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THE RELIABLE SOURCE Wedding bell tales told


Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger HEY ISN’T THAT . . . ?


nother memorable moment from Chelsea Clinton’s wedding: Bill Clinton, on the dance floor Saturday night, making a very proud attempt at the moonwalk. See? We knew we could cadge a few more details from the guests, once they’d recovered from a three-day weekend of festivities that didn’t end until Sunday afternoon, with brunch for all 400 at a restored barn outside of Rhinebeck, N.Y. And how about those guests? Ever more


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indication that this truly was Chelsea and Marc Mezvinsky’s wedding, not a fundraising opportunity or Renaissance Weekend Redux. The only Cabinet-level guests from the White House years appeared to be Madeleine Albright and John Podesta. Podesta’s predecessors as chief of staff, like Mack McLarty and Erskine Bowles, not in evidence. Instead: Many lesser-known staffers who’d spent more time with Chelsea, including two White House butlers. And Chelsea’s


spinning instructor, manicurist, family doctor. And scads of 30-something friends of the bride and groom. Out of that category came Friday’s rehearsal-dinner entertainment: Tim Blane, a Boston-based singer-songwriter, whose band has a jazzy pop sound. The Potomac native was a Sidwell Friends classmate of the bride’s. In an e-mail he told us it was an “absolute joy” and honor to play for his friend — but sorry, no other details, out of respect for their privacy. Guests got gift bags that included


pretzels, peaches and bottles of wine from the fortuitously named Clinton Vineyards in nearby Clinton Corners, N.Y. Oh, and so you know, turns out that the


AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES STAN HONDA/ COURTESY OF TIM BLANE


Guests got gift bags with the aptly named Clinton Vineyards wine and enjoyed the jazzy pop sound of Boston’s Tim Blane.


jewelry Hillary Clinton wore with her Oscar de la Renta dress — a pink crystal necklace and earrings — was custom-made by D.C.’s Ann Hand store. As a month of speculative frenzy finally


quieted, we checked in with Jim Langan, editor of the Hudson Valley News, which had the biggest hit of the news cycle — but also the biggest miss. The small-town weekly broke the news that this super-secret wedding would happen in Rhinebeck. But it also trumpeted a scoop — echoed across the mainstream media — that guests would include Oprah Winfrey, President Obama, Steven Spielberg and Ted Turner. None of it true. Regarding the first story, Langan said,


“We’re pretty pleased. . . . It certainly raised our visibility.” As for the second, he wouldn’t say what went so wrong, but “I can think of a couple sources I won’t use again.” He added: “There was a palpable disappointment around town when they realized the biggest celebrity was going to be Ted Danson.” Finally, guests had barely cleared out of the wedding reception when the grand estate where it was held — Astor Courts, the beaux-arts mansion built for John Jacob Astor IV — was put on the market for $12million. The headline on the ad in Sunday’s New York Post: “Yes, It’s for Sale. Home of the Recent Celebrity Wedding.”


Marc and Chelsea’s invitees included two Cabinet-level guests and two White House butlers.


BARBARA KINNEY VIA GETTY IMAGES


 Rose McGowan dining at the J&G Steakhouse in the W Hotel on Sunday night (while various LeggMason tennis stars partied upstairs). Tight black dress that most bystanders agreed worked quite well on her. Unclear what the actress was doing in town, but she’s a frequent USO celeb volunteer.


Rose McGowan was in the house (the steakhouse, that is).


 Robert Mueller dutifully doing his jury duty in D.C. Superior Court on Monday. The FBI director (with an ear-pieced security guy in tow) made it all the way into the jury box for voir dire on a gun-possession case and got a warm smile from the judge . . . but he was quickly excused (the “work in law enforcement?” question seemed to do it).


