The Transom

Italian playboy turned workaholic entrepreneur Lapo Elkann recently took on the appointment of Global Ambassador to the biggest hospital in the Middle East, the Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, which treats roughly two million Jewish and Muslim patients.

“My companies, they all start with an ‘I’ and end with an ‘I,’” said Mr. Elkann, founder in the past year of both Italia Independent, the lifestyle brand, and Independent Ideas, the advertising agency. He was watching a soccer match at a sports bar on Bleecker Street, hours before he was scheduled to catch a plane to Paris. After a few days there, he was planning to visit Italy for four days, followed by a trip to Iceland, where he’s working on yet another mysterious venture.  read more »

“It’s very surreal,” said David Chang, the hugely hyped hotshot at the helm of Manhattan’s three Momofuku restaurants, about taking top honors as the city’s best chef at the James Beard Foundation Awards at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday, June 8. (The ceremony was hosted by Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrall, who “flirted” awkwardly onstage with Mesa Grill’s Bobby Flay and refused interviews.)

Mr. Chang had just bested a slate of industry vets, including Gramercy Tavern’s Michael Anthony, Picholine’s Terrance Brennan and WD-50’s Wylie Dufresne. “Those guys are the rock and foundation of New York, and I’m just a young punk,” he said modestly.

While many foodies were sniping about how such a young upstart earned a spot on the best-chef ballot to begin with, perhaps even more were gossiping about how Mr. Chang physically got to the ceremony: rolling up to the red carpet at Lincoln Center in one of two tricked-out party buses that he leased specifically for the evening’s festivities. “We invited a lot of chefs,” he explained. “Hopefully, guests don’t realize that all the chefs are absent from the kitchens tonight.”

Each 40-passenger bus—which cost a minimum of $2,100 apiece for the first six hours, according to the rental company, the Party Ride of Brentwood—came equipped with tinted black windows, custom black leather couch seating, disco lights, flat-screen TVs, surround-sound speakers and a smoke machine.

The mobile blowout began early. “We went to Daisy May’s BBQ,” Mr. Chang said. “My good friend Adam Perry Lang fed us and took good care of us. Then we were on our way here. … I don’t know what’s going to happen later; we’ll see.”

He rebuffed the Transom’s humble request to join the rejoicing chefs on board. “What happens there is going to stay on the bus,” he said.

cshott@observer.com

Amanda Green is the daughter of the late playwright and lyricist Adolph Green—who formed a legendary, lasting collaboration with Betty Comden—and Broadway actress Phyllis Newman.

On Monday, June 9, Ms. Green—who has herself written lyrics, for the musical adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, and has worked with actors Mario Cantone and Christine Ebersole—directed and performed in a revue called Comden & Green’s New York, as part of a benefit for Greenwich House Music School in the West Village.

The production included 42nd Street’s Michael Arnold tapping out “Moses Supposes” from Singin’ in the Rain, as well as numbers from The Revuers, On the Town, and Bells Are Ringing. “I saw how much fun they were having, and I wanted to do it, too,” the tall, slender, bronzed Ms. Green, who is in her early 40s, said about her decision to follow her parents into music theater (older brother Adam is a journalist who has written for Vogue and The New Yorker). She recalled growing up on the Upper West Side, where the famille frequently entertained composers Leonard Bernstein, Julie Styne and Stephen Sondheim. “It was a lot of cool people.”

Despite her parents’ stringent warnings not to choose a career in showbiz, Ms. Green wrote and performed her first song at the age of 19, for their 25th wedding anniversary celebration, which took place at actress Lauren Bacall’s apartment in the Dakota on West 72nd Street and Central Park West. She was last in the lineup, after Messrs. Bernstein, Styne and Sondheim. “And Isaac Stern on violin, so it was a pretty intimidating debut.”

And how was her act received? “I was the sentimental favorite. What were they going to do?”

ialeksander@observer.com

Poets House of Soho, founded by Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Kray in 1985, has long had a devoted patron in the actor Bill Murray, who played a cameo role in the Transom’s childhood: En route to nursery school one day, we met him shooting Ghostbusters at a firehouse on North Moore Street; according to the Transom’s mother, he offered to buy our Smurf lunchbox. (We declined.)

