New York, July 28, 2008 – We’d been wondering why we haven’t seen the Ugly Betty folks on red carpets around New York City since the show moved production east this summer.  Apparently they’ve been saving themselves for the premiere of America Ferrera’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, where the Betty gang hit the Zeigfeld Theatre in force.  

Becki Newton noted that shopping is not the only major distraction in the city. “Our whole cast is really into theater, so we’ve just been seeing as many shows as we can see”, Newton told us.  She loved In the Heights, and will be going to see Jersey Boys.  Mark Indelicato loves Broadway, just like his character Justin Suarez.  “I saw The Little Mermaid, my favorite movie of all time”, Indelicato told us.  “I want to go see Mary Poppins, Grease, Legally Blonde, Gypsy, all of them.  Get me tickets, I’ll be there”, he added.  Ana Ortiz thinks that Ugly Betty was meant to be in New York.  “It feels so right; it’s perfect”, she told us. 

Pants co-star Blake Lively’s Gossip Girl cast mates didn’t let her down.  Leighton Meester, Ed Westwick, Chace Crawford and Matthew Settle all checked out the flick.  Rumors of friction between Traveling Pants stars Ferrera and Lively may be fictitious – Ana Ortiz told us that Blake visited America on the Ugly Betty set – in Queens! 

Touted as an “eco-friendly” premiere, the stars drove to the red carpet in hybrid vehicles.  (Do hybrid Chevy Tahoe SUVs really get good mileage?)  But America Ferrera got the green message and walked to the theater.  “The invitation said to please try and not leave a carbon imprint on your way to this premiere, so I walked here”, she told us. 

New York, July 25, 2008 – Miley Cyrus appeared on NBC’s Today Show in Rockefeller Plaza on Friday, and during her performance, the 15-year-old pop phenomenon’s tongue seemed to have a mind of its own.  Miley’s tongue seemed to favor the right side, but she also licked to the left and the center.  What’s up with that?

New York, July 22, 2008 – Designer Isabel Toledo will be honored in September by the Couture Council of the Museum at FIT, and Glenda Bailey and museum director Valerie Steele threw a party to celebrate.  Not only is Toledo a talented designer – a favorite of Michelle Obama – but she’s so charming that 200 or so fashion world VIPs ignored the lack of air conditioning in her Midtown Manhattan loft to toast her.  Toledo’s husband, artist Ruben Toledo, played the gracious host even though he’s shy.  “Isabel’s very social; I’m very anti-social.  So it’s a perfect blend of the opposite”, he told us. 

The Toledos are a private couple and say they rarely entertain, and indeed, most of the guests told us they’d never before been to the multi-level, art-filled loft.  One exception is Narciso Rodriguez, who has visited the Toledos often.  “I guess they’re part of my family”, Rodriguez told us. “It’s fabulous here”, he added, looking around the vast space.   Ruben is finishing up his book of drawings called Fashionation, and then the couple is off to Germany in August where Isabel and Karl Lagerfeld, the publisher, will choose the inks and paper for the book. 

New York, July 22, 2008 - A year ago Laurie Anderson played the Highline Ballroom as a part of the High Line Festival curated by David Bowie. That intimate venue and the dozens that followed throughout North and South America and Europe in many ways have served as Anderson's laboratory for the project she calls Homeland.  "Homeland is about love and war -- two things that have been on my mind recently," said Anderson in an interview with Lincoln Center Festival's Charles Sheek.  "So more or less I collect ideas in notebooks and put them in stories and songs.  It's great to edit them with a live audience so touring has been essential to the creation of the piece."  As a light-show performance, Homeland has evolved in the last year from the hyper-frenetic digital projections of Mark Coniglio as staged at the High Line Festival to the more languid lighting of the current production.  This latest installment of Homeland, however, continues to employ those naked incandescent light bulbs at the ends of long electrical cords.

Tuesday afternoon's dress rehearsal doubled as the press photo-call and hinted at the refinement coupled with force that is Laurie Anderson's program.  Both the musicians and the stage lighting were put through the paces one last time before the opening notes were to be played Tuesday evening.  At one point during the rehearsal, Anderson and her sound man Charlie Campbell spent a solid five minutes attempting to isolate a low-level, nearly inaudible whirring noise coming from her side of the stage.  Meticulous timing was the goal as they planned the exact time Campbell should mute the sound of Greg Cohen's electric bass just as he was to set it down in exchange for his upright, in order to reduce as much ambient sound as possible lest it clang into, say, the bird sounds delicately being made on the viola by Eyvind Kang.  The attention to detail is surely nothing new to Anderson, but all the same no less important for this homecoming of Homeland to Lincoln Center's Rose Theater, which runs for five nights through Saturday, July 26th.

Text and photographs by Damien Neva