By: Jennifer Saba The sticky air didn't prevent thousands of journalists from showing up to the New York City Media Welcome bash Saturday night at the new mall-like Time Warner building.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg knew how to pull out all the stops with free-flowing liquor and food from the city's top restaurants. "A mall with free drinks and appetizers is more than just a mall!" said Robert George, an editorial writer for the New York Post. The hosts were kind enough to keep the shops open too, just in case someone wanted to duck into Williams-Sonoma to purchase a panini press.
Safe to say, no one was doing much shopping. Instead guests were trying to rub elbows with the likes of Wolf Blitzer, Sean Hannity, John McLaughlin, Matt Drudge, and Larry King. Carol Salomonson, a striking blond artist and former intern for Vice Magazine, happened to be on the receiving end of one of Larry King's glances. "When Larry King checked me out it was the skeeviest thing that happened all week," she winced before trading a white wine for a Marker's Manhattan.
It was another King, though, that held the biggest court (right outside of J.Crew, in fact). Somehow boxing promoter Don King, with no less than 50 different people gathered around him at any given time, outmaneuvered all the big egos in the room. It was clear that King, still with that shock of peppered hair and dressed in a jean jacket with an "I love America" button, was a supporter of President Bush because "he's a man with a plan."
Asked why, King took a page right of Bill O'Reilly's book, waxing non-stop on any subject that popped into his head. He covered ground from slavery to terrorism; at one point he compared Condoleezza Rice to Harriet Tubman.
Not everyone there wore their colors on their sleeves. Brant Warthen, the editorial page editor of The State in Columbia, S.C., was still debating whether or not to support any candidate in the pages of his paper because "we're not partisan." Though he did admit that if the paper did go out on a limb, they would less likely endorse a Democrat. "There's a dilemma this year because there's a lot of problems with Bush and a lot of problems with Kerry," he said.
The real dilemma, at least for a few hours, was trying to figure out what to drink next as the party went past the 11 o'clock end time.
The staff, donning orange T-shirts with various New York slogans, such as "You talking to me?" and the police manning the barricades, politely corralled the stragglers after 11:30, out the door, and onto Columbus Circle.
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