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KLMNO THE RELIABLE SOURCE Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger
Obamas mean a bonus point for Spain Good summer for Spain: First,
the World Cup. Next, a private visit from Michelle Obama. The White House announced
LARRY DOWNING/REUTERS
Michelle and Sasha Obama are headed to Spain next week for a “mother-daughter trip with longtime family friends.”
Monday that the first lady will travel next week to Spain for a “mother-daughter trip with longtime family friends.” Only Sasha, 9,will make the trip; Malia will be away at camp. No further details were released, although Spanish press reports say the trip is scheduled for Aug. 4-8 at the Villa Padierna in Marbella. Although the visit is considered a private holiday, the first lady will meet with King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia. (This isn’t the first mother-daughter overseas trip: Last summer, Michelle, Malia and Sasha vacationed in France and England.) The president won’t be on this trip. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Obama will celebrate his 49th birthday Aug. 4with a fundraiser at the home of Chicago billionaire Neil Bluhm — guests will donate $30,000 each to the Democratic National Committee. The family will vacation
together later in August — a weekend on the Florida Gulf Coast and 10 days inMartha’s Vineyard.
TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2010
PATRICK MCMULLAN/PATRICKMCMULLAN.COM Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky have kept guests in the dark about details of their wedding, such as where it will be. Little info on her big day
o much mystery over Chelsea Clinton’s upcoming wedding to Marc Mezvinsky!Why can’t we just ask some guests what’s going on? Well, because they don’t know,
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THIS JUST IN President Obama will appear on
“The View” Thursday — the first time a sitting president has appeared on a daytime talk show. Barbara Walters, out since heart surgery in May, will return to interview the president with her co-hosts. The last time Obama was on the show was March 2008, during the presidential primaries. Maryland can boast its first Miss Teen USA. Potomac’s Kamie Crawford, 17, was crowned Saturday at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. The Winston Churchill High student (and captain of the cheerleading squad) won a $100,000 scholarship, trips and clothes, and gets to share a New York apartment with Donald Trump’s other titleholders— Miss Universe and Miss USA — for a year!
either. In the classic covert-ops style of many VIP nuptials these days, even the near and dear who’ve scored invitations are largely being kept out of the loop on the particulars. Such as: Where is it? If not for widespread media reports pinpointing the Hudson Valley community of Rhinebeck, N.Y., as the locale, guests might not have known where they’re headed this weekend. “We only just found out where our hotel is,” one invitee told us. Huh?
Rather than let guests book their own accommodations, wedding planners took invitees’ credit card numbers and offered three price ranges to choose from . . . and only belatedly informed them all where they’d be staying. No one has yet officially informed guests exactly where Saturday’s wedding will be held — strong circumstantial evidence points to Astor Courts, the estate built by turn-of-the-century tycoon John Jacob Astor IV — but, heck, they don’t need to know: They’ll be transported via buses directly to the site. The point of all this cloak-and-dagger was to keep the wedding location secret — so that
paparazzi and sightseers would be thrown off the trail. (The Clinton family has not even confirmed the July 31 date, disclosing only that the couple will marry this summer.) Well, that didn’t work: Journalists are already descending on the place. But many layers of control remain — guests will have to surrender BlackBerrys and cellphones before they arrive (so no unauthorized photos get out) and carry credentials (so no crashers get in). And the couple’s gift registry is listed under fake names. Guests, however, have been told how to dress: black tie. Not Bill Clinton’s favorite kind of attire, but anything for his little girl.
PATRICK PRATHER/MISS UNIVERSE LP
Kamie Crawford took home the crown as Maryland’s first Miss Teen USA.
fun, and do some good on the way.” — Michaele Salahi skirting questions about her finances in an interview with the Associated Press. The “Real Housewives
of D.C.” co-star says her husband handles those pesky money details. GOT A TIP ? E-MAIL U S A T RELIABLESOURCE@WASHP OST . COM. FOR THE LA TEST SCOOPS, VISIT WA SHINGTONP OST . COM/RELIABLESOUR CE
“I’m just a party Barbie girl! I like to have
BOOK WORLD
here is precious little innocence in Carl Hiaasen’s moral universe, only gradients of venality. Spend enough time with all those stoners and smugglers and ex-cons and sugar cane tycoons and telemarketers and televangelists, and you’ll swear they must have crawled straight from the Florida swamps, hiss- ing, wreathed in poisonwood. Which is another way of saying that Hiaasen needs his southern Florida the way Dickens needed his fog.
