People

By Sora Song Sunday, July 25, 2004
    • Next Week: Marie Osmond Turfed Out Of Caesars
    Antiwar messages are bubbling in the public consciousness, and singer LINDA RONSTADT is making headlines. Has someone opened a door to the 1970s? During an encore at the Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas, Ronstadt called Fahrenheit 9/11 filmmaker Michael Moore a "great American patriot" and dedicated her rendition of the Eagles' Desperado to him. Some of the 4,500 audience members got so mad that they stormed out of the theater and demanded their money back. Others reportedly threw cocktails and defaced Ronstadt's concert posters. Some cheered and applauded. Hotel management responded by booting Ronstadt off the premises and asking her never to return. In an interview a day earlier, the singer expressed disdain for the city and the Aladdin, saying "I keep hoping that if I'm annoying enough to them, they won't hire me back." Another Vegas dream come true.

    Paging Dr. Weird
    Pity this is the most we'll get to see of perennially underappreciated character actor HANK AZARIA'S hunky side in his new one-hour television show, !Huff (or should it be !Buff?), which premieres on Showtime Nov. 7. Azaria plays Dr. Craig Huffstodt, a well-to-do Los Angeles psychiatrist whose life revolves around a bevy of people plagued by varying degrees of insanity. His schizophrenic brother lives behind locked doors in a private mental institution. His best friend, a lawyer, asks him to lie under oath. His mother Izzy, a manipulative, acidic and passive-aggressive divorce played by Blythe Danner, occupies the apartment above Huff's garage and makes a sport of tormenting his wife. Then there are the patients. One of them, Monique, is driven to a near homicidal rage by her boyfriend's incessant knuckle cracking — but it has never dawned on her to ask him to stop. So the question is this: What's with the exclamation point in the title? "I asked the same question. I thought it was a typo," says Azaria. "Basically, it's just kind of something that makes you look twice and makes you wonder. It should just be normal, but it's not. That's very much our show."

    Idea Starts With An I
    The chick-lit genre has two new first-time authors. Bonus points if you can guess which book comes with a free naked pinup.

    SAMMY'S HILL , a Bridget Jones clone for the Washington crowd by the former Vice President's daughter KRISTIN GORE, 26. Commissioned by Miramax Books, it's about a 26-year-old Senate aide who tags along on her boss's vice-presidential campaign and falls for another Senator's speechwriter.

    STAR by PAMELA ANDERSON (with a ghostwriter). It's about a young Florida starlet who gets discovered by Hollywood, lands a role on a TV sitcom called Hammer Time , gets breast implants, has a lot of uninhibited sex and stars in another TV series, Lifeguards Inc.