Posted on 09/13/2006 8:12:05 AM PDT by SmithL
Paul Hipp once played Buddy Holly on Broadway. On Monday night, he sang and played a song in tribute to media star Arianna Huffington in a stage-worthy Pacific Heights mansion on outer Broadway.
It was all part of singularly odd way to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- a festive, A-list book-launch party for Huffington's "On Becoming Fearless." The oddness of the evening, hosted by Oracle Corp. founder and CEO Larry Ellison and his romance novelist wife Melanie Ellison, was intentional and carefully planned. Guests began gathering at the Ellison's city showplace with its floor-to-ceiling bay views minutes after George W. Bush finished his televised Oval Office address. As the author explained on her own, influential Huffington Post Web site, "There is a special poignancy to starting a tour for a book about fearlessness on the five-year anniversary of one of the most fear-filled days in all our lives. It underscores my belief that fearlessness is not the absence of fear, but rather the mastery of fear."
Mastery is a Huffington speciality. Sporting a cultural comet trail that includes credits as a best-selling biographer of Pablo Picasso and Maria Callas, a staunch Republican who stage-managed her ex-husband Michael Huffington's brief political career, a reconstructed liberal columnist, California gubernatorial candidate, "Crossfire" commentator and founder of her eponymous Post, the protean Huffington plays large wherever she goes and whatever she does. Murmuring to Ellison as friends and admirers eddied and flowed around them, she grinned warmly, one powerful presence to another. The gold chain she wore against a jet-black top matched the thinly trimmed band of his beard.
In her sincere, ambitious and sometimes airy new meditation on "Love, Work and Life" aimed at women, Huffington must be the first self-help book author ever to quote Goethe, ...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
It's gotta be tough for a gal to live down seeing her husband run off...with another guy.
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