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Looking
northwest towards the Empire State Building and Times Square.
10:15 PM. Photo: JH using a Sony DSC-V1 Cyber-shot digital camera.
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Paris
sizzles. The sun came out on Monday in New York and melted
away most of the snow on the streets. I went
to lunch at Michael’s which was jammed. Steve
Millington, the manager of the restaurant, was very
excited to report that tomorrow (today, Tuesday), Paris
Hilton is expected at lunch.
One of my lunch partners revealed that she
had “seen the video” because
one day when she walked into her office, her young daughter
was at the computer surrounded by friends “looking” at
it. She then had her daughter email it to her friends with
the message: “my mother told me to send you this.”
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Paris
Hilton at her 21st birthday party.
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Then everybody
who’d seen it (I have not) expressed their awe over the boyfriend Rick
Solomon’s private (and now public) endowment. Someone
else told me that for years Mr. Solomon’s friends’ nickname
for him was “Scum.” Which is short for Scumbalaya.
Or something cute like that.
I have known Paris Hilton since she was a thirteen or
fourteen year old in Southampton in the summertime. When
I say “known,” I mean I’ve been in the
same room with her (and dozens of others) at her parents’ houses
(the mother, Kathy is the personality
in the family).
I’ve been interviewed on a half dozen television shows about
her and her sister Nicky and the little I have to
say about her remains ripe fodder for the mill. I have never had
a conversation with Paris beyond the perfunctory courtesies. To me
she has always been a polite, even diffident pretty blonde girl who
is very close to her parents and has a well known ambition to be
an actress which her parents supported 1000%.
I’ve always been amazed that such a personality could create
such a huge celebrity. So it gave me pause to consider her in Michael’s
for lunch, in the presence of media moguls, editors, publishers,
businessmen and entertainment honchos (Norm Pearlstine of
Time was there yesterday, for example, as was Sam Cohn, William
Lauder and Stan Shuman).
Although after listening to my friends’ amusement and curiosity
about the great “community leer” that the sex tape became,
I kinda wished I was going to be there. It should be a kick watching
all those sophisticated ones, suddenly boys and girls, buzzing like
schoolkids over the blonde actress at the corner table (where the
whole restaurant can get a look) with her agent. While the two will
be talking business, just like rest of the room would be if Paris
Hilton weren’t there. |
Yesterday
was a full day of events in New York for Governor Howard Dean MD, “Democratic
Candidate for President of the United States.” Billed
by the campaign as “Howard Hits Town!” there was
a breakfast at the National Black Theater’s Institute
of Action Art at 8 in the morning, a lunch in Queens at the
Foundry at noon, a “Roast” dinner hosted by Rob
Reiner at the Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th at
7, a Coffee Dessert & Comedy with Janeane Garofalo,
Andrea Martin, David Cross, John Leguizamo at the
North Pavilion on West 19th and then a “Downtown Dean
Series at Roseland on West 52nd from 9 until midnight.
A friend of mine who is a big supporter of Dean invited me to the “Roast” so
I could see and hear the candidate for the first time. I am one of
those who has never seen or heard Dr. Governor Dean “live,” since
I rarely watch television. I’ve read about him and read interviews
with him but had no visceral impression of the man.
There must have
been several hundred people at the dinner – tables of eight,
with a big committee list including some names I recognized: Boaty
Boatwright, Estrelita and Dan Brodsky, Charmaine and Carter Burden,
Andree Corroon, Eve Ensler, Patricia Duff, Richard Feigen, Peter
Georgescu, Marife Hernandez, Nicholas Katzenbach, Cheri Kaufman,
George Kennan, Jane Curtin, Mark Patricof, Kathy Sloane, Podie
Lynch and Jim Torrey, Diane Straus Tucker and Carl Tucker, Bill
vanden Heuvel, Olive Watson.
The “Roast” was tame. Very. Although Rob Reiner is great.
Just makes you laugh with his good-natured charm. Grey, bald on top
with a well-maintained salt and pepper beard, wearing a grey business
suit and tie, I didn’t recognize him at first. He was dressed
like, and has the bearing of, a very prosperous Hollywood studio
executive but he makes you think he must be a great guy to hang out
with. He was the emcee. He’s been supporting Dean since Day
One.
He introduced the “roasters” which included Dean’s
brother Jimmy, along with his headmaster from St.
George’s School which Dean attended, and one of Dean’s
roommate from Yale, an African-American man from Charleston, South
Carolina.
Afterwards, the candidate got up. Although I had never seen him “live,” he
looked exactly as I had imagined: easy on the eye, not tall, clean-faced,
sharp and clear-eyed and serious. A man with a sense of humor, yes;
but a no-nonsense guy.
His speech, which I was later told is the standard speech, was about “community.” Hearing
it for the first time resonated with me because I think about that
word all the time, and I’m always looking for it in a world
that often seems devoid of it.
The personality transforms when it gets down to the speech. He’s
utterly serious and resolute. And, as I said, no nonsense. People
have compared him to George McGovern. I worked in
the McGovern campaign and it was full of passion, as were those times.
But Governor Dean is a very different personality from McGovern.
The similarity in their campaigns is that he’s fired up a lot
of the youth in a way that we haven’t seen since those days,
and this is always a very hopeful sign for the community.
Both those boys, Bush and Dean, were at Yale at
the same time. To hear tell about Dean’s college career and
Bush’s college career is to hear about two distinctly different
personalities from remarkably similar socio-economic backgrounds.
They were both members of the American WASP elite, the establishment
families of the Northeast. Many of us have always known boys like
them in college and later in life. To see them up against each other
in a Presidential race, if that is what it comes to (which at this
moment many people think it will), will be very interesting. And
unlike George McGovern, whose race against Richard Nixon was
an unfortunate and foregone conclusion almost from the outset, Dean
and Bush may be a real race to the finish. McGovern was courageous
as an individual but with a gentle demeanor and presentation that
was often mistaken as ineffecting. Dean is tough; of that there can
be no doubt. Gentle maybe, probably – he was a physician – but
tough. Not at all dissimilar in many ways to Bush’s tough.
It was over by quarter to nine. Afterwards
I walked over to Park Avenue South, so that
I could have a brief look-see at a part of town that I
don’t see much and which never fails to fascinate.
My cabdriver heard me on the cell telling a friend where
I’d just been. When I was finished, he started talking
to me about Dean, and Bush, and politics. He was a Turk,
although now living here for a long time. He was worried
about the Shiites in Iraq. Worried about them coming to
power. He called them “Iran 2,” adding that
he was Muslim, to give me an idea of his point of view.
This is New York. Sometimes, like yesterday, I think this is the
greatest community in the world. |
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