Should we be alarmed, then, that the
chief troublemaker in “Star Island” hails not from Dade County but from the Hollywood Hills? Her name is Cherry Pye, nee Cheryl Bunt- erman, and she’s a pop singer of the “barely legal slut” school, employed by Jailbait Records. She sells millions of singles with titles like “Runaway Tongue” and “Jeal- ous Bone,” and so what if she has a voice like “a sackful of starving kittens”? That’s what backup singers and celebrity ma- chinery are for, and, as a result, Cherry Pye is a bona fide star and very much an island: vacuous, egoistic and shrill, and given to pensées like “After I die, see, I really wanted to come back as a whale? But now I don’t, ’cause who wants to get, like, stabbed with a harpoon?” It’s okay, Cherry doesn’t have to be
smart. She has a retinue of handlers and bottom-feeders — her parents notable among them — who do all her thinking for her. The one thing they can’t do is keep Cherry from partying and, in short order, overdosing. Their only recourse is to trundle her off to the next ER or rehab center and hope nobody notices. And to make sure nobody does, they hire an “un- dercover stunt double,” a young actress
Hiaasen skewers a pre-roasted topic T
by Louis Bayard
named Ann DeLusia who impersonates Cherry at clubs and premieres and even the passing funeral — wherever fans ex- pect Cherry to be. The subterfuge is ticking along just
STAR ISLAND By Carl Hiaasen Knopf. 337 pp. $26.95
fine until a sweaty paparazzo named Bang Abbott kidnaps Ann under the im- pression she’s Cherry. Bang’s agenda is simple. He wants a day alone with his be- loved star so he can create the photo- graphs that will compose her memorial. (Quite reasonably, he assumes she’ll be dead before the year is out. Remember all those advance obits being generated for Lindsay Lohan?) Unfortunately for him, Cherry’s latest bodyguard is a giraffe-size killer named Chemo with a finely honed instinct for self-preservation and a weed whacker where his hand used to be. And Ann her- self has a defender in glass-eyed Clinton Tyree, formerly gover- nor and now a vigilante-style nemesis to the developers who
are turning Florida’s wilderness into cin- der blocks and asphalt. Alert fans will recognize Clinton and
Chemo as holdovers from earlier Hiaasen larks, but will be comforted nonetheless by the new grotesques crowding into the grotto: Botoxed twin publicists; a strung- out drummer from a band called the Poon Pilots; a young actor playing “a corpse-diddling longboarder with the soul of a poet” in Tarantino’s latest film; and, just in passing, Cherry’s youngest brother, who has “a gallery in La Jolla dedicated to homoerotic sculpture and watercolors on butcher paper, painted with the tail of his deaf Persian cat.” How would such disparate people ever intersect in the real world? Why would someone as smart and resourceful as Ann allow herself to be kidnapped by a clod like Bang Abbott? Why is Clinton Tyree even there? (His effect on the main story
DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau
is minimal.) Longtime readers know bet- ter than to dwell on such questions: Hiaa- sen is a master not of plot but of situa- tion.
Consider three moments. Cherry’s mom, upon hearing that a scallop tastes “like a broiled tumor,” suggests trying it with ponzu sauce. Tyree’s glass eye pops out of its socket and rolls down the aisle of a bus; Ann, without a word, retrieves it from under a wet bar. A hired assassin rats out his employer for failing to up- grade him from coach to first class. In each case, the effect is strangely serene because each character is simply follow- ing the dictates of his inner logic — and is all the more surprised when some other system of logic gets in the way. A sentence like “The whole experience had soured him on contract killings” is, in the Hiaa- sen scheme of things, perfectly coherent and all the funnier for it. What keeps “Star Island” from ascend- ing to the author’s upper echelon is the op-ed staleness that clings to its satire. Wandering outside his tropic comfort zone, Hiaasen hasn’t come up with any insights more lancing than this: Show business is phony. Which, in addition to being old news, is seriously beside the point. Under the prevailing cultural ethos, phoniness is the new integrity. Kathy Griffin makes lunge after lunge at the A-list (long after she’s arrived there). Heidi Montag pouts when doctors deny her more plastic surgeries. Lady Gaga sounds like Madonna, and Madonna sounds like the Duchess of Bedford. Writ- ing a comedy about showbiz has become worse than easy, it’s become redundant. Never mind what Edmund Kean said on his deathbed: It’s tragedy now that’s hard.
bookworld@washpost.com
Bayard is a novelist and reviewer in Washington.
Hoping to catch a break, ex-trader in fraud case peddles his reality show
new york — A former Wall Street trader accused with associates of swindling more than $140 million from investors is angling for his own reality television show, eager to prove his innocence in the court of public opinion. Ross Mandell, former head of Sky Capital Holdings, was indicted in July 2009 on charges that he and five oth- ers defrauded investors in a scheme that U.S. prosecutors say pressured people to buy stock from what they called a “transatlantic boiler room” with operations in London and New York.
Released on $5 million bail, Man- dell faces as much as 25 years in pris- on if found guilty. Mandell, 53, has not secured a tele- vision deal for his show but insists that he has received “serious interest” from TV networks. Eager to prove that he has a hot story and a cast of in- triguing characters — including his wife and his mixed martial arts bud- dies — Mandell has begun filming. “This is not about money for me,”
Mandell said in explaining his ration- ale for the show, tentatively titled “Facing Life.” “This is about facing the public, clearing my name and the legacy of my wife and children,” he said. He said he also wants to humanize
himself. “People think that I’m a beast, that I’m an animal,” he told Reuters. “I’m not. . . . I’m a loving hu- man being, I’m a sober man, I’m God- fearing and a member of Alcoholics
CUL DE SAC by Richard Thompson
Anonymous.” If he gets a TV show, Mandell would be among a growing number of peo- ple who have sought redemption on prime-time TV after getting into legal trouble. After his impeachment, former Illi-
nois governor Rod Blagojevich ap- peared on NBC’s “Celebrity Appren- tice.” NFL football star Michael Vick, convicted of animal cruelty, was on the BET network with “The Michael
“People think that I’m a beast, that I’m an animal.”
— Ross Mandell, former Wall Street trader
Vick Project” to try to reveal his softer side — including scenes of him volun- teering at an animal shelter. Mandell, who lives in Boca Raton,
Fla., says he was set up by the U.S. gov- ernment because of his work helping bring U.S. companies to the London Stock Exchange.
“I took the business from them.
That’s why I’m being targeted now,” Mandell said. And, like the boxer he is in his spare time, Mandell refuses to go down without a fight. “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees,” he said. — Reuters
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