Just when winter was getting boring—the Knicks losing night after night, the subways and buses running every day—came a week packed with so much showmanship that even the most jaded New Yorkers didn’t know where to look. The Super Bowl was a hell of a lot more entertaining than those famously expensive ads. Let’s hope the commercialism lives up to the athleticism during the Olympics, which began Friday in Torino (or Turin, or whatever). In the wake of his girlfriend’s getting hosed by Republicans in D.C., Mayor Bloomberg ducked an event honoring the Dance Theatre of Harlem hosted by President Bush and picked a fight with GOP big man Joe Bruno. Fashion Week, of course, gave us show after show after show, along with a couple of unlikely sideshows: Natalie Reid, a Paris Hilton look-alike, and Wafah Dufour, an aspiring pop singer who happens to be Osama bin Laden’s niece. The Post unveiled Page Six: The Magazine, filling 74 pages with such tidbits as Simon Doonan’s observation that a recent Gwyneth Paltrow dress “made her boobs look terrible.” Harrison Ford was suddenly all over town (he’s on David Letterman! And Jon Stewart!) flogging Firewall, which once again finds him rumpled, growling, and saving his family from bad men. But, no matter what, the show must go on: At Scores, where three employees were implicated in tax fraud, the girls kept dancing; at the Garden, where harassment lawsuits have become more common than Knicks wins, the team kept trying (trading for 33-year-old vet Jalen Rose); and in NHL rinks, where a Jersey-based gambling ring drew unwanted attention to an already troubled sport, bodies continued to be checked. One place where, alas, the show will end is the elephant park at the Bronx Zoo, the last of its kind in the five boroughs. After Patty, Maxine, and Happy retire to that great safari in the sky, the only time we’ll be able to see elephants in the city will be when the Greatest Show on Earth comes to town.

Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Table of Contents: Feb 20, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!