At Britney Spears' wedding, Spears, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Selena Gomez, Donatella Versace, and Drew Barrymore attempt a spontaneous rendition of Madonna's hit song “Vogue.”

I found that at the NY Post, which calls it "awkward." I think they were just standing together and needing to pose, so the lyric "Don’t just stand there, let’s get to it/Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it" worked as a comical way to get in the spirit of producing a good visual for still photography. We weren't really meant to listen.

And let me say they all look great. I especially love Madonna's dress and find Drew Barrymore's giant black bag pretty funny. I'm sure it must mean something, maybe something like the polar opposite of a wedding dress. Drew is not currently married (and has 3 ex-husbands).

"But this summer Ivanka transformed into someone entirely alien and new. She’s a frum Donatella Versace, her platinum hair parted severely down the middle..."

"... clad in increasingly conservative floor-length dresses, with an uncanny-valley beauty that’s the inverse of her father’s slack meat sack, and speaking in the ever-huskier whisper of a phone-sex operator who went to boarding school.... In her rebellious phase, she dyed her hair blue, listened to grunge and country music, and cried over Kurt Cobain’s death, none of which her parents were excited about. She also developed another habit that friends say her father did not like — she became a prodigious reader of great novels, burying her nose in Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Austen, Morrison. In her 20s, she said her favorite book was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and she had modeled herself on its capitalist heroine, Dagny Taggart.... She was the flashy shiksa daughter of a celebrity showman in Manhattan, and Jared was the buttoned-down Orthodox Jewish real-estate heir from New Jersey, which sounds like a rom-com plot and seemed, at least at first, like a way for Ivanka to break with tradition; she’d gone with a straight arrow for a mate instead of a wild man.... With Jared by her side, Ivanka left her hard-partying crowd for tamer friends.... After her father’s election, Ivanka... told friends she wanted to stay in New York. Jared argued for D.C., saying they needed to protect her father, and, by the way, now anything — everything! — was theirs for the taking. At their synagogue, at least a few people began referring to Ivanka, the first Jewish member of an American First Family, by a new nickname, that of a savior. ...[T]hey called her Esther, after the beautiful Jewish wife of a Persian king who convinced him to cancel an order to annihilate the Jews."

A couple snippets from the long New York Magazine article, "Ivanka Aeternum After the White House, she probably can’t go back to the city that made her. So she has cannily devised another exit strategy" by Vanessa Grigoriadis."

"She’s a frum Donatella Versace...." I know Donatella Versace, the 64-year-old fashion mogul who has aged quite weirdly... but what is "frum"?

Wikipedia says:

Frum (Yiddish: פֿרום‎, lit. 'religious', 'pious') is a word that describes Jewish religious devotion.... The term connotes the observance of Jewish religious law in a way that often exceeds its bare requirements.... Frum can be used in a negative sense for 'hypocritically pious', 'holier-than-thou', 'sanctimonious'; or in a positive sense for 'pious', 'devout', 'God-fearing', and 'upright'.... 

"This is my first ever blog, so I forgive me if I make any 'blogosphere faux pas.'"

No no no, Donatella Versace. We will not forgive you. But we appreciate your humility as you enter our domain. So go ahead, tell us all about the White House Correspondents' Association dinner:

The evening started with drinks at Christopher Hitchens' house.

Just getting started!

Then onto the Newsweek pre-dinner cocktail...

How does one get onto a cocktail? I'm picturing that cartoon character from the Playboy Magazine jokes page...

... and then the actual dinner....

The dinner was a glamorous affair, as it was last year, but this time round there was a very different atmosphere, in ways that seemed to me to symbolize the huge changes that are taking place in this country as a result of the new administration.

The first thing that hit me was that nobody was using their BlackBerrys. This is a pet hate of mine, and last year lots of the guests were glued to their devices. While George Bush did a little comedy — conducting the orchestra and entertaining people with a speech — the audience was just not that attentive. Many people were talking away and those dreaded BlackBerrys were out in full force.

This year, the minute Barack Obama stood up to speak, there was silence....

There was a friendly atmosphere, it was cool, younger, relaxed and glamorous. Glamour was something that seemed to be completely lost before....

The key to this administration's appeal is, I think, that it's so energetic and positive, and (yes, one of my favourite words) glamorous!...

Glamour. Is it wrong to have glamorous leaders that glamorous people find glamorous?

It was a long night but the time flew — it went so go quickly. People genuinely had fun. I've been to so many of this kinds of events where you have people looking at their assistants as if to say, "Can I leave now?" There was none of that.

Hey, I want an assistant, an assistant that can read my eyes when they say "Can I leave now?"!

Everyone was having a good time, and I was amazed by how members of the Obama administration, high-powered people like the Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, and the Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, were just walking round the room in a really cool and relaxed way. Rahm was carrying his jacket slung over his shoulder. These people look like they know what they are doing.

And, yeah, what are they doing? But they look like they know what they are doing. Per Donatella. With their cool, relaxed walk around the room and their jacket slung over their shoulder. What a relief from Bush!