(I am entranced by this couple because of a story about them their daughter told me. Last year at their annual Thanksgiving fete — when they all dress up in vintage Pilgrim outfits for dinner — an elderly aunt in full Pilgrim regalia started inexplicably and without warning vomiting green stuff onto her plate. Everyone kept on talking calmly and handed napkins over without looking, pretending nothing was happening. “Are you OK, Ninnie?” asked the hostess politely, putting another bite of roast into her mouth. This is the behavior of true wealth. Old money. If somebody vomited on my dinner table I’d probably flip the whole thing over from excitement, peasant that I am.)

In any case, we took their advice and went and saw “Kiss Me, Kate” at the Martin Beck Theatre in Manhattan.

The production is a perfect example of the golden age of theater — when it was squeaky and clean and somehow magical in a non-high-art kind of way; a sociological piece of gilded yesterday. The thing your grandparents would have thought was a killer piece of new, razzle-dazzle entertainment. All the now-exhausted dramatic rules were new back then; the boy-meets-loses-gets-girl-back thing, the predictable dramatic twists, etc. You can’t, after all, find much to say that is negative about Cole Porter. No matter how jaded thou art, you can’t see “Kiss Me, Kate” and not sing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” around the house for days afterwards. Old King Cole knows the abuses of the humankind and wrote about them as cleverly as anybody ever has.

However, as much as I loathe the uptightness of p.c. ultra-feminism, I have to say that the rampant sexism inherent in “Kate” and other dumb entertainments of the time (e.g. worthless, prehistoric Julia Roberts prototype girlie movies like “Adam’s Rib”) reminds me of watching a film in which the protagonists are wealthy plantation owners in the Deep South before the Civil War and all the black servants cringe vapidly and say “Lawdy lawdy, yes massuh” and tap dance in the stable and eat watermelon. It makes one cringe, no matter how cute and/or historically innocent the overall production.

The two main females in “Kate” are Bianca, the slut, the little blond piece of ass who can barely speak her own native language, and who sings gleefully about whoring herself for expensive clothes — “If [my passage, and by extension, my prostitution on] the Gable boat means a sable coat, anchors away!” — and Lilli, the powerful-bitch movie star protagonist, the “Kate,” who as a sophisticated woman has to endure countless indignities in the name of love at the hands of her egotistical, pussy-hound ex-husband, then comes crawling back at the end pledging on her knees to be his spaniel. There was a small concession in this production to making this gesture less nauseating when Lilli/Kate winks at Bianca the whore as if to say, “Watch me make this bastard eat this line of simpering wifey bullshit and I’ll weasel my way back into marriage, ha ha ha,” and it all basically stinks.

The thing that I object to most in this production is the fact that all of the deliciously naughty Cole Porter double entendres are ham-fistedly reduced to single entendres. “Where is the life that late I led? Where is it now?” sings Freddy, the newly married stud character, referring to the excitement of his randy bachelor days. He gazes down at his crotch and shrugs. “Totally dead.”

The whole production is lousy with dick double-takes and dry humping, which is all fine in and of itself, but removes all of the amusing upper-crustish style of Porter’s artfully concealed smut. I suppose the producers thought that if they didn’t over-indicate the naughtier meanings, nobody in the super-refined and innocent New York theater audience could possibly arrive at the lewder suggestions themselves.

“If she says your behavior is heinous, kick her right in the Coreolainus,” sing the gangsters in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” That’s not too vague, right? “When your baby is pleading for pleasure, let her sample you measure for measure,” croons the gangster, mime-jacking-off his giant schlong. Honestly, did we need that, people?

“Kate” also has a lot of ha-cha-cha “high-energy” dance numbers. These unfortunately feature weirdly uncharismatic performers, and result in a whirling gravitational vortex of non-excitement. It’s really awful when everyone onstage is dancing as fast as they can, and spasmodically clapping their hands and acting as if they were involved in an inspired, full-gospel, skirt-hoisting kind of rave-up, yet the number still fails to get off the ground. The more energy the performers unsuccessfully try to create onstage, the more oxygen gets sucked out of your brain.

