Hey Mrs. Jarvis Cocker and Emily and anyone else who gets The New Yorker

[Laurie]

I once saw Cynthia Nixon on a crosstown bus, sans makeup, clutching a Zagat guide.

[Omar]

Celebs encountered in NYC:

King Buzzo
Diane Keaton
Sandy Duncan
Mario Batali
Roscoe Orman

[Martin]

The celebs I spotted last week were all comedy related for some reason.

Glaser
Fred Armisen
Aziz Anzari
AP Mike

Also I happened to stumble upon the latest Improv Everywhere prank. I thought it was a photo shoot.

[Laurie]

I forgot to mention: I saw Peter of Peter, Bjorn, and John at Other Music during the Vampire Weekend performance. GOOD TIMES.

[Laurie]

I saw Tom Wolfe at tonight's showing of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll. He sat four rows ahead of me, and he left after intermission.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

Wow, good bit of gossip.  Though I don't know if Tom Wolfe counts as a celebrity sighting, because he's so ubiquitous.

Evidently you stayed, though.  What did you think of the show?

[Laurie]

Eh, it was okay. The acting was outstanding, but the script could have used a solid edit or three. Is Stoppard so  big that he doesn't have anyone give his scripts a once over? He should have put the hammer back where it belonged, with a sickle, because he used it over and over again to hammer home the same goddamn points. After three hours, it got pretty tiresome.

Also, I don't know if I would consider Tom Wolfe a reliable arbiter of taste. Did you read his last book? The one all about his daughter's sex life at college? Awful.

I'll probably read his next book, as it's all about Miami, but... Eh. I'm not so hot about Tom Wolfe.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

Eh, it was okay. The acting was outstanding, but the script could have used a solid edit or three. Is Stoppard so  big that he doesn't have anyone give his scripts a once over?

That just about hits the nail on the head.  It's a totally perverse system where all of these famous farty guys no longer have to try, while all of the young playwrights (like all my friends and me) have to jump one ridiculous hurdle after another.  Whine, whine. 

I think Stoppard's kinda overrated, though I like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (which he wrote like forty-five years ago).  One of our actresses, the lovely Mia Barron (at whom I gawking right now in fact) was just in Coast of Utopia, and now I regret not seeing it, because she is really fucking funny.  We're in tech right now.  It's like watching sausage being made, except that the sausage is being made from your kid.  Thank god the theater has wi-fi.  I still stand by my pledge, Laurie, but I also gotta warn you that you'll be seeing it on the second preview, so while our cast will still be awesome it won't be up to full speed.  So basically what I'm trying to say is pee first because there isn't an intermission and by Friday we'll have shaved a good 10 minutes off but I can't make any promises for Tuesday. 

Also, I don't know if I would consider Tom Wolfe a reliable arbiter of taste. Did you read his last book? The one all about his daughter's sex life at college? Awful.

I know, totally embarrassing.  I could give an unfair book review to that book just based on the chapter titles.  I really like some of his early stuff but god knows what possessed him to start writing fiction.  Probably the same dementia that made him a Bush supporter.

[Gilly]

I think I Am Charlotte Simmons could have been really good if it were 200-300 pages shorter. It didn't resemble any college experience I ever had but it was interesting nonetheless. But, every chapter led off with the same characters having the same thoughts and it made the book really monotonous. In between the self-aware cliches there actually was a story and it wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either.