Despite or perhaps in defiance of recently reported marital difficulties, Mr. Murray was among the hundreds of men and women who gathered at Centre Street on Monday, June 9, for the House’s annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge. “Would now be a good time to share our Smurf anecdote?” we asked our liaison. “Maybe later,” she said.

Poet Thomas Lux, the evening’s emcee and self-proclaimed Safety Captain, walked over the bridge backward, making sure, as he said, that no poetry nut was killed by a bicycle nut. On Fulton Ferry Landing, poet Martín Espada read lustily from a Mayakovsky poem, and Pulitzer Prize winner Galway Kinnell read, as he does every year, Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

During a banquet at Bubby’s Brooklyn, the Transom was told that Mr. Murray was in no mood to talk. A note was circulated, but never came back. Later, the star rose before the crowd. “I am aware,” he read, from Mr. Kinnell’s poem “Oatmeal,” as Mr. Kinnell turned his chair to face the lectern and ate from a plate of cherry pie in his lap, “it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.”

As the evening drew to a close, the Transom approached Mr. Murray directly, forgot the Smurf anecdote, and asked, instead, how reading poetry compares to acting.

“I like this,” Mr. Murray replied, before disappearing into the night, “because it’s a live take.”

wheinrich@observer.com

At the Wildlife Conservation Society on June 3 at the Central Park Zoo, we found a creature with a steely gaze and a hefty, 235-pound-ish build: Al Gore.

The Transom imagined that the former vice president was thinking the following: What am I doing here again? Oh, yeah, my daughter Karenna married a Schiff and they’re big supporters of this charity—therefore, I have to be here or I’m a dick even though I won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for saving the planet. Say … that’s some porcupine.

Wearily, Mr. Gore shook our hand. “We’re not doing interviews tonight,” he said.

For comfort, we turned to his wife. Unfortunately, we greeted her not with our own name but with “Tipper Gore” and it came out all wrong—like we were reminding her who she was, or were trying to score points for recognizing her. Whatever it was, Ms. Gore had no interest telling us what animal she identified with the most.

Trial lawyer Ed Hayes was more forthcoming. “I hate to say this, but honestly, the animal that I relate to would be a wolf,” he said. “You know what else I love: zebras. I love the way they look.”

Writer and self-proclaimed zoologist Paul Gregory Speck bummed a cigarette. Mr. Speck, who looks exactly like Tennessee Williams (“they all say that”), said he identifies with leopards. “I love all of the great cats,” he said. “In fact, the little cats, too. I think they’re really the supreme beings among the animals.”

Later, after he’d chatted with Mr. Gore about energy conservation, Mr. Speck offered his opinion on the candidates: He said John McCain was most like a buffalo. (“Determined, indomitable, ferocious, stubborn.”)

“And we’ll give Obama ‘mountain gorilla,’” he said.

Was he sure about that?

“I was about to say spider monkey. Well, he does have certain simian movements and jungle fever—see, I think it’s going down the politically incorrect path. … Let’s say a bird, a bird might be better. Let’s say magpie. A magpie is a very talkative and intelligent bird, which is even capable of imitating sounds. A magpie is like a two-tone crow. It’s half-black, half-white.”

Interior decorator Mario Buatta told us he loves monkeys, and how when he was a kid, he’d go to the Staten Island Zoo and see Jocko the gorilla, a frequent masturbator.

“I like McCain. I think he’s a patriot, and he’s been through a lot,” Mr. Buatta said. “He’s old but he’s got experience. King of the jungle. An elephant.”

During dinner, we found a couple of fabulous socialites.

I’m like a mother lion,” said Muffie Potter Aston, who was wearing a pink silk dress. “I fiercely protect my children. I try to take care of my den and other people in the den, other peoples’ kids, anyone I love in my circle.”

Mr. McCain, she said, resembles a wolf, while Mr. Obama is like a horse.

“I’m a minx,” said Debbie Bancroft, wearing a diaphanous peacock-colored number. “I am some form of feline, because I am observant, selectively madly affectionate, clean and cool.”

And the candidates?

