Thank you Mother Nature

Keeping cool by the window. 4:00 PM. Photo: JH.

The night before last in New York it rained and poured and the winds blew and the thunder struck and the trees fell and so did the garden tables atop the penthouses while I was sitting blissfully on the First Tier of the Metropolitan Opera House watching the American Ballet Theatre at their Noche Latina; a celebration of ABT’s Spanish and Latin American Dancers. No doubt about it; central heating.

The upshot of the storm was a cooler city. Thank you God, thank you Mother Nature. So it’s warm in New York now but summer warm; the city is beautiful.

The ABT program filled the theater. Not a balletomane, at least not yet, I’ve seen enough to now experience the thrill of watching. Last night was “Don Quixote,” in three acts with Paloma Herrera and Angel Corella in the lead roles with Vitali Kreauchenka and Alejadro Piris-Nino as Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.

Inside The New York State Theater

I loved it. I’m an Angel Corella fan. He’s the 21st century ballet’s equivalent of Fred Astaire. When he comes on stage, the sunshine comes with him and it’s yours to share all the way. See for yourself; it’s a no-brainer.

Last night’s benefit honored the beautiful Carolina Herrera (take your cues there, girls) and Julio Bocca. Onstage, accepting their honors, just before the show, Sr. Bocca said that indeed he was honored to be finally standing on the same stage as the incomparable Sra. Herrera. Hugs/kisses abounding. Staged, not so incidentally, by Kevin McKenzie and Susan Jones.

The curtain drops.

If you’ve never been to the ballet and you’re even remotely curious as to why this culture has endured a hundred times longer than the biggest rock hit, Don Quixote is a good place to start. The music is vaguely familiar and symphonic, the story is clear and amusingly told, and the dancers and the dance are just plain fabulous And thrilling in its moments.

You watch and sometimes feel as if you’re dancing right along with them. Worst things could happen to you. And probably have. So be there torrential storms or firecrackers in the outside world, there’s still the ballet, and it’s true….everything is beautiful at the ballet. You need that. We all need that.

Paul Wimot and Alexandra Kotur

Susan Fales-Hill

Grace Meigher and Angel Sanchez

the Grand Tier after dinner before the performance

Anne Grauso, Dayssi Olarte de Kanavos, Angel Sanchez, and Lauren Santo Domingo

Gillian Miniter

Peter Lyden, Karen LeFrak, and Juan Paysse

Mildred Brinn

Peggy Mejia, Rod Drake, and Adrienne Vittadini

Paul Soros and Jackie Weld Drake

Violaine Bernbach, Alberto Mejia, Daisy Soros, and Ghighi Vittadini

Alison and Chris Brown

Tara Milne, Emilia Fanjul, and Anne Grauso

Chris Meigher, Phoebe Gubelmann, Kate Gubelmann, and Pepe Fanjul

Yesterday at Lunchtime, some of the Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy had a little lunch at Doubles in thanks to Jeff Hirsch whose NYSD photographs, sold at Exhibition last May 15, resulted in raising $30,000 for the Central Park Conservancy.

JH himself gave a little toast and talked about how growing up on 72nd and Fifth across from the Park, he’s old enough to remember the Park before the Women’s Committee. He told us of one incident when cornered by a gang he wasn’t sure if he was going to get out in one piece although thanks to one Park Ranger, whom he remembers to this day, his day was saved.

Last night, I went over to the Park Avenue apartment of Ann and Andrew Tisch for a little cocktail kick-off for the late September (23rd) power breakfast of Mrs. Tisch’s baby, the Young Women’s Leadership Foundation which was established ten years ago to support the work of two programs: The Young Women’s Leadership Schools and College Bound. At the Pierre. They held a similar fund-raiser in 2006 and raised $700,000. They’re hoping to break a million this year. The Leadership Schools’ Single Sex Schools offer college-prep education for inner city young women, on a par with the finest private and suburban public schools in the country.

Ashley Moore, Bianca Martinez, Seventeen editor Ann Shoket, Mashkkura Chowdhury, Melissa Suazo, Ann Tisch, and Kenya Bryant.

At this little get-together I ran into Jennifer Raab, the President of Hunter College. Mrs. Raab is a girlish sort of executive of academe. In fact, you can catch a clue of the personality in that smiling face in the picture with Ann Tisch and Kim Davis. In real life, actually, she’s Mrs. Michael Goodwin, he of the NY Daily News’ This-Is-What-I-Think page, a hail fellow well met.

I’m going on like this because I like the Goodwin/Raabs. They are what is the essential side of New York, on the side of history. They know much more than the know-it-alls and never press the point.

Jennifer Raab, Ann Tisch, and Billie Tisch

Laurie Tisch showing her Tiffany trophy ring

The Tisch canines in residence, Daisy and Lilly

Mrs. Raab last night was celebrating her seventh anniversary as the President of Hunter. We talked very briefly about the cost of higher education. I was telling her how I’d just learned that my alma mater (so to speak since I flunked out in my junior year and never returned), Colby College, was now something like $37,000 a year.