For all of its highbrow, top-shelf entertainment, there is a vast aesthetic age gap. The blue-haired rich oldsters and their grandchildren were the people who really got their money’s worth out of “Kate.” I was mildly amused, mostly by the lyrics. My date was stone-bored halfway through.

It made me try to figure out what I really consider to be great entertainment, and where I could find it. I realized that I thought the best part of “Kate” was when the fabulous set-pieces derailed and didn’t go away; the “star’s dressing room” set didn’t pull back into the darkness, and Padua suddenly tumbled from the proscenium and crashed down on top of the dressing room and the landscape didn’t unroll all the way, and the singers were supposed to be doing some kind of bucolic Maypole dance amid flourishing trees and there was nothing behind them but a dark box and some confused chubby guys with headsets on.

A stage manager in a horrible Bill Cosby sweater came onstage, stopped the show and apologized, citing technical failures, and promised to have us “back in Italy shortly.” The lights came up, the curtain came down. Mid-show! The audience was astonished. A full-scale Broadway major-league fuckup! My, my!

But some of the finest entertainment of the evening was leaving the theater and watching the audience: little girls in their best dresses, not-so-little girls in their best dresses, which happen to be inappropriate disco-date leather micro-minis and tight angora sweaters.

I was struck by a quote in a recent interview in the Onion with rock poster-artist Frank Kozik. He was discussing some paintings of his that he refuses to exhibit in the United States: “There’s stuff I do for other places I absolutely won’t allow to be disseminated in the U.S. because nobody here would really understand,” Kozik said. “I do a lot of sort of high-end stuff in Japan with this group of people who own lifestyle kinds of businesses … a lot of the older cats were beatnik types in the ’50s and ’60s.”

“There’s no ageism over there,” he continued, “so I work with a circle of people in Japan where they’re all super cool, but they’re from 17 to 65 in age and they all work together as a big organic family. It’s a very cool scene over there, very intellectual. It’s also extremely fucking anti-everything. So, for example, we do super-fancy designer stuff where you take Klan imagery and twist it toward making fun of Japs. Like, I did a whole series of ultra-fascist Nazi stuff, but it’s all because they like to look at it and it’s not really Nazi stuff. It’s kitsch, almost. Does that make sense? You take this bizarre power imagery and turn it on its head. It’s a really complicated process for an American to understand, so I don’t let that shit out over here, because people would flip out.”

Kozik’s remarks in the Onion made me want to swim to Japan, made me feel like there was a ray of hope somewhere, an irreverent planet within the all-too-reverent one. I was exposed to something like that here in New York recently, but generally these klatches of ultra-cool bizarro stuff are remote and hard to find.

Richard Metzger recently had an event at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom called “Disinfo.con,” a sort of paranoid, black-clad and tragically hip conference featuring speakers from the intellectual weirdo elite and various conspiracy theorists. Basing his idea on the 1979 Nova Convention in honor of William S. Burroughs, Metzger expressed a desire that the event be “one part rave, one part performance, one part mind-fuck.”

Of all the speakers, I was most impressed with Adam Parfrey, publisher of Feral House books and author of “Apocalypse Culture (Vols. I and II).” Parfrey proved, to me at least, that the most interesting stuff in the world, entertainment-wise, is manifestations of bizarre, isolated belief systems and/or other wild anthropological mutations. The ways people flip out.

During Parfrey’s brief time onstage, the audience was shown slides of art from the “Nubian Hebrews,” a sect that utilizes images of Jesus and the Holy Mother looking like Lionel Richie and Toni Braxton. This segued into a discussion about the multimillion-dollar breeding of a pure red heifer by a Texas oilman for reasons of promoting Armageddon, and talk of a group of people who want to try to clone Jesus out of DNA from his foreskin, which they say is in the possession of a group of cloners from the Bay Area at this very moment.

My personal favorite topic of Parfrey’s was the tale of Brice Taylor, a woman who claims that Bob Hope and Henry Kissinger forced her to be their sex slave through Satanic mind control. Taylor also claims that she was forced to be the romantic female lead in a “dolphin porn” movie shot by Sylvester Stallone, who also tried to force her to have sex with a sea turtle. The turtle, claims Taylor, was “too nice” to have sex with her. She writes that she was eventually saved by Jesus. Needless to say, I found Parfrey’s collection of whacked-out human oddity souvenirs totally interesting and entertaining.