“I would think McCain is something sedentary. A black bear. Something that hibernates. I think it’s not a good thing. I think Obama is completely a sleek and observant and perceptive character and is awake in all seasons. Hillary has come and gone. I think she was a predator that missed her mark. Some form of feral cat that missed her prey.”

ggurley@observer.com

“I’m very sad about Yves Saint Laurent, which is why I’m wearing a 30-year-old jacket,” Council of Fashion Designers president Diane Von Furstenberg, clad in a blue “Le Smoking”-esque number by the late designer, confided at the New York Public Library on Monday, June 2. “It’s from my attic.”

Mr. Saint Laurent, who died June 1 in Paris from a brain tumor, was much on people’s minds at this, the annual CFDA Awards, otherwise known as fashion’s Oscars. “He was wonderful, he was divine, he was mischievous,” Ms. Von Furstenberg said. “I loved him.”  read more »

“I have a broken toe and I walked here—I break them all the time!” said actress Blythe Danner (a.k.a. Gwyneth Paltrow’s mom), wearing not hideous gladiators but daisy-accented sandals with an elegant white pantsuit at Planned Parenthood’s One Million Strong Cocktail Party on Monday, June 3. She said she would be spending the summer with her grandchildren, Apple and Moses, while her son-in-law, Chris Martin, is on tour with Coldplay.

Ms. Danner was one of several Hollywood grandes dames, including Jane Fonda, Kathleen Turner and Jessica Lange, at the Prince George Ballroom in Murray Hill (or is it North Gramercy?) on Monday, June 2.

Ms. Fonda arrived as her typical glammed-up Southern self, wearing a tangerine-colored Issey Miyake blazer with a texture not unlike that of an egg carton. “We can get certain women in the White House that might as well be a man and we can get certain men in there that are feminists,” she said when asked about our presidential prospects. “I happen to think Obama is a feminist. In general, though, I think women govern in a less hierarchical, ‘I have power over you,’ more inclusive kind of way.”

Ms. Turner, wearing an Asian-style knotted jacket, seemd to agree. “The biggest difference between a woman and a man is of course compassion, ability to communicate and less ego!” she said in her signature raspy voice, adding that she’s been involved with Planned Parenthood since college. “I needed consultation, contraception and a sex education.” Who doesn’t, honey, who doesn’t...

ialeksander@observer.com

On Friday, May 30, the Transom found reality-show star Dina Lohan, mother to actress Lindsay and three other children, at an event for Project Cuddle, a charity benefiting abandoned babies, in Port Washington, Long Island.

Hailing from North Merrick, Ms. Lohan is something of a local heroine: Last month, she was honored as one of the “Top 20 Long Island Mothers of Celebrities” by an organization called Mingling Moms. Don’t ask.

“I’m here because it’s so important,” she said. (Also? National spokesman John Stamos, the actor, couldn’t make it.) “I got this call like really late last night and they’re like, ‘Can you come?’”

Does she consider herself cuddly and a good cuddler? “O.K., that’s a really weird question. Cuddling means just to embrace your kids. They make me out to be some crazy mom. … I’m just there for my kids.”

But is E!’s Living Lohan a sendup of her family? “It’s not about me; it’s really about setting the record straight, and the world has gotten so ridiculous with the sensationalism—not you guys … I’m sorry.”

What else is cuddly? “When my kids want to sleep in my bed, which they do—that’s cuddly. And we have animals—that’s cuddly.”

What’s uncuddly?

“I don’t really know what that means. It’s kind of a derogatory question. Like you don’t wanna go dark. You just have to—laws of attraction. You know, if you breed good, you get good.”

We think that’s what she said. So there’s nothing uncuddly out there? “I am so not going there! There is no one uncuddly to me! And if they are, they’ll figure it out.”

We asked what she was wearing and she turned around so we could check the label of her fancy tan coat (Armani). Unfortunately we pulled down the back of her black lacy dress (Chanel) and she spun back around. “I said my coat! You looked at my dress!”

We did, Dear Reader, and we likey what we saw!

ggurley@observer.com

Speaking of fashion! Now that we know the latest in Marc Jacobs’ love life at the click of his Facebook page, the Transom was wondering: Will other designers follow suit?

