Wednesday, April 22

Who needs Wellbutrin when you have schadenfreude? Maybe it’s the timid blossoms on the trees or maybe it’s those photos of Ruth Madoff leaving jail with a sad baggie of dollar bills, but we’re feeling positively giddy this week! Uptown, the galas continue to tax everyone’s pocketbooks and conversational skills before they follow the money out east for the summer. (What’s left of it, anyway!) Actor and fashion designer David Arquette hosts City Harvest’s “Evening of Practical Magic” at Cipriani, honoring annoyingly perky Rachael Ray and Le Bernardin’s sea urchin maestro Eric Ripert and attracting Real Housewives disaster Kelly Killoren Bensimon (just try having an event in New York these days without at least one of those floozies stumbling around!) Culture types are consumed with weightier matters: One-man Off Broadway show Swimming With the Polar Bears explores the convergence between polar bears and performer Mel England’s battles with AIDS and cancer. “In discussing or talking about the polar bears, I realized … that I am one of the polar bears,” said Mr. England. “That the idea of extinction and survival is something I’ve been dealing with my whole adult life … the earth has cancer and I have cancer.” There goes that bounce in our step. Later, Woody Allen’s latest film about a neurotic old guy and his nubile young lover, Whatever Works, kicks off the Tribeca Film Festival. According to The Observer’s own Sara Vilkomerson, it’s New York “filtered through the Allen lens as we’ve never seen it before. Meaning, forget the Upper East Side!” Yes, ma’am!

[City Harvest’s An Evening of Practical Magic, Cipriani, 110 East 42nd Street, 6:30 p.m., www.cityharvest.org; Swimming With the Polar Bears, Bleecker Street Theatre, 45 Bleecker Street, 8 p.m., www.telecharge.com; Tribeca Film Festival, www.tribecafilm.com/festival for schedule]

 

Thursday, April 23

Tribeca mutants! Turtles, that is! In keeping with the times, the Tribeca Film Festival offers more than just highbrow Woody Allen fare; it also offers free outdoor screenings of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—attended, we hear, by the ’90s-issue beasts themselves! (In other words, bring your spawn or your bong!) Meanwhile, the Junior League is spicing up its 10th annual Spring Auction with Who’s Bad, the “ultimate Michael Jackson Tribute Band …” Are we the only ones who find the idea of a room full of white girls named Bunny and Bitsy hopping around in headbands to “Beat It”—as if the whole Neverland version (i.e., millions of dollars; kids; way too many questions) of Michael Jackson never happened—completely creepy?

[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles screening, World Financial Center Plaza, North Cove at 200 Vesey Street, 8:15 p.m., www.tribecafilm.com/festival; Junior League Spring Auction, 583 Park Avenue, 7 p.m., www.nyjl.org]

 

Friday, April 24

Gwynnie first … now Natalie? Geeks heads (and other parts of them) explode as hot/smart Harvard grad Natalie Portman descends on the Apple store to discuss not her latest role opposite Orlando Bloom and Hayden Christensen in New York, I Love You, but her new “Web project!” Oh, Natalie, please do not go the way of the Goop! Anything—yes, even a sequel to V for Vendetta—would be preferable!

[Natalie Portman at the Apple Store, 103 Prince Street, 3:30 p.m.]

 

Saturday, April 25

Why do New York’s sexually repressed, Ivy League–educated single women devour 800-page books about vampires meant for 12-year-olds? Meet Robert Pattinson of Twilight, who stars in How to Be, which screens at the IFC Center at midnight, about a hot 20-something (a “poet,” but aren’t they all?) getting dumped and having a quarter-life crisis. Hmm, when T. S. Eliot hit his quarter-life crisis, he wrote The Waste Land. Your move, punk.