She’s out of jail but not free yet


Well, that didn’t take long. After serving just 14 days of a


90-day sentence, Lindsay Lohan is out of the hoosegow and on her way to rehab. The actress, who is being punished for violating her probation in a 2007 drug case, was discharged from a Lynwood, Calif., jail during the wee hours of Monday morning — then quickly spirited away to an undisclosed residential treatment center where, per judge’s orders, she’ll spend the next three months. The truncated stint was not


unexpected: Inmates who serve time for nonviolent offenses frequently have their stays shortened to free up space and reward good behavior. Lohan’s court-ordered stay in rehab might be a tad more stringent, though. A prosecutor has said that Lohan will have to do the rest of her time in treatment.


Lohan got out after 14 days but faces three months in rehab.


THIS JUST IN


 Charlie Sheen pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault Monday in Aspen, Colo., the Associated Press reports. It was part of a deal struck with prosecutors, who dropped some heavier charges related to a Christmas Day fight with his wife. He was sentenced to 30 days in a California rehab clinic, 30 days of probation — and 36 hours of anger management.


 A flamboyant British book dealer who walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library two years ago with a rare 1623 volume of the Bard’s plays that turned out to be stolen was sentenced Monday in London to eight years in prison. A jury last month cleared Raymond Scott of stealing the First Folio but convicted him of handling stolen goods and taking them out of Britain. The Associated Press reports the judge blamed the champagne-swilling, Ferrari-driving Scott of attempting to use the book to “fund an extremely ludicrous playboy lifestyle” and impress chicks.


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 POOL PHOTO VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS


TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2010


‘Savannah Disputation’: Lots of humor in its soul


theater reviewfrom C1


sa’s fatuous arguments? What is the Word, anyway? Smith’s capable construction leads to the second miracle, which is Brigid Cleary’s juicy, en- tertaining performance as Mary, the cranky matron who slams the door in Melissa’s pretty face as the play begins. Mary’s the kind of churchgoer who comes home after Mass and starts right in with the petty gripes; she’s mean and she knows it. But she’s also smart, and the battle of wits with Melissa (Beth Hylton, the perfect flustered softball for Cleary’s hard, swift bat) can seem one- sided as Cleary dispatchesMary’s blissfully vindictive one-liners. Marvelous, too, is the balance in director John Going’s ensem- ble. As Margaret, Michele Tauber listens to the other characters with fear, as if hell were a pit she might tumble into right now if she missed a word. And Jeff Al- lin’s turn as Father Murphy is as cool and laid-back as Cleary’s is edgy; once the priest has been duped into a confrontation with Hylton’s chirpy Melissa, Allin looks like he’s caught a lasting case of indigestion. Credit the director with keep- ing all this from feeling antic and silly, and praise Cleary for know- ing exactly how much depth Mary has (more than you’d think). Though it flags in the late stages, the show typically glides along agreeably, leavening its weighty themes (thought, doubt,


BOOK WORLD OLNEY THEATRE CENTER


TELL ME MORE: Beth Hylton, left, as a perky missionary and Michele Tauber as a Catholic whose faith wavers.


faith) with foibles and funny bits. Occasionally it even seems Smith might have fashioned a much bigger play from this contentious material, but it’s not bad that he settled for a bit of devilment. style@washpost.com


The Savannah Disputation


by Evan Smith. Directed by John Going. Scenic design, James Wolk; costumes, Liz Covey; lighting design, Dennis


Parichy; sound design, Christopher Baine. About 95 minutes. Through Aug. 22 at Olney Theatre Center, 2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Rd., Olney. Call 301-924-3400 or visit www. olneytheatre.org.


page comic novel about a disem- bodied arm set in the desert in 2026.” And maybe that’s all you need to know about it because, let’s face it, the idea for such a novel will appeal to you or it won’t. In fact, I bet this very min- ute you’re either reaching for your credit card or moving on to the next article. Moody himself is just such a divisive writer. Most avid read- ers I know are either loyal fans or, like Dale Peck, who famously called Moody “the worst writer of his generation,” staunch de- tractors. However you feel about him, though, Moody is a major attraction on the literary land- scape, and his new novel, begin- ning with its dedication to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, is Moody’s attempt to plant him- self alongside such literary lumi- naries as Thomas Pynchon and Vonnegut himself. To be fair, “The Four Fingers of


