New Yorkers try excruciatingly hard to be blase about celebrity-sightings. I was once waiting on line for a movie when I saw a guy in a field jacket standing next to a woman wearing a floppy hat. I gestured towards them and told my friend, “Oh look, they think they’re Woody Allen and Diane Keaton.” Then I realized that it was Woody Allen and Diane Keaton.
Scandalous celebrities are another matter entirely. My partner and I were once at a screening, seated just behind Donald Trump and Marla Maples, the beautiful young girl Trump had just married. The couple was surrounded by Trump’s cronies, all of whom looked like Jabba the Hutt with a combover. Marla looked shellshocked, as if she’d just started to realize what she’d gotten herself into.
I once attended a fundraiser, pre-prostitution scandal, for Eliot Spitzer, at someone’s Soho apartment. Everyone there agreed that Silda, Eliot’s wife, was so much smarter and more charismatic than the candidate.
I was at a revival of Lanford Wilson’s play “Burn This” at the Union Square Theatre, and I was seated in the same row as Monica Lewinsky. During intermission, as I squeezed past Ms. Lewinsky, I noticed that she had her shoulderbag carefully positioned between her knees. The shoulderbag was open and inside, also open, was a family-size bag of peanut M&Ms. This made me worship her.
