The week began with a brush of spring, as temperatures hit the seventies. Though it got much chillier, we couldn’t seem to shake the seventies after that. Liza With a ‘Z,’ essentially a 33-year-old rerun in a Halston dress, had people lined up outside the Ziegfeld. A crazed man in a rooming house bit one cop and then shot two others with what the tabloids called a “Dirty Harry” .44 magnum. Trader Joe’s, its interior décor vaguely reminiscent of the Regal Beagle on Three’s Company, opened in Manhattan on Friday. Blondie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the Waldorf (Deborah Harry dyed her locks to a timely kiss-me-I’m-Irish shade of red). J.Lo is likely to play Sue Ellen in a remake of Dallas (Jenny from the Fork?), while the Weinstein brothers brokered a deal with one of New York’s leading cultural icons—Gabe Kaplan—to finally bring Welcome Back, Kotter to the big screen, with Ice Cube in the title role. No Sweathogs have yet been cast. The Post ran a list of “A-list” contributors to Hillary’s campaign, and the biggest giver was Chevy Chase, the coolest man in the city for a brief period in guess-which-decade. Meanwhile, Hillary’s would-be vanquisher, Park Avenue resident Kathleen McFarland, explained that “the realities of family life” had prevented her from voting in six of the last fourteen elections, adding to the troubles of state Republicans trying to recapture a little Nelson Rockefeller juju (remember when the city was just one poorly chewed bite of rib eye away from having one of its own occupying the White House, back in the . . . oh, you know) as George Pataki continued to stumble over the big hole at ground zero and recently downgraded attorney-general candidate Jeanine Pirro attempted to burnish her upstate cred by boasting about time she’d spent on New York’s nonexistent border with Ohio. As a law-and-order type, she’d probably appreciate that in Brooklyn, crooked cops were on trial, Serpico style. The key witness against them, according to the Times, is a convicted pot dealer who “looks like a man that one might find playing shuffleboard on the Lido Deck of a Carnival cruise ship.” But then again, the man is in his seventies.

Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Articles by Mark Adams
• Table of Contents: Mar 27, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!