Screw “Kate,” screw Broadway — maybe I’m a tacky sensationalist, but give me a vomiting Pilgrim and some dolphin porn any day over reheated operettas of the tepid past. We should all force our grandmothers to go to Marilyn Manson concerts instead of letting them cart off on the comfy tour bus to another pastel, whitewashed Broadway abortion. We should diminish the aesthetic age gap. I’ll go to Japan to find others of like mind if I have to, but I hope I don’t have to.

Gee whiz, was it so long ago that Manson was frolicking with the real Wood in semi-clad, plasma-drenched bliss? Guess something had to change after Manson told Spin earlier this year that “I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer.”

Manson may be about as relevant today as a VHS of “Dawson’s Creek” and a bicep full of tribal tattoos. And paying his loathsome shtick any notice might be construed as giving him exactly what he wants. But the fact that anybody would be hungry enough for controversy that he’d create this grim little six and a half minute bit of torture porn doesn’t make the final product any less revolting.

You can make meaningful songs about sex and death. Exhibit A: Eighty percent of the blues canon. You can create interesting videos that dance around themes of violence. And it may be healthier to fantasize about pummeling your girl than actually doing it.  But in Manson’s black-gloved hands, it’s not artistic expression; it’s not thought-provoking music. It’s not outrageous and envelope-pushing. It’s a cynical exploitation of abuse served up as entertainment. And it’s just gross.

But then there were a few other problems.

“When it came to Lara’s tight-fitting trousers there was very little we could do about this guy’s shape,” the source said. “His relevant bits were strapped down, and it can’t have been very comfortable for him, but with clever camera angles and lighting, the audience will never know the difference.”

Now they will.

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Eminem: Mama’s boy?

“People should know that when they look at Eminem and think what a cool, tough guy he is, they should remember that he actually lived at home with his mom until he was 26.”

– Eminem’s mother , Debbie Mathers, on her son’s reluctance to cut the umbilical cord, on Peoplenews.com.

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Say his name … correctly

Dear David Letterman.

The next time Jake Gyllenhaal — or his sister Maggie, for that matter — is on your show, please try to pronounce his name correctly. It would mean a lot to the young actor.

“My last name simply means ‘golden hall’ in Swedish but it really gets butchered in English,” Jake, who has appeared in “The Good Girl” and “Lovely and Amazing,” told celebrity researcher Baird Jones the other night at the premiere party for “The Secretary,” in which Maggie stars.

“Sometimes it just comes out funny, like when I was on David Letterman plugging my next movie, ‘Moonlight Mile,’ and Letterman kept calling me ‘Jill-and-Ham’ the whole time,” he says.

Other people find a way to get ‘guile’ or ‘jilted’ in there, but Gyllenhaal would like you all to know, it’s pronounced Gill-en-hall.

Are we clear now, Dave?

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Angst over angst

“They only go to me for angst.”

– Ralph Fiennes bemoaning the dearth of comedy parts he’s offered, in the London Express.

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Juicy bits

Guess what? Marilyn Manson’s been painting something other than his face. The goth rocker has painted a series of watercolors depicting people who look like him, people who look like corpses and then people who look like Hitler … only with a female body. His work is now on sale as part of an exhibit called “The Golden Age of Grotesque” in Los Angeles. “I make things that most people would consider grotesque a little bit prettier,” Manson told the press. And I must say, Hitler, as depicted by Manson, does have a nice set of jugs.

On to happier news … A film version of “Bewitched” — starring Nicole Kidman. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the ex-Mrs. Cruise is in talks to make the most of her perky nose and play the role of Samantha, everyone’s favorite newlywed witch. Producers are also said to be courting Mike Myers to play her befuddled husband, Darren. Or is that Darwood?

And heeeere’s a denial from Johnny Carson that he’s seriously ill. Carson’s people have confirmed that, yes, Carson is suffering from emphysema as the National Enquirer reports, but that no, he’s not, like, dying or anything. “I’m dealing with it the best I can and it is not causing me any major problems,” Carson told the press this week. I guess we’ll know it’s bad when Ed McMahon stops laughing.

