My friend, New York Post reporter Mandy Stadtmiller, was all over the gossip-o-sphere this week for going undercover to hire the country’s first legal male prostitute, Markus, who works at the Shady Lady Ranch in Nevada. She paid him $500 (well, really, The Post paid him $500) and they took a shower and a hot tub bath but didn’t fuck, which if you think about it makes their encounter perhaps the least dirty sex-for-hire scheme ever.
I was wowed and surprised but definitely not shocked when I saw that Mandy had done this. Because she is my friend, I know that she is something of a wild woman. And Markus is not the only one who has benefited from her adventurous spirit.
One week last Spring, I was sad because I’d just moved out of the place I shared with my ex and into a new joint. Sure, I was happy to be free of a relationship that was no longer working well. I’m not saying anyone should’ve given me a pity party, and no one did. It was one of those breakups that is simply the right thing to do, and ends relatively amicably, and the nursing of wounds happens in private and not on blogs. Anyway, I was fortunate and physically comfortable in a new apartment but sad. And guilty. And lonely.
Then Mandy emailed me and asked if I wanted to stay at the Plaza with her for the weekend as part of an Eloise-themed PR party they were throwing.
Um, duh.
Manderpantz and I and one Heather Fink then proceeded to wreak havoc at the Plaza hotel that weekend, most of it entirely sober havoc. We ate our weight in sugar and sexually harassed the pastry chef at the Oak Room and terrified our very patient butler (we had a butler! And a 2-bedroom suite with two bathrooms and a sitting room!) Mandy read books to little child models and, best of all, spent the entire fucking weekend DRESSED AS ELOISE. Like she walked into the Plaza that way. She didn’t change in the room. She got her ass in a taxi and then strolled into the lobby of the country’s most legendary hotel just fucking dressed as a 6-year-old children’s book character.
To wit:
In one of our bathrooms.
A photographer documented our adventures, and Mandy did a cartwheel in the middle of the Plaza’s legendary Palm Court and you could see her panties for a second and then this tourist guy was there and he stared and we’re pretty sure his wife left him after that. Oh, and we rode around on a bellman’s cart and alternately enthralled and antagonized the security staff. Heather kept fantasizing aloud about drawing on the walls in lipstick, just like Eloise. The Plaza staff giggled nervously. They were really wonderful to us, considering we were women in our twenties and thirties acting like we were starring in “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”
Mandy has also done strange and wild and interesting things like go to Northwestern University for grad school in teaching and then drop out to do comedy (ahem, I can relate to that–took me three years to get my one-year masters from Columbia); get married; get divorced; write a dating column; have a threesome with Italian pilots; get weirdly attacked by Andy Dick; interview all your favorite celebrities; appear on television; write movingly about her father, who lost his sight in combat in Vietnam; and maintain very long blonde hair.
She has done me endless solids as a fellow-traveler in the intersecting worlds of media and comedy. I suggest you enter her wonderfully weird world and examine what you find there.
