and “unsubscribe” as you head to the 92nd Street Y, where Rachel Greenwald discusses her book, Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School . “It’s a message of empowerment,” Ms. Greenwald told us from Denver, where she lives with her hubby of 11 years and three wee ones. “It’s about taking control of the situation: If fate hasn’t knocked on their door yet, it’s time to open the door. I tell women they need a strong dose of mental Viagra. ” Boing! “About five years ago, a friend of mine who was a Wall Street investment banker woke up on her 40th birthday and thought, ‘I want to find someone to spend my life with.’ Well, there are about six datable men in Manhattan, and she’d dated all six. So I started coming up with ideas for her on how to meet good men, and I realized it was similar to the advice I was giving clients during my day job of marketing. She was married within a year, told other people the story, and now it’s a movement!” The book has been optioned by Paramount; Ms. Greenwald sees Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock. (By the way, how come books/articles about female “empowerment” always make us feel less empowered than when we started reading them?) … Speaking of married with children, if you thought the world would end before you saw Madonna in a matronly floral dress with capped sleeves, well, cue the locusts and see left. We still prefer her in her “I’m fat as a house and I’m f*cking Sean Penn” phase ….
[ How to Find a Husband After 35 , 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 7 to 9 p.m., 212-415-5500; The Little Book of Courage , Benisty Salon, 152 West 26th Street, 7 to 9:30 p.m., 646-336-6231; Diamonds in the Ruff, Tiffany and Co., Diamond Floor, 727 Fifth Avenue, 7:30 p.m. to 1 a.m., 212-876-7700, ext. 4652.]
Friday 26th
Sounds like a porno crossed with a Bob Dylan song: Swordswallowers and Thin Men premieres at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival . The picture was directed by Max Borenstein , who graduated from Yale University with a bunch of other geniuses this year. What’s with the title? “I’d rather it be a little mysterious,” said Mr. Borenstein. “It’s an image of college students feeling a little like sideshow players- freaks, carnival freaks …. It deals with the anxiety of senior year, dealing with the, you know, impending graduation and the anxiety of realizing that everything they’ve known is coming to an end.” By the by, the cheeky bastard once interned for Oliver Stone’s Illusion Entertainment, so we asked, naturally, if he’d ever smoked up with Fidel Castro’s (cough, cough) new best friend. “‘Fraid not, no,” said Mr. Borenstein. “He seemed like a lovely guy, though.” Yeah, we think Natural Born Killers is way underrated, frankly.
[ Swordswallowers and Thin Men , 662 Van Ness Avenue, Raleigh Studios, Charlie Chaplin Room, Hollywood, 212-777-1000, ext. 13.]
Saturday 27th
If your Jewish boyfriend’s mom hates you because your name derives from a Christmas song (uh, not that we’re speaking from experience … ), take them both to Sean Altman and Rob Tannenbaum’s kosher revue, What I Like About Jew . “It has occurred to us that because it’s Rosh Hashanah, all the good Jews will be in temple. So we’re hoping for plenty of goyim,” said Mr. Tannenbaum, a senior editor at Blender and one of those amorphous “rock journalists” you’ll find weighing in on those True Hollywood – Behind the Music specials. “I’m one of the few people at Blender who doesn’t mind going on TV and talking about Beyoncé’s ass. So in that regard I’m invaluable to VH1.” How did the current show come about? “Sean and I needed an outlet for our funny kike material. Sean, unlike me, is a real and talented musician. He’ s the tall one who, after shows, is surrounded by cute girls telling him what a beautiful voice he has, and I’ll be the medium-height one surrounded by a bunch of indignant people saying, ‘How dare you use the word kike !’ … It’s baffling to me that people think Jew music has to be in good taste. People want us to be polite and go to graduate school and assimilate. I, however, was saved from a lucrative career in the law by an interest in rock ‘n’ roll.” Keep an ear out for songs like “Reuben the Hook-Nosed Reindeer.” On that note, in kooky Williamsburg, choreographer Paula Hunter does an interpretive-dance something or other titled Nothing Is More Unexpected Than an Erect Penis . Not when we walk in a room, honey.