Gawd. I won’t even tell you how much it was when I went there but it was less than 5% of today’s. Jennifer Raab was telling me that NYU was the same and that didn’t cover housing IN MANHATTAN. Hunter, however, is $4300. Happy Anniversary Mrs. Raab/Goodwin/ Hunter.

Ann Moore, Ann Tisch, and Kimberly Davis

Ann Tisch, Jennifer with the laughing face, and Kim Davis

Meanwhile, the world. Le Figaro newspaper was given a sneak preview of Comme si de rien n'était (As if Nothing Happened), the first album of Carla Bruni, the new wife of the French President Sarkozy (they say Sar-ko-ZEE — cooler, no?). In this record the President’s wife “playfully (mocks) her reputation as a man-eater.

She sings: "I am a child. Despite my forty years. Despite my thirty lovers. A child." No kidding. Mlle. Bruni-Sarkozy has dated in the past Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Donald Trump, and Kevin Costner. She once infamously claimed to find monogamy "boring." Although this does not apply to American politicians. Or British ones, come to think of it.

This same article said that French women are becoming increasingly assertive in their sexual habits, while one-in-five younger French men "has no interest in sex," (“terminal ennui”) according to one of the most comprehensive surveys of the nation's love lives. Yeah, but what about the Italians, Mlle. Bruni-SarkoZEE?

"I am a tamer [of men], a cat, an Italian," she told Le Figaro last year.

"I am faithful... to myself. I am monogamous from time to time but I prefer polygamy and polyandry [its female equivalent]."


	Bruni and President Sarkozy.

According to Figaro, Women now have more than twice as many partners as they did in the 1970s, according to the study by the French Aids research agency, which is backed by the government.

"Are women just like men?" asked Le Nouvel Observateur Tuesday, which released extracts of the Study on Sexuality in France, a 600-page tome that brings together 12,000 in-depth interviews with people of all ages conducted during 2005-06. And everybody told the truth because everybody tells the truth about sex. Even to themselves.

One of the biggest changes in recent years, according to the report, was that male and female sexual behavior had become increasingly similar.

This is new? “You’ve Got that Thing,” Cole Porter wrote about 75 years ago or so.

The proportion of French women who claim to have had only one partner has dropped from 68 per cent in 1970, to 43 per cent in 1992 and 34 per cent in 2006. A woman's average number of partners has risen from under two in 1970 to over five today, while a man's has remained the same for four decades, almost 13.

Meanwhile back to Carla-baby: The Figaro account related that at the same time, Mlle B-S reinforced old stereotypes that link status and virility, by reportedly declaring: "I want a man with nuclear power."

Is this girl writing your SPAM? N’est-ce pas?

This same report observed that some things never change. For example: Despite the changes in female behaviour men found it easier than women to disassociate sex from love. The research suggested this was due to nurture rather than nature. The study said: "Young women are still educated to consider their entrance into sexuality as a sentimental-relationship experience." And Bride Magazine.

Don’t ask me why I got into this. When I was in London I realized that a certain part of the world is obsessed with Mlle. Sarkozy. As if she were the new sitting duck for the tabloid tycoons.

Footnote to history: I was on the 86th Crosstown on the morning in New York after Bobby Kennedy was murdered in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was a sweltering morning. I was on my way to the office (working for the stock brokerage of Harris Upham) when I noticed the headline on the Daily News that someone on the bus was reading. My eyes kept returning to the front page as if I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.


Nemesis. Click to order.

Bobby Kennedy was a far more controversial figure than his older brother, the slain president. When he left the Johnson Adminstration (where it was said the two men hated each other) to run for Senate in New York, he was called a carpetbagger. Just like someone else you know. There was also a lot of resentment at his winning although his supporters were diehard and not unlike the supporters of Obama – as contrasted to the impassioned supporters of his older brother, JFK who was a new national item when he ran for President. Bobby Kennedy was going to save us.

He had come into race only after Eugene McCarthy’s primary win in New Hampshire demonstrated that President Johnson was dead meat. This move was controversial and did not endear him to a large number of the electorate. However, the tousel-haired fellow with that sporty looking wife and that raft of children (and very rich father) had charisma. He walked with kings and had the common touch. He quoted the poets. G.B. Shaw’s words came into play. Americans are deeply affected by the Irish and the Jewish and it is no accident. Opposing kinship.

Somehow coincidence or otherwise had removed the three most impressively inspiring American public figures in that decade, and with it some might argue that it destroyed the Common Sense of its peoples.

“Conspiracy” is a negative word in today’s American parlance. It is also the word of Shakespeare who didn’t care about American parlance built an entire career around. The Kennedy Assassinations both John and Robert are rife with “conspiracy theories.” There are those who say: I don’t believe it, and therefore it is not true. Then there are those who say, I don’t know. And then there are those, like me, who say: A conspiracy only takes more than one. And envy of power plagues us at our own risk.

This is a long way to get to explain how today’s Guest Diary is by Peter Evans, a British journalist and author who published “Nemesis” two or three years ago, about the involvement that Aristotle Onassis had in the assassination of that Passionate Beacon of Hope, Robert F. Kennedy. And many other things and other people who live on that side of the coin.

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