When I got to the Waverly Inn last night, the party Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive threw to celebrate the publication of her senior contributing editor Sheila Weller's Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—And the Journey of a Generation was well underway, with Weller cheerfully greeting guests at the front door. I managed to get one photograph before the Glamour publicists let me know that Patrick McMullan's emissary was the only person allowed to take pictures, and only in the foyer. So I made my way to the main party room, immediately got claustrophobic, and worked my way to the back, where there's a "conservatory" with a high glass roof. En route, I ran into Dawn Raffel, who told me about the short story collection she'd just sold to Dzanc Books, and then I met up with Lesley Dormen and her husband, and explained to them how blogging wasn't going to kill me just yet. Lesley caught sight of Isaac Mizrahi, and somebody who sorta looked like Carly Simon kept walking through the room and then turned out to actually be Carly Simon. The party's soundtrack fit the period, and when I commented that it was like being trapped in my parents' car on a roadtrip in the summer of '78, half a dozen boomers reacted as if I'd just kicked their dogs.

On my way to get a fresh glass of wine, I believe I may have overheard Leslie Bennetts and James Wolcott talking about birdwatching in Central Park. But avoiding the packed main hall meant that I missed most of the boldface name sightings, until freelance writer Noelle Ashley came over to say hello and gradually filled me in about spotting Dave Zincenko, Keith Kelly, and Kevin Haynes of InStyle, along with an assortment of other staffers from the Times, the Post, and Glamour. One staffer from the mag who didn't turn up, who I'd had an eye out for, was special projects director Andrew Kilbourn—his debut novel, a fashion-themed thriller called Photogenic, was in the middle of a two-day auction, and I'd heard that two diffferent divisions of one of the bigger conglomerates were playing tug-of-war over the manuscript...