I've spent a lot of time considering Lindsay Lohan over the past decade. When I began my career as a gossip columnist she was a sweet freckled little thing whose biggest drama was battling Hilary Duff for the love of Aaron Carter.
At this very moment, Levi Johnston is undressing for a Playgirl photo shoot. But last night he was at The Box accepting an award from Fleshbot while a scrum of reporters poked and probed the Wasilla boy for a story.
The New York Daily News has trailed the Post's Page Six in the New York gossip wars for a long time. Now the paper is blowing up its gossip columns and starting over. Two major changes went down today. First, husband and wife gossip team Rush & Molloy announced this morning that they'll be moving from a daily column to a Sunday-only schedule, after more than 13 years. Second—and more dramatic—we hear that Jo Piazza, who wrote the paper's Full Disclosure column, has resigned.
We get a lot of emails every day, and often times we just don't have the time, energy, or patience to respond to them, let alone report them to you, dear readers. So here, on this sun-soaked Friday, let's take a moment after the jump to look at a few of these once lost missives who have now found a home here, in Glaring Omissions.
We hear that Jo Piazza, late of Bauer's wretched and folded-before-opening Cocktail, is going back to her old home at the New York Daily News. That's crazy! Who goes back to places they quit? Oh right, this stupid industry. She'll be a features princess or something. We also hear she found out about Cocktail's death while on a cigarette break. Heh. Anyway, fellow Cocktail castoff Piper Weiss will also be rolling up to the Daily News. So much for that self-actualizing screenplay or book proposal or whatever she was talking about.
Yesterday's announcement that Bauer was shutting down Cocktail before the first issue even launched caught many in the industry off-guard—the poor thing didn't even have a chance! "Nobody saw anything coming," says one former staffer. But another source tells us that signs pointing to the magazine's problems had been evident for the past few months. For one thing, what were they doing naming it Cocktail in the first place?
Poor former Daily News gossip girl Jo Piazza. Bauer Publishing lured her to lady-startup Cocktail mag—and now it's not even going to happen. (Still, thank God. Seeing that name on newsstands would just do us in.) Well, too bad Jane isn't going to hire the glut of ladies now to be dismissed by Bauer! [Radar]
The author needed to meet some very important person from the world of publishing, and his tightly-wound editor let him know it by waving frantically and then physically dragging him over to the corner of the bar. Dana Vachon had been born wealthy and healthy and handsome and he was right to view himself as entirely blessed, especially considering that his first novel, Mergers & Acquisitions had already gone to a second printing that very day. No one wore costumes on the night of his book party at Felix, that Eurotrash magnet on West Broadway, but there was no need for costumes to have a masque ball. Everyone knew their role and played it.
Girl reporter Jo Piazza, who earned her gossip Brownie badges as a Rush & Molloy stringer before becoming a full feature-writing girl scout, has taken up her sash and emancipated herself from the New York Daily News. She's headed for the greener pastures of New Jersey, where she'll help to launch the Bauer-owned ladygoss magazine Cocktail—no, not the eponymous magazine for men with small weiners that Balk made up—as an executive editor. Good news for Jo, but a devastating blow for newsroom gender equality: now there is almost literally no one left on the News's writing staff for Joanna Molloy to borrow a tampon from.
The intrepid girl reporter went under less cover than usual to make a point of some nature about the outfit Sienna wore at the Factory Girl premiere. Her findings? Well, apparently, dressing like a cheap hooker attracts the wrong sort of attention. Listen up, ladies:
Meta-gossip: over at the Daily News, George Rush & Joanna Molloy's two beloved stringers, Chris Rovzar and Jo Piazza, have legally emancipated themselves from their gossip family. After two years of alcoholic reporting, they're both moving up to the News' feature section, where they'll bend to the mercurial will of editor Orla Healy. If they can handle the mandatory late nights at Bungalow, surely they'll be able to endure the Irish terror.
