It Happens This Week
• Opening night at the Met.
• Finally, the primary.
• Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative confab.
• Anniversary of British takeover of Manhattan during Revolutionary War.
• Marc Jacobs show.
• UN World Summit.
Lohan Agonistes Lindsay to Direct!
MePa district video to dramatize her family’s feuds.
Lindsay Lohan is set to make her directorial debut later this month on the music video for her new single, called “Confessions of a Broken Heart.’’ The song features tumultuous lyrics (“a family in crisis that only grows older”) addressed to her serially incarcerated father, Michael. According to its production notes, it will be filmed in a symbolically run-down room somewhere in the meatpacking district—where suitably dilapidated spaces are in short order these days (which you’d think Lohan would’ve noticed from all those nights partying thereabouts). Lohan listens from another room, while actors portraying her parents duke it out verbally as her little sister cries in a corner. Meanwhile, the public can see inside the room, like a fishbowl.
—Beth Landman
Hamptons Class-Anxiety Insultfest
Roast host calls Allen Grubman “nouveau riche.”
Irik Sevin’s annual Labor Day dinner party was the unlikely setting for class warfare, Hamptons style. Sevin, former CEO of Star Gas Partners, likes to “roast” his attendees. It’s not exactly the Friars Club, but this year’s theme was “classics vs. nouveaus,” referring to the age of their money. One guest says, “Irik got up on a chair and started spewing insults” toward a crowd that included Richard Meier, Nicole Miller, Sophie Dahl, and Allen Grubman. Sevin deemed Grubman to be decidedly nouveau, saying, “At Allen’s house, there are three tables: The billionaires eat lobster, the half-billionaires eat steak, the quarter-billionaires eat chicken … and the rest have to leave.” The attendee says, “It was so strange. All these stiff, rich, older men were sitting there, being tortured and looking uncomfortable.” But Sevin denies that he caused any distress: “It’s not a big to-do. I was just talking about my friends.” Sevin’s had a rough year himself. In April, hedge-fund loudmouth Daniel Loeb called him “one of the most dangerous and incompetent executives in America” in an SEC filing picked up in the press, shortly before Sevin was forced out at Star Gas. For the record, Sevin considers himself “classic nouveau.”
—Emma Rosenblum
Chuck E. Cheese Wants You
Is the military targeting the birthday- party set?
Last week, members of the Park Slope Parents Association were alerted to a new threat: Republicans bearing pizza. The mother of a 3-year-old reported that she was shocked to see “promo films for military recruitment” playing at her local Chuck E. Cheese’s. The 500 franchises of the amusement-park-like pizzeria were screening a two-minute montage of smiling soldiers handing out toys and candy to Iraqi kids (set to “America the Beautiful”). According to Chuck E. Cheese’s VP of marketing Dick Huston, this segment, created from footage donated by the Defense Department, began showing at the chain around July 4. “There was no firing of weapons,” notes Huston. “It was meant to honor our troops and the humanness of what is occurring. It is a nice, innocent piece. It’s pretty warm.” Still, customers complained that this was inappropriate for a child’s birthday party. “I guess people could interpret it as prowar, but we support what our troops are doing over there—helping kids.” So is Chuck Republican? “We don’t know what he is.”
—Shana Liebman
Hedge-Fund Stud Conquers Israel
Battle of the Semitic brides.
Ari Goldman, 34, seems like a Jewish mother’s dream: The dashing yeshiva-educated NYU grad and Great Neck native is a partner at a hedge fund who lives on the Upper East Side. What’s more, he wants to marry a Jewish girl. Now he’s the star of From All the Girls in the World, an Israeli-television take on The Bachelor that will be taping its final episodes of the season from September 24 to 30 in Manhattan and at Goldman’s parents’ beach house; he has to choose among Gali, Galit, Orit, Ofira, Etty, Moran, and Neta. “When I first came to Israel in 1987, I wasn’t really attracted to Israeli girls,” Goldman says. “They didn’t really put themselves together in a way that appealed to me. I was used to New York girls, who always looked beautiful, whereas [Israeli] girls are, like, going into the Army. Now they’ve become so cosmopolitan it’s astounding. They look great. They wear the same brands as girls in New York.” And his mother couldn’t be happier about the show: “It’s all Jewish girls? God bless you!” Likewise, Goldman has been charmed by the Holy Land. “I don’t have to go out on a date and then figure out, Is this girl Jewish or not? Israel takes that variable out.”
—Rebecca Milzoff
King of Pop Rules the Ladies’ Room
Sony moves Jacko’s pics to the women’s lavatory—but it beats the boys’ room.
Between his personal legal issues and the fact that his last album, Invincible, cost a reported $30 million to produce but sold just 2 million copies, Michael Jackson is not particularly in favor with his record company at the moment. So it’s maybe not surprising that at Sony’s West Side recording studios, where pictures and records of artists line the walls, the Gloved One’s likenesses were recently relocated to the ladies’ room (better that, one supposes, than the little boys’ room). “I have no idea why those pictures are there,’’ says Tony Drootin, director of audio operations for the studio. “That’s where they ended up being hung. Jessica Simpson’s picture is outside my office, and that’s by chance, too.’’
—B.L.
EDITED BY CARL SWANSON