[How to Be at the IFC Center, 12 a.m., www.movietickets.com]

Sunday, April 26

Shadowing Maddow: News fascination Rachel Maddow—practically New York’s mascot these days!—appears at the 92nd Street Y in all her sneakered, bespectacled, overeducated, photogenic, lesbianic glory with Jeff Greenfield, but who really cares about him …

[Rachel Maddow in conversation with Jeff Greenfield at the 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 7:30 p.m., www.92y.org]

 

Monday, April 27

Throbbing Gristle not your thing? The charmingly retro-sounding New York Pops host a Carnegie Hall gala celebrating the 400th anniversary of the exploration (well, that’s putting it mildly) of New York Harbor and the Hudson River by those nice folks, the Europeans. Liz Smith hosts, dinner and dancing at the Pierre follows, and attendees include Broadway star Idina Menzel (pregnant with Taye Diggs’ spawn, the bitch!), Michael Feinstein, Her Royal Highness Princess Christina of the Netherlands (no uptown gala is complete without one!) and actress Anika Noni Rose, who told us she’ll be singing a song called “Half Moon, actually. It’s about Henry Hudson and his Discovery floating down the Hudson River…” It’s only a matter of time before they write one about Sully! Nearby at Lincoln Center, the Film Society’s 36th Gala Tribute takes over shmancy new glass-encased Alice Tully Hall, honoring Tom Hanks (hey, where’s he been lately?) with tributes by a distinguished troupe of Hollywood veterans like Nora Ephron (thanks to her, we now moisturize our neck), Sally Field, adorable Ron Howard, Mike Nichols, director Robert Zemeckis and Julia Roberts (Mystic Pizza) who—speaking of necks—was brazenly necking with her husband at the airport the other day, the hussy. …

[New York Pops gala, Carnegie Hall, 7 p.m., 212-247-7800, followed by dinner at the Pierre, Fifth Avenue at 61st Street, 646-435-4875; Film Society’s 36th Gala Tribute, Alice Tully Hall, 212-875-5668]

 

Tuesday, April 28

“I always say it’s the Oscars of the literary world! The red carpet of the literary world!” exclaimed Annette Tapert, author and chair of tonight’s PEN Literary Gala at the American Museum of Natural History (convenient, since the bulk of attendees will be walking from prewar co-ops on Central Park West). “In this really strange, precarious, troubled economic time, we’ve been able to do miraculously well with our fund-raising efforts,” continued Ms. Tapert. “We don’t have dancing. We used to have dancing… Every year the attendance has just escalated, and it’s hard to do dinner and dancing in the same room now. I think it’s very funny because it starts at seven, it’s black-tie—what’s wonderful to see is writers coming out of their caves to come to this event, and people seeing people they haven’t seen in ages because it’s not just normal suspects of a normal charity benefit.” Although the newly single Salman Rushdie will be on the prowl—watch out, ladies! Ms. Tapert revealed that this year’s guest list includes New Yorker scribe Adam “Go to Paree and Fetch Me Some Goose Liver!” Gopnik; his boss, “Dapper” David Remnick; and Gay “Ever-Tumescent” Talese. (If writers these days were more like you, sir, and less like, well, Benjamin Kunkel and Keith Gessen, maybe we’d actually want to bed one occasionally. …) “When they ring the gong for dinner, it is so hard to get people down to the Whale Room to sit because everyone’s having such an amazing time,” said Ms. Tapert. Somebody for goodness’ sake just make sure the salmon (not you, Rushdie!) hasn’t turned.

[PEN Literary Gala, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, 7 p.m., 212-629-8748]

 

Wednesday, April 29

Tired of those corseted panties?  Buck up, honey, Memorial Day’s still a month away, and in the meantime, the social season marches on! Parsons’ design school angles for a piece of stylish donors’ shrunken pies with a Fashion Benefit for its canny, harem-pantsed undergrads, who intuited early in life that a liberal arts degree will get you nowhere, did you hear that, NOWHERE! So why the hell not just make python bags? Calvin Klein designer Francisco Costa receives an award from caped crusader André Leon Talley; Terry Lundgren, CEO of Macy’s, attends; and Times writer Cathy Horyn is named Student Icon, which sounds vaguely Liberace. … It’s all enough to make a girlfriend grateful that she can at least spend the summer face-planting in flip-flops under a tree somewhere before Fashion Week rolls around again.

[Parsons 2009 Fashion Benefit, Cipriani Wall Street, 212-229-5662]

mbryan@observer.com