At the end of a typical dispatch from the New York City of Andrea Peyser’s glorious imagination — which veers from September 11 to Anthony Weiner — the endearingly batty Post columnist announced her exit, at least temporarily. “To my friends, colleagues and frenemies. You, too, Alec Baldwin,” she wrote. “You won’t be hearing from me for a while. I am taking a leave of absence from this newspaper.”
Peyser, who started there in 1989, has been described in these pages as the “local Madame Defarge … the Post’s class warrior” and called “a rabid New Yorker” by the tabloid’s editor Col Allan, who is himself going overseas for a bit. “But I can’t stay away too long, and I’ll be back in time for the next celebrity meltdown or psycho-sexual crisis to hit this city,” she wrote today, cryptically, in a section titled “I promise it’ll be worth the wait” (we’ve requested more info). “Count on it.”
Update: Post television columnist Linda Stasi is also leaving the paper, according to a post on her Facebook page. She’ll be working on the sequel to her novel, The Sixth Station, and contributing to the tabloid as a freelancer, she wrote.
The Post had layoffs in June, in hopes of reducing the staff 10 percent, “hoping to the extent possible to forestall layoffs by offering buyout packages to selected employees first,” Capital New York reported.
A spokesperson for the tabloid told Daily Intelligencer, “we will have no further comment other than what Andrea wrote in the paper.”