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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.

Anyone in the market for a maternity-underwear model?

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The sanest woman in Hollywood

“I don’t think there is anything good about fame. ‘Tables in restaurants.’ People say that but, then again, why don’t you just call the day before? Or go eat somewhere else?”

– Jodie Foster on the invariably losing nature of the fame game, in the Toronto Sun.

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Lucky Liza?

Some honeymoon.

Not only have Liza Minnelli and David Gest spent the first days of their marriage tirelessly working the interview circuit in London to maximize their wedding press bounce, they were almost robbed to boot.

Word out of Britain is that, as the couple was being driven away from one of their many TV appearances in a chauffeured car, some pesky youths reached in through a window while the car was stopped at a light and tried to grab the $15,000 diamond crucifix Minnelli was wearing.

Luckily, the couple’s driver figured out what was going on and managed to make a speedy getaway, leaving the kids empty-handed — and Minnelli a bit shaken up.

“It was incredible. It was so terrifying,” Minnelli told the London Evening Standard. “There were these three kids who just picked on us at the lights. They obviously saw what I was wearing and tried to grab it … It was really horrific, very frightening.”

Gest, however, was far less freaked by the attempted manhandling of his wife’s property. “We’re New Yorkers,” he told reporters, “so nothing scares us.”

Let’s just see how the rest of the honeymoon goes.

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Found art

“I am equally the artist as much as I am a work of art.”

– Marilyn Manson on himself (what else?), on NME.com.

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Burnin’ down the house

Oops! ain’t the half of it.

Is Britney Spears showing the strain of her new alleged singlehood or does she just have a few things to learn about fire?

According to Spears’ mother, Lynne, the pop princess almost burned down the New York apartment she was staying in the other day after she lit a candle in front of an air vent and then split the scene.

During Britney’s four-day stay in the Big Apple, she and her friends “shopped every day!” Britney’s mom writes on her daughter’s official Web site.

They went “out on the town a few times too,” she says, adding that “one of those nights, they all came in to a real mess! Brit had left a candle burning in front of an air vent. The wall caught on fire, and the fire department had to come to put it out.”

That’s certainly one way to meet one of New York’s Bravest … but it’s not the first time Spears has had bad luck with a flame.

“This is the second time this has happened,” writes Lynne. “Brit left a candle burning in her bathroom in our Louisiana home” and “caught her bathroom on fire.”

Well, we can only assume she had her reasons for lighting a match in there.

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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.

Well, you know what they say … the couple that pisses together kisses together. Or something like that.

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More terlet talk

“She actually sneaked into my room once and cellophaned my toilet. Puh-lease! She’s strictly amateur night.”

– George Clooney on Julia Roberts’ inadequacy as a practical joker, in Controversy magazine.

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Look who’s livin’ like a Bing!

A blow for those of you still holding out hope that Hugh Grant would reunite with Elizabeth Hurley and act as in loco paternis to her unborn child.

The actor has just plunked down about $5 million for his own bachelor pad in Kensington, West London, Peoplenews.com reports, thus adding weight to his claims that fatherhood is simply not his bag.

The deluxe two-bedroom penthouse apartment reportedly comes complete with a hot tub on its terrace and is tricked out with remote-control-operated windows, stereo and giant master-bedroom movie screen. Maybe if Hurley’s kid came with remote-controlled diapers …

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Victim of the TV mafia

“There’s a terrific line from ‘Godfather 3′ — ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.’”

– Eriq LaSalle on how he feels to be headed back to “ER” even though his character, Dr. Benton, had been written out of the show at his request, in Variety.

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Juicy bits

Guess who’s checked into the heartbreak hotel: Nicholas Cage and Lisa Marie Presley. After 10 blissful months together, the disparate duo is dating no more. “Nicolas Cage and Lisa Marie Presley ended their 10-month relationship two weeks ago,” their publicists told the press. “They hope to remain friendly.” Cage, for his part, was reported to become quite friendly with any number of comely young women at a Super Bowl party last weekend, and Presley’s been spending some friendly time with her ex, John Oszajca. So they neither of them’s exactly all shook up.

