“You shouldn’t get too attached. Don’t you want to date around? I was with so many people in my 20s.”

My parents have been nervous about my relationship with my Ivy League-educated, hardworking, literary-minded boyfriend from the beginning. They’d always been intrigued by the idea of my having a serious romance, but once it happened about a year ago, when we met at college, it was a whole other story.

The legacy of the feminist movement has made my free-love-promoting, baby boomer parents excited about my promiscuity and nervous about long-term relationships. I remember the summer after my freshman year at college, their eyes glittering with delight around the kitchen table as I told them about my escapades post all-girls high school.  read more »

GEORGE: This a new couch?

DR. SELMAN: So what brings you back?

GEORGE: Well, it’s been six months.

HILLY: Well—

GEORGE: I’m a little groggy, I have to admit, because I had to work last night. Went to this benefit at the Central Park Zoo. What animal did you like best?

HILLY: This huge porcupine and the little fox and an owl that was just gorgeous.

GEORGE: And Al Gore was there.

HILLY: Whatever.

DR. SELMAN: Personally, I’ll leave the petting of wild animals to other people, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

GEORGE: And then as usual, I started getting a little rambunctious, didn’t want to go home, so I put Hilly in a cab round midnight, and ended up in some apartment sitting around with kids half my age playing this game I invented.  read more »

Morgan Freeman and his wife, Myrna Colley-Lee, were the first to arrive. They stepped out of a town car in front of the French restaurant Tocqueville on East 15th Street and made their way to the empty bar area. Neither knew what to expect; the hostess, Ruda Dauphin, had called it a “salon.” They were offered flutes of Ruinart champagne; the Oscar winner asked for vodka on ice.

Ms. Dauphin is a petite, stylish but tough lady who grew up in Brooklyn. Her father was in the shmatte business. She wanted to be an actress, and she married the director Claude Dauphin and they moved to Paris.  read more »

This is how I found out a good friend of mine—we’ll call her Lauren—was engaged: I was at her birthday party, and I ran into this other girl I know through mutual friends, and when I asked her how she knew Lauren, she said, “I’m a talent manager and her fiancé is my client.”

I nodded and pretended I knew what she was talking about. When she walked away, I asked the guy I’d been talking to—we’ll call him Max—if he had heard the news. He looked wide-eyed. “Did you see a ring on Lauren’s finger? I didn’t even look.”

I went over to Lauren and smacked her on the arm with a paper plate. “You know how I found out you were engaged? From Brian’s manager!” She giggled and showed us her left hand. “It just happened yesterday! I was going to tell you guys, I swear.”  read more »

I remember being 18 and watching three seniors dancing ecstatically to Talking Heads’ “Wild Wild Life” and feeling sorry for them. They were 21—their lives were practically over. Suckers.

I’m five hours away from 40.

When I turned 30, I was optimistic and totally deluded. So many possibilities. The inside of my mouth gets numb after a smoke these days. Probably be talking through a voice box, which’ll be great during interviews: “So. What. Are. You. Going. Through. Now?”  read more »

Six boys in a cabin. Four strewn about on bunks, affecting casual repose, though their eyes were fixed on two boys at the back of cabin. Something about to go down. We were all around 12. A short, pudgy-but-proud choirboy from Ohio was adamantly refusing to share even a few granules of his enormous supply of Kool-Aid. His confronter, a Canadian beanpole with a long nose shot out from under a perfect bowl of orange hair, wasn’t having it. The noble, carrot-topped weed had shared many homemade treats with “Ohio,” as well as the rest of us.  read more »

I was about to turn 40 and something major had to happen. With three weeks to go, I found myself getting hammered at an exclusive nightclub. I looked through the haze and saw a roly-poly man who, like me, had no business being there. He was wearing glasses and a conservative blue suit; he looked like a giant sea turtle.

I watched as he sipped red wine in the corner. Soon we stepped outside to smoke.  read more »

I’m getting married this summer and thought it might be a good idea to speak with some gentlemen who I suspected could give me some pointers.

It was raining on a Friday morning when I met Bo Dietl at his office on the 50th floor of One Penn Plaza. Despite some shreds of cloud, Mr. Dietl—a homicide detective turned security consultant and media darling—had a clear view of the city below and, off in the distance, in the middle of the choppy harbor, the Statue of Liberty.  read more »

Think of a book club, and the image that comes to mind is one of a group of middle-aged women in a suburban living room, munching on crudités and sipping white wine, talking about The Kite Runner for 20 minutes and then sliding effortlessly into gossip about the markers of suburban ennui: children, husbands, lovers (always other people’s, of course), school boards, nosy neighbors, nosier bosses, and how Linda has lost so much weight since the divorce, maybe we should say something?

My mother has been in such a book club for over 20 years.  read more »

I spoke to Archimedes J. Selby, inventor of the six-sided television. I visited him in his loft in Dumbo.

Sparrow: So this is your six-sided television.

Selby: One of them, yes.

Sparrow: It’s a cube. When I heard ‘six-sided television,’ I didn’t picture a box.

Selby: It’s perfectly cubical. I call it ‘Total TV.’

Sparrow: It must have taken you a long time to perfect.  read more »