This Saturday, the House of Xtravaganza will host their first ball in over five years. I live for balls, and I’ve always lived for the Xtravaganzas; this ball will consist of 26 different competitions. Cash prizes and trophies will be awarded. Contestants are spending hundreds of hours preparing, as this is a very big thing. Some of the categories are Realness, Natural Beauty, Butch Queen-Vogue Fem, Battle Kat, Cha Cha Ruffle Bitch, and Butch Trans and His Bitch: A Night on the Town. The competition is fierce, but the love pervades it all. I am honored to be a judge; when I was asked by grandfather Hector Xtravaganza, I got goose bumps. For me it was one of the greatest honors I have received in this business. Other judges are old friends designer Malcolm Harris and Patricia Fields. There are some others who are famous and all that, but I can't mention them right now. If you have never been to a ball, I recommend that you get out and catch this one. The Moda La Envida Xtravaganza Ball is this Saturday, November 14, at Irving Plaza from 8pm. For more info, email . The following is an interview I got with an Xtravaganza contingent a couple months back.

● Madonna has moved on from being the poster girl for Louis Vuitton to the leading lady of the Dolce and Gabbana’s Spring 2010 collection; she shot the campaign yesterday with Steven Klein. [Swide]
● Winona Ryder will join Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in the ballerina romp Black Swan. [HR]
● Gwyneth Paltrow will push Nicole Kidman into becoming a man in their new film The Danish Girl. Paltrow will play painter Gerda Wegener, whose husband, played by Kidman, was the first post-op transsexual. [Us]

Rio De Janeiro’s weather may always be 80 degrees with a 98% chance of passion, but that’s all about to change. The frigid pop doyenne and part-time bulldozer impersonator Madonna is coming. This time she is putting her special brand of off-putting generosity towards helping Rio’s incredibly impoverished favelas. Having been to Brazil a handful of times and having been exposed firsthand to the kindness of a local beachside bartender in Buzios urinating in a cup and pouring it onto my jellyfished chest after surfing it’s a state close to my heart. As the entire internet knows, her most famous trip down there was for Steven Klein’s notorious W Magazine shoot. And after she had smuggled Jesus away up in her rainforest-like Sugarloaf Mountain she has been enamored with the state ever since. But I’m really torn about this, man.

In matters of romance, we must turn to true-and-trusted bibles like Pride & Prejudice to determine the course of relationships wherein one-half of the couple is clearly operating on motive while the other may be hungrily eyeing a green card. P&P's signature maxim, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," rings especially true here. In this world, few have greater fortunes than Madonna. And few besides Jesus Luz are readily available for subjugation by such a well-connected megalomaniac. So where to go from here? Marriage! The Ciccone-Luz matrimonial process has already started, with the couple plotting a trip to visit Luz's parents.

By performing enough spells to burn mid-sized Prussian villages to the ground, flighty mogulista Madonna is now finally rid of ex-husband Guy Ritchie. Which frees her up to try her own hand at being an auteur. This works well! Because there won't be awkward bedroom exchanges that find Ritchie sulking, spouting, "Oh. I'm the filmmaker in this family, but people obviously like your crappy films better than my crappy films! Harrumph," and Madonna groaning and offering, "No, no sweetheart, you're a special person," as she applies witch hazel to her chapped cheeks and swigs a half bottle of Maalox before nodding off. Oh, those olds and their Maalox. Projects that will suffer premature ends then: the album campaign for her umpteenth greatest hits and some finishing school for Malawi girls that she was heading up she was heading up. The barge is already headed for another port, and so on.

Despite the fact that Lara Stone may see her curvaceous, size-4 frame as "fat" when compared with her stick-thin runway mannequin counterparts, the model's rapidly rising star is showing no signs of slowing. Having opened numerous high-profile shows, an entire issue of Paris Vogue dedicated to her (not to mention reappearing recently in the rag sporting blackface and spawning loads of controversy), and gracing an enviable collection of magazine covers, Stone has now caught the eye of Marc Jacobs. According to Women's Wear Daily, Stone will be following in Madonna's footsteps and appearing in the next series of ads for Louis Vuitton.

Here in this post I hold the secret to getting everything you've ever dreamed of, and the secret to Madonna's fountain of youth face. First of all, to gain great riches while working at your dream job, complete with prestige and stardom, apparently all you have to do is ask for it. At least, that's how it happened for Gina Brooke, Madonna's personal makeup artist and Shu Uemura's eyelash-obsessed artistic director. On the morning of her big move to Los Angeles, determined to make the big time in Hollywood, Brooke laid out her makeup portfolios on her bed, and in her authoritative, native New Yorker tone, made it explicitly clear they were not to be touched. This was a New York moving company, so naturally the collection of all of her life's work disappeared. She began desperately reaching out to LA acquaintances for test work, immediately connecting with Caroline Murphy and landing and an agent who helped grant her two initial wishes: to work at the top at Shu Uemura, and to be Madonna's personal makeup maven.

And then you have those celebrity knife fights that you're secretly hoping will be rained on by a downpour of meteors because you can't sympathize with either fighter. Having successfully earned the ire of musical Mensan Mariah Carey, Eminem now creakily adjusts his dated brand of overly-macho pugilism to throw down with Madonna. And while a Madge-and-Em mash-up shouldn't work technically, from a kind of hometown solidarity standpoint, it should be inevitable. Here we have a city cratered with devastation, blight, and utter despair, where houses are go for $100 a pop. And we have a pair of pop stars who have managed to escape the thrashing tentacles of such blight just barely. Pop stars who should be jumping at a chance to make the most of their messianic complexes.

● Although Guy Ritchie claims to “love” ex-wife Madonna, he still thinks she’s “retarded.” [MSN]
● Who would have thought? Kevin Federline doesn’t take care of his house! The owners of his rented Tarzana house want $100K for damages, including cigarette butts and empty beer bottles in the gutter, a bent light post, and drawings all over the walls. [Dlisted]
● Law & Order’s next ripped-from-the-headlines plot will feature a Jon and Kate Gosselin-esque storyline, where the “Kate” character is murdered and the “Jon” is the suspect. [EW]

It's a crude, filthy, perfectly foul world we live in where I rummage through my spam folder to find misplaced e-mails only to read subject lines proclaiming, "Best lust recipe!" while Madonna's preferred method of hawking her new greatest hits collection includes clawing at the withered corpse of Guy Ritchie and their erstwhile marriage. On his show, David Letterman asks, "You were married for eight years?" to which she snaps, "The Bush years." Those of us not in the studio audience and therefore not within her fire-breathing radius meet her outburst with exaggerated eye-rolls. And before further dissection of how such an immortal woman can manage to age so gracelessly, a notable plus working in her favor while in Letterman's company: the hair! It's so full and wavy!