One of the nine art fairs in the city this weekend is the Pool, a three-day showcase of mostly unsigned artists at the Chelsea Hotel. But there’s a hierarchy even amongst the unsigned: Dominka Ksel, Maureen Catbagan, and Pamela Giaroli will be displaying ten of Ksel and Catbagan’s paintings and several of Giaroli’s photographs, not at the fair, but in a 24-foot U-Haul parked outside on 23rd Street. (Ksel and Giaroli live in deepest Williamsburg/Clinton Hill, Catbagan in Washington Heights.) “We wanted to enter,” Ksel explains, “but we found out it cost $2,000.” The U-Haul, by comparison, runs about $60 a day (they got a police permit to park for the duration). They made custom stained-wood platforms to display their artworks, which are as much as seven feet high, inside the truck. Their work is not quite as lighthearted as one might expect from the setting: Ksel says it addresses themes of alienation. “Depending on how you look at it, being on the outside isn’t always so bad. You know, on the outside of society, or of the art world, or of the Chelsea Hotel.” —Catrinel Bartolemeu

Earlier this week, at the opening party for Itamar Moses's new play The Four of Us, we grilled three very different playwrights over what bizarre preoccupations fed their latest works. The theme developed when Moses denied recent reports that his show is a thinly veiled account of his friendship with the author Jonathan Safran Foer, who in real life received a whopping advance for his first book — the very kind of artistic windfall that throws off the balance of friendship between the two brainy, needy guys in Moses's play. "I have dozens and dozen of close friends who are writers," he said. "Some are more successful than I am and some are less so."

At last night’s opening-night party for Gypsy, we caught up with the current (and apparently great) Mama Rose, the infectious Patti LuPone. LuPone’s current standing in the theater world isn’t too shabby, but, as we learned, no one is born a diva. When she was 13, she told us, she and her brother appeared on The Ted Mack Amateur Hour, performing an adagio waltz to “The Belle of the Ball.” Backstage, the pint-size LuPones had a rude awakening as to the realities of showbiz: “I had a tiara and a white ball gown,” Patti remembered. “A stagehand came … and he sprayed my tiara with a dulling spray, because it was being reflected into the lights. Then he said, ‘Open your mouth,’ because I had a mouth full of braces, and he sprayed the braces! Talk about humiliation! I thought, Oy oy oy, is this show business?”

At least, we figured, mini-Patti would take home first prize — but apparently this went to some kid from Tennessee. “It was fixed!” she exclaimed. “We were hanging out in a stairwell, and we heard the producers … and we went, “Holy" — and here she mouthed, "shit" — "It’s fixed!” Forty-five years later, she still looked astonished. —Ben Kawaller

Related: Let Me Be Entertained