Lindsay Lohan Shopped Here

I was exhausted yesterday. The heat, the work, the night before had taken their toll as I approached my Nolita building. A huge crowd was blocking Prince Street, and my first thoughts were fire, then Law and Order, then Gossip Girl ... again . The windows of Ina, that chic shop where everybody loads up on slightly used labels, were covered with makeshift wrapping paper. I watched as paparazzi trying to steal shots through cracks were nuzzled away by cops. I asked the girl from the corner restaurant what was up and was told Lindsay Lohan was inside. A cop hustled me from my door. I said, "I live here, and I'm going home."

My neighbors came to say hey or use me as an excuse to inch closer. One asked me why the cops had the right to tell them to move if they were in a doorway or not blocking the street. It was good question, so I walked over to the closest pair of cops. I asked why Lindsay Lohan shopping was their concern and why they were rousting my neighbors, preventing us from chatting at the end of the day like we do almost every day. They answered that she was attracting a crowd and that they had to keep things moving along. I asked why she has rights over me and my neighbors—we pay rent and taxes, vote in this district, and who is she anyway? They mumbled something about keeping the sidewalks passable, and I pointed out it was they who were blocking the sidewalk. They decided to leave us alone and bother some people on the east side of the store. My little victory swelled my head, and I flirted with neighborhood beauties and cuties that I usually just nodded to. I ordered a couple of slices and took it all in.

Lindsay Lohan lives a public life yet demands to shop in private and has made a career of publicizing her private affairs. She hasn’t done anything meaningful creatively in a long time, yet her relationship with everybody downtown’s friend Samantha Ronson has made her the queen of the tabloids. Why are a half-dozen NYC cops tied up because she is shopping? Why do we care about her, idolize her, consider her more important than the doctor or fireman? Outside Ina, mothers were telling children Lohan is “a bad person who did drugs and ruined her life.” The children only saw the attention and awe in the crowd’s eyes and ducked real small under the paper to see royalty trying on Manolos. I have seen Lindsay Lohan do despicable things in nightclubs—even by my standards. Of course, second and third chances are part of America’s shtick, and mine as well. I drew hate mail when I excluded Michael Vick from my forgive list, but any friend of a Ronson is a friend of mine. I went upstairs after picking up my slices from Original Ray’s.

How does a club define celebrity? I used to tell my club door people that a celebrity is any person that will attract a crowd that we want to come to our joint if their name appears in the papers the next day. For many clubs, that relegates most athletes off the celeb list. With the exception of sexy marquee players like Derek Jeter or Michael Jordan, the rest will just attract frat boys or worse. Gangster rappers are great to see at some joints, but worse than useless at others. The lead singer of a band like Green Day may not be of much importance at Pacha. Yet Marilyn Manson transcends the genre and is a celebrity almost everywhere. The mediocre celebrity does have some value. Patrons inside will ogle them and go home and tell their friends how hot the club was because some second-rate star from The City was checking them out at the bar. The doorman evaluates the “juice” a celebrity has if they are traveling with an entourage of cousins, bodyguards, and ugly friends or groups of buddies. The crew gets chopped if the celeb is not sexy enough. Some years the “playa” can walk in with his boys in tow, but if his star fades, the doorman will squash it at the door and whisper in his ear “yo, I can’t help you, my owner’s on my back ... but if you show up with a hot girl I’ll always look out.” Shoot, even my deli guy gets in with a hot girl.

If the celebrity has cashed some of their fame into cash, the “buy the bottle get my six college pals in” mentality works too, though it works at some clubs better than others. I remember Sugar Ray Leonard, a mythical boxing champ, being turned away at Pink Elephant when it was still in the pink rather than the red. A street bottle hustler alerted me, and I grabbed the legend and sat with him and his family at my table at a nearby joint. Inside, many came by to pay respects to a man who sold out stadiums and had television audiences larger than Leighton Meester, yet Sugar needed a saccharine old dude like me to get him past the door. Celebrity often has an expiration date. A local football hero asked me to get him into a hotspot the other night, and I told them they wouldn’t care about him; he had called because he had found out the hard way the night before.