[ What I Like About Jew , Fez, 380 Lafayette, 10 p.m., 212-533-2680; Williamsburg Art Nexus, 205 North Seventh Street, Brooklyn, 718-599-7997.]
Sunday 28th
Now that A.D.D. has been appropriated as a self-diagnosis by the narcissistic thirty- and fortysomething set (can’t they let kids have anything anymore?), check out the Manhattan Short Film Festival for live music and a screening of 12 short films from all over. Bonus: It’s in Union Square Park, so you can run in circles to your heart’s content. Meanwhile, we joined some of our old college mates one night recently at Peculiar Pub, and they spent all night bitching about how expensive everything in N.Y.C. was …. Honeys, if you can’t take the heat, get outta Hell’s Kitchen! Life in New York should be handled like you’re on vacation: Everything is ridiculously overpriced, so you spend tons of money, get wasted all the time and sleep with sketchy people. Then you leave and return to the real world.
[Union Square Park, 7 p.m., www.msfilmfest.com.]
Monday 29th
Sotheby’s, Part I: Alfred Taubman sneaks in the service entrance and tries to slip antiques writer Carol Prisant his résumé. She’ll be sipping bubbly and furrowing autumn’s new bushy brow at 20th-century collectibles, the subject of her book being launched tonight. Clothes are optional but not recommended. O.K., so that last part was from us. Speaking of clothes, whether or not you’re out of the proverbial Vogue fashion closet, the Commercial Closet Association invites you to join them in examining gay stereotypes in advertising at tonight’s fall benefit. An entire organization dedicated to sitting around counting how many times that couple said “fabulous” in the Ikea commercial? Hmmmm ….
[Sotheby’s, 72nd Street and York Avenue, 6 to 8 p.m., 212-614-7502; Commercial Closet Association Fall Party, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, 7 to 10 p.m., 212-995-0147.]
Tuesday 30th
Sotheby’s, Part Deux : Money magazine and Sotheby’s offer a glimpse of soon-to-be-auctioned jewelry and watches. If you prefer lit’ry baubles, Steve Martin is reading from his latest effort, The Pleasure of My Company , and is requesting yours at Barnes & Noble …. Now that Bonnie Fuller’s pink-trenchcoat mafia are no longer running their “let’s look slutty and pass out Star” ring outside Bryant Park, you can find more of the annoying color at the launch of the Pink Drink Book . We found author and Bartender magazine editor Jaclyn Foley in Joisey, where she lives with “my 13-year-old son and a husband I didn’t give birth to.” “I like girly frou-frou drinks,” she said. “I’m very fond of raspberry lemonade with vodka and grenadine. I drank a lot of them last night! I was in Chicago and went to a place called Fulton Lounge, where I had a key-lime-pie martini with a graham-cracker-crust-rimmed glass.” We prefer our martinis dirty and cold -just like us. “But then I had to get up at 4 a.m. for my flight this morning, and does anyone give a shit that I was on a plane this morning? No, my son still has to be picked up from school, the laundry still has to get done and dinner still has to be cooked. I swear, in my next life I’m coming back as a man, because it’s a hell of a lot easier.” We love us an angry drunk! But we agree about coming back as a man. We’ll do it just for the urinals.
[ Treasure the Riches of Living Well , Sotheby’s, 72nd Street and York Avenue, 6 to 8:30 p.m., 212-522-6265; Steve Martin, Barnes & Noble Union Square, 33 East 17th Street, 7 p.m., 212-253-0810; the Pink Drink Book tour, Divine Bar, 236 West 54th Street,
7 to 9 p.m., 212-265-9463.]
Wednesday 1st
Wasn’t he just here? Bruce Springsteen swings for the bleachers at Shea, while those who want to get this month’s “high culture” night out of the way pull on gloves for the Opening Night Gala at Carnegie Hall. Valery Gergiev leads violinist Maxim Vengerov , who was born in the Western Siberian capital of Novosibirsk and fantasizes about driving across the U.S. on a Harley , to kick off the 113th season. And remember, folks, it’s fall, so knock off all that silly crap you pulled over the summer. And remember to floss.
[Carnegie Hall, enter at 154 West 57th Street, 6 p.m., 212-903-9750.]