“I don’t have a Facebook page,” said Thom Browne, rolling his eyes. “I have no interest in people knowing my personal life.” Mr. Browne was speaking at Ago Ristorante in Tribeca on Thursday, May 29, at a party thrown by GQ. “I have no idea what’s going on with Marc Jacobs,” he sniffed. “I hope he’s having a good time.”

Last year, Mr. Browne was romantically linked to an angelic Columbia undergrad—does he have someone in his life now? “My personal life is personal!” he said. So quaint!

A few feet away, designer Michael Bastian was asked about the Jacobsian way. “Well, I don’t have a Facebook account for that exact reason!” he said. “But you also don’t have a choice at a certain point. When you become such a superstar like that—I’m nowhere near that—that’s part of the price that you pay. Either you don’t give a shit and you roll with it, or you don’t live your life.”

Meanwhile, over at the bar, there was West Village habitué John Bartlett, currently creating a line for Liz Claiborne. Would he put it out there on the Net? “No, not anymore,” he said. “When I broke up with my lover of 12 years, it was in Page Six—it was kind of horrifying! Now I’m very happily married.” (To custom framer John Esty.) But married-married? Like California-style?

“Well, we haven’t gotten married in front of our families. But we feel married. We’re still negotiating, our lawyers are still negotiating!”

jkoblin@observer.com

During El Museo del Barrio’s 15th annual gala at the 42nd Street Cipriani on Thursday, May 22, tiaras were distributed on trays, in keeping with the Latin American tradition of the quinceañera (kinda like a sweet 16 but a year earlier and more formal). Miss Teen USA Hilary Cruz and Miss USA Crystle Stewart arrived wearing their own recently bestowed crowns. Cute, ladies!

The event was co-chaired by husband-and-wife collaborators Ruben Toledo, the artist, and fashion designer Isabel Toledo, until recently charged with the makeover of label Anne Klein. Both are of Cuban descent, but met when they were just 13 in West New York, New Jersey. “She has a theory that if you marry early, it actually works out well because you sort of change together,” said Mr. Toledo, who has a faint pencil moustache that makes him look a bit like Gomez Addams in The Addams Family.

Though traditional quinceañera wear is white, designer Nicole Miller arrived in a feather-accented black gown with artist Romero Britto, who was wearing a white blazer festooned with splashy giant red and black kisses. “We met in Miami through Absolut Vodka!” Ms. Miller told the Transom. “Years ago, I designed a tie for Absolut and Romero designed a dress, so we met at an event for that.” Carmen Unanue, of the Unanue family that owns Goya Foods, was also clad in negro. “Very elegant,” she said. “And very New York.”

How does Steven Brill—the entrepreneur and journalist whose many ventures include Court TV, American Lawyer magazine and the now defunct media-watchdog monthly Brill’s Content—feel about his daughter Emily Brill’s fledgling blog, Essentially Emily: Confessions of a 5th Avenue Misfit, whose topics include “elite private schools,” “Ritalin,” “fashion,” “exotic trips” and “nightlife”?

“It’s getting better every day,” Mr. Brill e-mailed from a vacation in Umbria. “It’s quite a distance from when she was writing a brilliant honors thesis in prep school about the electoral college, but it’s well-written and has a distinctive voice. It’s now clear that the more she does it, the better she is getting at it.” Does he mind being mentioned, as in an April 23rd post signed “Misfit”? (“Are we seeing eye to eye right now? Not exactly. He keeps telling me to ‘Get a J-O-B.’”) “I often wish she wouldn’t,” Mr. Brill wrote. “Then again, there are people I’ve written about who’ve had the same reaction, to put it mildly.”

Ms. Brill, 25, attributed her decision to blog with a long-standing interest in journalism, along with confidence gained after shedding 100 pounds last year. “I had a family newspaper in fourth grade with a subscription base of four people—my parents and two siblings—called The Brill Family Times that I would slide under their bedroom doors,” she told the Transom, adding that she rued posting a video of herself laughing over a private voice mail left by Men’s Vogue editor Hudson Morgan. “I learned a lot from that. I do have journalistic integrity, and I will have it from now on.”