The comedy of errors that led to the tragic fifth act of talk radio’s King Lear, Don Imus, set the stage for a most Shakespearean week. Imus, who lost his multimedia kingdom for his comment about “nappy-headed hos,” lent his earphones to the Falstaffian Reverend Al Sharpton, who proceeded to bury him, not to praise him. New Jersey governor Jon Corzine was en route to broker peace between Imus and the Rutgers players but wound up in a condition of the worst degree.

The Big Apple’s own Hotspur, Rudy Giuliani, for whom parting his hair has always been such sweet sorrow, caused a tempest when he failed a quiz on the price of milk. (His reps said the mistake was much ado about nothing.) Governor Eliot Spitzer launched a PAC to spread treasure to Democratic candidates throughout the land. Mayor Michael Bloomberg compared the sound and fury raised by the perfidious teachers union not to a summer’s day, but rather to the National Rifle Association. The MTA abandoned its “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” strategy for the Second Avenue subway, finally unearthing a section that hath lain buried since the seventies. City health officials admitted that inspectors had failed to respond to customers’ cries of “How now? A rat?” when a rodent fell from the ceiling of a KFC/Taco Bell.

Naked Angels debuted a short drama in which a Macbeth-like president (not, they swore, inspired by Coriolanus-on-the-Potomac George W. Bush) suffers an Et tu, Brute? demise. A chorus of gossips whispered about what a piece of work is Katie Couric’s new man — a rich, hunky triathlete seventeen years her junior. (She’d been spotted making late-night visits to his building: To sleep? Perchance to dream?) Dreamy midsummer knight A-Rod smashed six homers in the Yankees’ first seven games — instantly erasing a winter of Jeter- fueled discontent. And Kurt Vonnegut, bard of the Hamptons, shuffled off this mortal coil.
—Mark Adams