It Happened Last Week

Haunted

By Mark Adams
Published Oct 29, 2007

In a week filled with political trickery, Hillary Clinton lugged home a goody bag stuffed with treats: Barack Obama’s spooky attack ads on her Iran-resolution vote failed to gain traction, Elvis Costello haunted her 60th-birthday fête at the Beacon Theatre, and Rudy Giuliani announced he’s rooting for the Red Sox in the World Series (“I go with the American League team,” he explained). Governor Spitzer got t.p.’d by the State Senate on his alien-I.D. plan, though former police commissioner William Bratton said it sounded okay to him. Current police commish Ray Kelly drove a stake through the hearts of supporters by announcing that he had “no desire” to run for mayor. The state once again yanked the Moynihan Station project out of the graveyard, planning a huge rail-and-retail complex. Preppy killer Robert Chambers reappeared, looking zombielike after cops busted him allegedly dealing coke out of his apartment. (Insult to injury: It was a rent-stabilized $1,800-a-month one-bedroom.) Strippers from Scores who’d volunteered to hand out candy at a middle-school carnival found themselves disinvited. Pioneering Soho gallerist Ileana Sonnabend passed to the hereafter; she was 92. John Varvatos announced he’ll dress up the old CBGB space as a boutique. Taxi drivers on strike raked in ghoulish fares under a temporary pricing system. A strain of staph bacteria swept through the suburbs. Foxy Brown was tossed into solitary confinement on Rikers. Wizardry fans pondered the implications of Albus Dumbledore’s outing by J. K. Rowling. New Nobel laureate Doris Lessing stuck a razor blade in the Big Apple, arguing that 9/11 was “not that terrible” compared with the I.R.A.’s reign of terror in Britain. And a 90-pound convenience-store clerk on Long Island acted out a security-cam homage to the original Halloween, chasing a large masked intruder out of her shop with an ax.