February 19 – At the opening night of Bridge & Tunnel, Sarah Jessica Parker wore the same Michael Kors outfit she’d had on earlier that day for a taping of the David Letterman show. Also taking in the debut were P. Diddy, Marisa Tomei, Annabella Sciorra, playwright Terence McNally, Bob Balaban, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Chad Lowe. Bridge & Tunnel is a one-woman show written and performed by Sarah Jones. Meryl Streep likes it so much that she's a co-producer of the Off-Broadway open-ended run. After the performance we asked Streep how she felt. She slowly broke into a smile, and said softly, “Great”.

March 5 – The smile on Martha Stewart’s face (photo at left) as she entered the Federal courthouse in lower Manhattan Friday morning may be her last for a long time. Late that afternoon, a frisson of disbelief swept through the ocean of media people outside as word of the guilty verdict spread. The sensational trial had finally come to an end. Leaving the courtroom, author Dominick Dunne said that Stewart was “devastated”. Stewart’s former stockbroker and co-defendant Peter Bacanovic was also found guilty; his mother was in tears as she left the building. Neither Stewart nor Bacanovic spoke to reporters. Prosecutors and a juror made statements, and defense attorneys vowed that Stewart would be found innocent upon appeal. Sentencing is set for June.

March 4-5 – They cut Jennifer Lopez out of ads for her new film Jersey Girl, and she was nowhere in sight at a benefit screening on Thursday. Lopez’s ex, Ben Affleck, and costar Liv Tyler hosted a way-crowded post-show party at Metronome. Tyler and Affleck both sing in the film, and director Kevin Smith told us that the two took lessons.

The next day at a press conference announcing the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, Robert De Niro, recently suffering from prostate cancer, said, “I feel great”. This year’s drive-in movie will be Footloose, and star Kevin Bacon said that viewers will be talking about how much he’s aged since the 1984 film, while costar Sarah Jessica Parker still looks so young and pretty. Bacon’s wife Kyra Sedgwick, New York Governor George Pataki and artist/director Julian Schnabel all spoke at the press conference held at Silvercup Studios in Queens.

February 29 – You know how when you have stuff with you, you leave it in the trunk of the car or put it in coat check when you go to a party? For some reason, Oscar winners were schlepping their golden statuettes around the Vanity Fair party, while clutching glasses of champagne and plates of food, keeping double-taped décolletage within the limits of propriety, smiling, air-kissing and posing for photos. Truly an extraordinary performance when done with grace; extra points if drunk.

The Vanity Fair party draws just about everybody in Hollywood – way too many to list here – from Benicio Del Toro to Catherine Zeta-Jones. Soon-to-be-unemployed Gucci designer Tom Ford was multitasking, keeping an eye on the hundred or so of his dresses adorning famous bodies in the room while making lunch dates to cement his future in the film industry. Even Nicole Kidman can’t say no to Oprah Winfrey – trying to skip out unnoticed as the party wound down, Kidman ran into Winfrey, who greeted her warmly, and insisted they pose for photos.

Boatloads of musicians - Beck, Gwen Stefani, Elvis Costello, Steven Tyler, Ricky Martin, Tony Bennett, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, and White Stripe Jack White, who seems on-again with Renee Zellweger - were all on hand.

The party went on until late, many stumbling out, shall we say, happier, at 3:30 a.m. than when they arrived. Ever-brilliant Joni Mitchell had a simple solution for getting through the schmooze-a-thon: the chain-smoking queen of songwriters and two friends arrived at the party already in, shall we say, good moods.

March 3 – The premiere of the film The Reckoning was so small that star Paul Bettany’s wife, Jennifer Connelly, stayed home. Costar Willem Dafoe also came solo – it was reported the day before in Page Six that he’s left his companion of 27 years, Elizabeth LeCompte, for a younger woman. The Reckoning’s director, Scotsman Paul McGuigan, joined the stars at a pre-premiere dinner at Brasserie 81/2, and then they all walked the two blocks to the Paris theater.

Meanwhile, Viggo Mortensen was over at NBC studios taping a segment of Last Call with Carson Daly, to air March 10. The handsome Mortensen, who played Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, seemed stunned at the gaggle of squealing female fans clamoring for his autograph. He’d better get used to it - his first starring role is in the film Hidalgo, opening March 5. If it’s a hit, Hollywood will keep calling.

March 2 – HBO introduced the fifth season of their hit mafia series The Sopranos with a movie-style premiere at Radio City Music Hall, complete with red carpet, celebrity guests and desperate fans trolling the sidewalks for spare tickets. Just about the entire Sopranos cast showed up; star James Gandolfini with his fiancée Lora Somoza. The cast is so large that it’s hard to remember who-all is in The Sopranos, but as far as we can tell, Gina Gershon, Denis Leary, hip-hop impresario Damon Dash, Mario Cantone, Richard Belzer and Chris Meloni are not part of the show. Nor is Rudy Giuliani, who said he’s a “true fan” of the show. Peter Boyle, of the TV show Everybody Loves Raymond, said that what he likes about The Sopranos is the way the characters resolve conflicts: “They don’t talk it out. They just whack ‘em. They’re very simple people.” Speaking of whacks, Vincent Pastore, who plays Big Pussy, declined to reveal any upcoming murders on the series this season, but did say that he’d like to see Paulie Walnuts (played by Tony Sirico) get whacked. In the "Who knew?" department, The Sopranos' Marianne Leone, came with her husband, Chris Cooper, who won an Oscar for Adaptation. After the screening, the whole famiglia partied at Rockefeller Center.

February 21-24 – With hordes of revelers eagerly baring their mammaries and other dangling body parts, we kind of expected to run into Janet Jackson in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. The nipple diva wasn’t there, but plenty of other celebs joined the drunken masses for the pre-Lent bacchanal. Even Hobbits manned the parades: Lord of the Rings’ Elijah Wood reigned as Bacchus, and almost toppled off the float when the tractor pulling it surged ahead unexpectedly. Ring-mate Dominic Monaghan rode in the Orpheus parade, which was presided over by New Orleans native Harry Connick, Jr. In fact, for the second year in a row, the skies opened up, and it rained on Connick’s parade. It rained so much that fashion designer Nicole Miller had a plastic bag over her dress, along with beads and a shiny red cape.

Country music star LeAnn Rimes, grand marshal of the Krewe of Endymion parade, good-naturedly tossed Mardi Gras beads to the crowd, and apologized to us after a strand smacked us in the face. Rimes must be health-minded - she passed on the corn dog, giving it to her husband, Dean Shremet to happily consume. (Note to foreign readers: Corn dogs are hot dogs dipped in corn batter, deep fried and served on a stick. Hot dogs are, er, well, never mind.) The other major Mardi Gras food group is beer.

February 13 – All queer eyes were on Kylie Minogue, who performed at the Fab Five’s CD release party at the club Avalon. Kylie is only one of many top artists featured on the just-released Queer Eye for the Straight Guy soundtrack. Lindsay Lohan and Deborah Cox joined the fun. We were lucky not to be thrown out after inadvertently insulting the cast: “Hey, what are you trying to say?” was the retort when we asked them to wait a moment while we put on a wide-angle lens for the group shot at left. Er, watch those carbs, guys.