party lines

Madonna, Rihanna, & Lively at the UNICEF Lighting

Blake Lively and Penn Badgley were about an hour and 45 minutes late to the Gucci/UNICEF dinner honoring Rihanna at the Plaza the other night, but Lively had a good excuse, she swears! “She’s filming,” a publicist murmured. “She always says that!” shrieked one cold, cranky photographer. In fact, Lively had suffered a tragic wardrobe malfunction: Her shirt kept popping open and she was getting her outfit altered upstairs. “I don’t usually get emotional, but velvet was everywhere!” Lively pouted later as a handler applied her lip gloss and pulled down her skirt. Then she refused to talk to us. Seriously? Does our devotion mean nothing to her? We thought we could hug it out when we were seated next to her and Badgley — our shoulders were thisclose! — but we were barely able to take a bite of our appetizer before the same handler told us to move.

But our Dan-chasing wasn’t over yet.

When Lively slipped off to the bathroom, we slid next to Badgley and batted our eyelashes. So, remember when Dan wrote that exposé for New York a few weeks ago — that was like a secret love note he passed to us, right? “Well, you know, honestly we’re not involved much in the writing of the story lines,” he said, maybe a little uncomfortably. “Obviously you guys are very supportive of us,” he said. “So I suppose that was probably an incentive in continuing relations.” Relations. Sexy! But our faces fell when he told us that he doesn’t read press about the show. “I stay away from that shit now,” he shrugged. Worried that Lively would come back and grab us by the hair, we scampered away and left him sipping a cup of coffee all by his lonesome. At the after-party, while Timbaland D.J.’d, we kept making deep, meaningful eye contact with Badgley from across the room — in between his smooches with Lively. Watch your back, S.

Madonna, Rihanna, & Lively at the UNICEF Lighting