As we drove up to the white tents of the Bridgehampton Polo Club this Saturday, we wondered if we had accidentally arrived early. Where were the billions of cars that were supposed to be tailgating during the kickoff to the Hamptons equivalent of a pro football game? We had heard that Peter Brant‘s annual event was as close to a mosh party as the jet-set tolerated. Read More
What exactly does one wear to a dog wedding?
We arrived at the Jumeirah Essex House on Central Park South last Thursday (after deciding on a purple cocktail dress) and we found out the answer was sequins and peacock feathers — if you’re a dog, that is.
While their owners were clad in traditional wedding-going attire, Shih Tzus and Labradoodles alike wore sparkled costumes of every variety. As a pair of tiny Chihuahuas in top hats passed by in the arms of their owners, Caroline Lieberman told us that her dog, named Maharaja Mumbai, was wearing a costume that was specially made for him in India. “I go there a lot, and this is a copy of a little boy’s outfit,” she told The Observer, before she adjusted his sparkly turban and strode off.
Wendy Diamond, founder and editor of Animal Fair magazine, originally intended the wedding to be her dog Lucky’s last hurrah, as the pup was suffering from terminal cancer. Lucky, a rescue dog, often appeared with Ms. Diamond at philanthropy events to raise awareness for pet rescue. Ms. Diamond’s new dog Hope, also a rescue, took Lucky’s place as bride for the affair, with the money raised from the event being donated to the Humane Society. Read More
What allows reality TV to exist so plentifully, and to be so successfully engineered, is perhaps our human tendency to experience the same event different ways. Liquoring up scared, fame-hungry young people gets you most of the way there, but it’s the producer-prodded endless parsing of what historian Daniel J. Boorstin termed “pseudo-events” that fill the hours and hours of cable programming we so happily consume: fights over who is a drunk, fights over who said who is a drunk, fights over what actually happened when everyone was drunk, and so on. (Mr. Boorstin also gave us a handy phrasing for the contemporary definition of a celebrity: “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”)
To test these theories, on Monday, The Observer embraced a full evening’s schedule of pseudo-events featuring celebrities and took a Rashomonic approach to the premiere of the fifth season of the wildly, bafflingly successful reality show, The Real Housewives of New York City. We sent three correspondents with varying degrees of RHONY knowledge to three premiere parties hosted by Housewives, and asked them to write honestly of their experiences.
What we learned: Despite perhaps being unwelcome, ex-Housewife Jill Zarin made the rounds. A couple of the Housewives will really miss their extra-large Diet Cokes (thanks a lot, Mayor Bloomberg). If you hang around with a Housewife long enough, you might run into someone actually famous (Liza Minnelli!?). And the show, when viewed with the celebrity cast members present, is even more uncomfortably hyperreal.
Thus we present: the Occasional Viewer’s Story, the Fanboy’s Story, and the Party Crasher’s Story. Read More
(Cassandra Seidenfeld, R. Couri Hay, and Wendy Diamond)
“Have you ever met the Mad Russian?” Animal Fair founder and dog lover Wendy Diamond asked The Observer at dinner last night. We had been covertly smoking outside on the lush patio of publicist R. Couri Hay‘s Upper West Side apartment after watching “Hindu Priest” Robin Cofer christen Mr. Hay’s dog, Webster Westbrook Alexander Hay, by rubbing behind the long-haired Cavalier King Charles Spaniel’s ears and whispering something in his ear.
Webster was being named after Mr. Hay’s good friend, Roger Webster, who died last year. Earlier in the evening, Mr. Hay had lead a group sing-along to classics like “No Business Like Show Business.”
We had not heard of the Mad Russian, but it seemed like that kind of night. Read More
