On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 16, Randy Weiner, managing partner of the Box, was on the phone with the Transom, hours after a late-night District 3 Community Board meeting gone “horribly wrong.” The six-member board—which covers the Lower East Side and Chinatown—voted unanimously to deny the burlesque theater’s application to renew its liquor license (an official recommendation to the State Liquor Authority will not be ratified until the full board meeting on Sept. 23).

The Box, where tables sell for roughly $1,000, opened to the public on Valentine’s Day 2007 and, Mr. Weiner said, “does a steady and growing business”; he said their shows cost upward of $50,000 a week and the club now employs 80 people.  read more »

Late last night at Simon Hammerstein and Richard Kimmel’s celeb-infested, serially newsworthy Lower East Side cabaret, The Box, the actress Leelee Sobieski wore a top-hat and slinky tank top and carried a mold of her own skull (it had been commissioned for an upcoming film, Night Train, she explained, in which she stars with Danny Glover). The occasion was Kiki de Montparnasse’s evening of “erotic entertainment and discovery” (which began with a dinner at the SoHo skivvies store and then moved East to Chrystie Street), and Ms. Sobieski—blonde, dewy, gratuitously tall, alarmingly unguarded—was dressed as a Latin phrase. More specifically: “My conceptual bullshit costume is Memento Mori. When you realize your death is inevitable.”  read more »