Staged Right: Tuesday Party Reports

6: 00PM Americans for Tax Reform, New York Yacht Club. Though the party invitation came as one of those fake credentials on a lanyard, they did not make you wear it. Yay. They were giving away boxes of Republican Kraft mac and cheese, or maybe that was just someone's idea of a table setting. Unclear. Otherwise the ambiance was all class, and had everything we've come to expect from the lower-key GOP parties: A jazz standards band, an open bar, a buffet with chefs cutting off huge slices of meat. . . andDavid Corn. (Does the Nation not feed its staff?) Co-sponsored by our personal favorite lobby, the Distilled Spirits Council, the ATR party also had waiters serving what we dubbed "cock-tizers" (and we don't mean those ambiguously handsome metrosexuals that we sawBoi from Troysizing up): little mini-martini glasses of mixed drinks (Manhattans, mojitos, margaritas, vodka martinis), the perfect size to swill while waiting for your main course drink. We hope this catches on.

It was incredibly white, mostly male, and aggressively conservative; the representatives of Mother Jones and the New Republic sat huddled in a corner, near the bar that servedonlyhard liquor. (Okay, that's where we were, too.)Grover Norquistmade the scene with gorgeous fiancee in tow, holding hands and generally rubbing their heterosexuality in everyone's faces. (No Log Cabins here!) Ralph Reed was there, still looking like the world's oldest twelve-year-old. We also sawPhyllis Schfaly, walking gingerly toward the ladies' room, dressed like a midwestern mother-of-the-bride. . . on acid! Just kidding: Just wearing a lot of jewel tones, that's all.Katherine Harriswas there as well, holding court, or trying to, now that she's more of a footnote than a player. Major realization: We're pretty ignorant about who the famous-for-D.C. Republicans are.

See also:

 Pledgin' With Katherine Harris (It's spelled "gams," btw, Marc.) [LA Weekly]

7: 00PM Creative Coalition reception for Kenneth Cole's "Five Minutes with the President," Kenneth Cole Rockefeller Center. We walked right in without anyone even asking if we were on the list. How good a party could this be? Left without even seeing if there was a bar.

7: 15PM Newsweek/Washington Post party, Four Seasons. New York nightlife tip: Make friends with the Page Six people. It sort of gives new meaning to the words being "whisked in." No one asked if we were on the list here, either, but that's different. Anyways: Awesome snacks (Foie gras!), and finally a party with famous for D.C. people we could recognize; i.e. journalists.Robert Siegel, sipping Glenlivet,David Corn(hope he didn't fill up at Grover's bash), your expected assortment of Newsweekians (Michael Isikoff,Richard Wolffe, but noHoward Fineman-- someone said he was taping Hardball), and the newly freeMatt Cooper.Lloyd Groveasked about our tattoos again. And at some point, the space directly in front of the entrance to party (held in the Pool Room, natch) became power player central, as some kind of gravitational pull drewMaureen Dowd,Donnie Graham,Henry Kissinger,Al Franken,Lou DobbsandLiddy Dolewithin six feet of each other. We heard that Kissinger and Franken had words, whether the words were, "War criminal!", we don't know. Of course, we hear a lot of things, including a rather easy-to-believe tale about Franken sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Four Seasons' coat room, doing some kind of interview as a scrum of folks rubbernecked. There was more to the story, actually (someone trying to pull him up, maybe?), but at this point, a very nice man was buying us champagne at the restaurant's bar and we had officially stopped paying attention.