Death” is a mere 725 pages long, and it’s about more than what Moody says it’s about. It opens in the year 2024 with Montese Crandall, a woebegone writer of one-sentence short stories, mar- ried to Tara Schott Crandall, an obsessive gambler and recipient of a double-lung transplant. In need of money because of his wife’s addiction and illness,


DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau


Grasping at a fresher form of fiction I


by John McNally


n a recent interview Rick Moody described “The Four Fingers of Death” as “a 900-


Montese plays a game of chess with the mysterious D. Tyranno- saurus in order to win the chance to write a novelization of the campy 1963 sci-fi movie “The Crawling Hand.” (“The Crawling Hand” is a real movie, by the way, available on Hulu.) Montese’s novelization of “The


Crawling Hand” com- poses the bulk of Moody’s behemoth novel, and it’s the story of astronauts on an ill-fated trip to Mars, culminating in the return of our chat- ty narrator’s severed arm to Arizona, where, missing a fin- ger, it wreaks havoc. Along the way, we en- counter, among other things, flesh-eating bacteria, Mexican wrestlers and a Unit- ed States that is losing population. There are two kinds of novelists: those who are like method actors, in- habiting the consciousness of a narrator so as to put us in that narrator’s shoes, and those who are puppeteers, standing above and manipulating their narrator. Moody is the latter. Unfortu- nately, the result is that I couldn’t respond to his novel on a visceral level. In fact, I rarely felt any emotions at all as I was reading it.


At times, the entire story seems to be a platform for


THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH By Rick Moody Little, Brown. 725 pp. $25.99


Moody to show off his talent for digression, whether it’s about bookstore readings, irritable bowel syndrome in outer space or acronyms like CBFs (chipped beef flakes). But there is an un- nerving iciness to the way Moody spends several pages de- tailing Montese’s wife’s double- lung transplant. The details become in- creasingly fetishistic, as when Montese ob- serves “both [lungs] were full of pus and fluid and dead car- bon-based gunk, stuff that Tara could no longer eliminate from her bronchi, stuff the color of turned may- onnaise.” Or, Tara “didn’t want to cor- rode her new lungs with the same mucoid rice pudding that had gummed up the last pair.” How much of this does the reader need?


Any similarities between Von-


negut’s work and Moody’s novel are superficial. The best of Von- negut’s novels were lean and fo- cused; he didn’t need 700 pages to write “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five.” A more notable difference is that in those classics, you feel Vonne- gut’s presence on every page, but you also invest yourself in the plights of the main characters. He makes you care. Vonnegut’s best work never feels self-in-


CUL DE SAC by Richard Thompson


dulgent. No, Vonnegut’s torch wasn’t passed on to Moody, but Moody may well be our new Richard Brautigan, another writer whose work inspired both love and hate, and I suspect that Brauti- gan, author of the international bestseller “Trout Fishing in America,” would have supported Moody’s claim in Bookforum that “the realistic novel still needs a kick in the ass. The genre, with its epiphanies, its ris- ing action, its predictable move- ment, its conventional human- isms, can still entertain and move us on occasion, but for me it’s politically and philosophi- cally dubious and often dull.” If, like me, you still find pleas- ure in those tired, old conven- tions that bore Moody, you may have serious problems with his latest, which never really tran- scends its own cleverness. But if you crave a novel that achieves the opposite of what he finds du- bious and dull in the realistic novel, “The Four Fingers of Death” may just be the book you’re looking for. Moody has certainly achieved his goals, even if they are often predictable and conventional and dated in their own postmodern ways. bookworld@washpost.com


McNally’s most recent novel is “After the Workshop.” His next book, “The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice From an Unrepentant Novelist,” will be released in September.


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