The government’s shut but its mouths aren’t. While Chicken Little sulks in the Oval Office, sucking his thumb because nobody anywhere in the world will talk to him, Humpty Dumpty House Speaker, still sitting on the wall before taking his fall, is out babbling.
Even Little Miss Muffett Pelosi got off her tuffet. Aflame in a neon orange Halloween jacket, she worked the CBS Morning Show.
Thursday night Boehner hit White Sulphur Springs because those magic waters supposedly cure everything. The government’s closed but Greenbrier’s open so he addressed a group of 50 CEOs.
A freebie speech or was he paid, this I don’t know.
Becoming Versace
Donatella Versace — knee-length platinum hair, prominent lips, glitzy go-go wardrobe — got immortalized in that “House of Versace” TV movie. Legal huffing and puffing had blown away four previous unfinished works about Donatella, who’d resisted anything about daughter Allegra, major inheritor of Uncle Gianni’s estate and once reportedly “fragile” in a facility battling “anorexia nervosa.”
Brunette Gina Gershon, who played Donatella: “Took lots of lighting, Scotch tape, makeup, prosthetics and two wigs, one of which I still hope to keep.
“For that extravagant super-skinny Versace look, I didn’t mind losing 11 pounds because, having played this lady, even now I’m eating less. I minded having to smoke those incessant cigarettes she loves.
“Looking like her, playing someone like her, is nothing unusual for me. I’m an actress. It’s what I do. Tight, tight clothes and really high heels was the fun part. I watched tons of her on French video. She moves hips forward, shoulders in, neck out.
“I was once a dancer so I could do that. And I exercised like mad, did power yoga to get her Barbie doll arms. I listened to the accent. Constantly played her recordings. A speech therapist helped because the way she speaks Italian English, nobody can understand her. If it were up to me you’d have subtitles.
“She’s very smart. Understand, she went through a ringer. Her genius brother’s killed and she’s left having to run a fashion operation, develop her own style and go through hell. She’d had her excesses. It’s a story of redemption.”
The House of Versace never lifted a finger or a pattern to assist this project.
TV lady
NY1 scheduling Budd Mishkin’s profile on me 8:30 tonight unless some last minute bulletin, like maybe a Marty Markowitz policy speech about Coney Island, takes precedence . . . Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at Nello’s discussing soccer with Manchester United’s Sir Alex Ferguson.
Faking it
Christina Applegate on movie sex: “I hate it. In front of people with someone you barely know, having a fake orgasm, which we’ve all done in real life — only this time your cover is up.”
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Patsy’s on W. 56th: “Mia Farrow and Sinatra always came to our restaurant.”
So did he make her son Ronan?
Said owner Scognamillo : “I only know they stayed alone in a private room behind curtains — and ate pasta.”
Goings on
Attention: Her Ladyship Elizabeth Anson, a party planner, invites for Nov. 4, the Frick, a launch of His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah Al-Thani ’s “royal collection of gems and jewels.” Maybe you should come early in case there’s a long line . . . And Oct. 16, shoe guy Stuart Weitzman ’s opening a digital pop-up shop, whatever that is.
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So this homosexual pair booked their wedding. To perform the “I Do’s” in this not-yet-everyday union will be an as-not-yet-everyday officiant. The gents selected a straight, married man with grown children and middle-age, old-fashioned views. Neither minister nor justice, he’s their M.D. hospital physician. The doc accepted. Working the Internet, filing the necessary forms, learning the phrases, he’s boning up on his “Take two pills and I now pronounce you married.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.