Overheard in Kirkland Dining Hall...

GIRL 1: Are you going to the formal?

GIRL 2: What's the point? Formals are expensive. I want to have fun if I go. But guys can't dance, so you end up just standing around, mingling with other awkward couples. The only way to have fun is to go with a gay guy since they can all dance.

GIRL 1: So you either look good with a hot date and suffer through the misery of the actual dance or you look lame with a gay date and get to enjoy the party.

GIRL 2: I hate formal season.

TREND-O-RAMA: HOLLYWEIRD

December should be about mistletoe and dreidels, family and friends, giving and sharing, and a steady supply of good old holiday cheer. The season has its immutable rituals-looking for that perfect tree, basting that hormone-injected dinner bird, setting up lighted lawn decorations (in Springfield Fla. this week, one man put up a display of two reindeer getting it on, much to his neighbors' horror-but that's an exception), and frantic last-minute dashes to the mall for almost-forgotten gifts. Ah yes, Holiday Happiness is everywhere-everywhere, that is, except Hollywood, where the promise of even temporary stability makes everyone act even weirder than usual.

If anybody has the right to throw a shameless multi-million dollar storybook wedding that spares no expense, it should be Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. After all, Douglas is a freakin' billionaire and well, he's never gonna get a girl like Catherine again. (Let me say for the record, that I still am floored by the fact that she had a baby. That means they had/have sex. Yikes.) Why, then, did they have to turn it into such a sketchy affair? First, Douglas secured an exclusive $1.4 million deal with OK! Magazine to publish the official wedding photos, knowing full well that every other tabloid would run unauthorized pictures anyway. "I wanted to avoid a media circus," he insisted, but with hundreds of paparazzi barricaded outside the Plaza, it looked awfully like plain greed. Moreover, instead of accepting gifts, the couple requested "donations" into their four-month old son's trust fund. Well, they didn't call it a trust -they used the euphemism, "giving fund" to describe the multi-million dollar account that young Dylan can open up in 21 years to make contributions to charity. "We want him to learn the joy of giving," said Douglas. But can you imagine the awkwardness in the room as celebrities pulled out their checkbooks to give thousands of dollars to a newborn who can't do anything but burp and vomit?

If giving was the spirit in the Douglas household, then stealing was the name of the game in the Madonna mansion. While she was sleeping upstairs earlier this week in her London palace, thieves broke in, nabbed the keys to her Range Rover and drove off. (You get inside Madonna's house and then you steal her car? And I thought the British were revolutionary!) This is the second time in six months that Madonna's house has been burglarized. And to think, she moved to London because it was "safer."

Ghosts of Christmases past haunt Elton John this week as the secrets of his private spending sprees continue to leak out of his legal imbroglio with a former lover. John, of course, is the world's most famous compulsive shopper-he once boasted that he could find a shop in the Sahara desert and has four luxury homes, and all sorts of vintage cars, jewelry, outrageous costumes and clothes. Out of court came the precise figure: John once spent $56.95 million in a 20 month period, more than $468,000 of it on flowers alone. When asked to explain the petals purchase, he responded weakly, "I like flowers."

Meanwhile, Marilyn Manson and Moby won't be sending each other flowers anytime soon. Manson always makes it a point to spoil Christmas with one of his shenanigans-last week, he sent his drummer to the hospital after breaking his collarbone with a microphone during a particularly violent stage performance. Moby took it upon himself to be the voice of reason: "It was disgusting. That kind of violence is totally unnecessary onstage." Manson's response: "On my stage that kind of violence is completely necessary. It's just unfortunate that Moby wasn't injured. My drummer has offered to beat him up with his good arm."

And the cherry on the top of this holiday sundae of good cheer is the fact that Robert Downey Jr. should make it back to jail just in time for Christmas pudding. Hooray.

POP CULTURE 101: BRAD, BEN, AND GWYNNIE WATCH

To those who think pop culture is "fluffy," I make a very bad face at you. I have a feeling that computer science and math majors don't read my column-which is a shame, because pop culture is a very rigorous quantitative science. For example, when Ben Affleck was seen on the New York club circuit with new galpal Shoshanna Lowenstein in tow, I had to go running to my TI-85 to see how this affected the Brad-Ben-Gwyneth status charts. Confused? Check out Arts in print for the data.

IN THE (K)NOW SUPERSTAR!

It's an off week for the It Boy and It Girl Club, but something so dramatic happened that I had to choose an It Girl this week...

It Girl: Brooke Lampley '02... Every boy has been waiting patiently for the day when Brooke Lampley would be single again. Drop-dead beautiful, talented, intelligent, funny and stylish, she cuts her own path wherever she goes. The problem, of course, was that she was attached-and that, as we all know, makes your stock plummet. Well, now she's not. And thus buzz is spreading. Let the wooing begin.

SOMAN'S SHORTS

Visit www.somanintheknow.com followed by www.amihotornot.com, and you'll be giggling with glee... Last year, someone said that my column reminded them of Liz Smith and I threw a hissy-fit. The memory came back when I read this absolutely inane quote from Smith protesting Robert Downey Jr.'s arrest: "We'd better change the draconian drug laws of America before this country sinks under the weight of a prison population so huge that if we sent them all to Harvard instead of jail, we'd be a nation of educated achievers." Uh, no. I think if you sent the entire prison population to Harvard, dining hall decorum would suffer tremendously.... Word has it that Meg Ryan banished any girls who had the hots for Russell Crowe on the set of Proof of Life. If anybody even made goo-goo eyes at the guy, she'd have them on the next plane out... I tend to luck out when picking paper topics. For my junior paper for English, I wrote on American Psycho, handing it in a couple weeks before the movie came out. Now, just as I'm immersed in thesis work on postmodern fairy tales and a book called Wicked by Gregory Maguire, I get word that ABC is running the miniseries of the novel in the spring (Demi Moore might play the Wicked Witch of the West in this revisionist Wizard of Oz). Shouldn't I get points for picking hot topics?... A WB press agent gushed, "Tori Spelling is the next Lucille Ball." Where's the Kaopectate?... Blah blah UC presidential candidates blah blah. I'm tired of presidential elections. They're sooooo last month... I keep thinking about the budding romance of Ben Affleck and Shoshanna Lowenstein and my stomach starts to hurt. After Ben got dumped by Gwyneth, he tried to get back with her for a while and then gave up-since it finally sank in, he's been dating beneath him. Is that a general course of life? How long after breaking up with the love of your life does it take before you end the random rebound flings and actually start looking for somebody worthy?

Questions, Comments, Back Rubs? E-mail schainan@fas.harvard.edu

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