Ever wonder what Marilyn Manson was like as a kid? VH1 has taken it on itself to head back to the goth rocker’s hometown to talk to family and friends about his early years, when he was known as Brian Warner and presumably had normal eyeballs. “He was just like any normal kid growing up in the Midwest,” Manson’s childhood buddy Charles Days recalls in “Driven: Marilyn Manson,” which will air later this month. “He had the poofy hair, too — the 1980s hair, mud flaps on the back. The look for our group back then was a jean jacket, collar up, maybe even a Bon Jovi T-shirt underneath.” So his Satan worshipper look actually sounds like an improvement.

Mike Myers, you’ve got a diehard fan in Britney Spears. Spears recently told London’s Radio 1 that she was “so excited” to appear in the Austin Powers film formerly known as “Goldmember,” she could barely contain herself. “I’ve seen the first two films and I think he’s the funniest man in the world,” she said. Which doesn’t mean the role came easily to her. “It was hard to keep in character,” she confessed, “trying to be this sexy vixen while he pelvic-dances and cracks me up.” Oops, let’s take it again …

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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.

One person’s delusion, he says, is another’s destiny. “I don’t believe that God has blessed me with the gifts that he’s blessed me with just to be an actor or just to be a rapper,” Smith insists. “I think the connection that I have with people I want to use for more than making money.”

Now where have we heard that before?

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In case you wondered …

“I’m very much a people person.”

– Brad Pitt on his love of the human race, in the Calgary Sun.

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Merchant’s missionary zeal

Celebritus humanititis strikes again.

Like David Schwimmer and Will Smith before her, former 10,000 Maniacs frontwoman Natalie Merchant has been felled with the dread disease that causes the rich and famous to pledge their readiness to give it all up for the good of humanity.

Displaying a sure symptom, Merchant tells the Associated Press she’s been thinking about casting aside her meaninglessly lucrative career as a singer to work with disadvantaged children.

“I’m surprised that I ever earned a living this way. I just joined a band to get out of my hometown and see other places,” she informs the AP.

And while she plans to put out at least two more albums, Merchant figures she’ll hang up her touring shoes within the next few years. “I don’t see myself at 45 living on a tour bus and leaping up and down on stage,” she says.

So what will she do instead? “I’ve thought of starting a nonprofit theatre group or some type of travelling arts group,” Merchant muses. “I feel like the experience with theatre and dance is not available to many kids who are economically unable or isolated.”

Hey, what’s the matter here?

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Manson’s Marquis cut

“I think it will make people want to have sex.”

– Marilyn Manson on his upcoming album, which includes “very groove-oriented beats” inspired by the Marquis de Sade, in the Alternative Press.

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Juicy bits

Pee-wee porn or poor Pee-wee? That is the question now that former “Playhouse” denizen Paul Reubens has found himself back in the headlines. It seems Reubens, who only recently appeared to have put that notorious public masturbation episode behind him, has landed back on the wrong side of the vice squad. According to the New York Post, the L.A.P.D. recently searched Reubens’ home for child pornography and carted off thousands of videotapes and scads of racy photos, magazines and books — along with three computers containing what the National Enquirer has called “lewd material.” Reubens’ spokesman insists the comedian is innocent of child porn charges and says the seized goods were the quirky comedian’s “vintage kitsch and erotic art and photography collections which Paul has collected for over 30 years.” The L.A.P.D. is said to be “cataloguing” its finds. A dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

Flashback. “Hogan’s Heroes” is headed back to the big screen. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Russell Crowe is set to star in a film version of the 1960s TV show about the wacky hijinks of the American colonel Hogan and his hapless German captors. This is not to be confused with the upcoming biopic of “Hogan” star Bob Crane, starring Greg Kinnear. I see nossink.

In more family-oriented revival news, a live-action movie of “The Jetsons” is reportedly headed your way. Based on the classic ’60s cartoon about a family of the future, the film will be directed by Rob Minkoff, the man behind “Stuart Little” and “Stuart Little 2.” Jane, stop this crazy thing!

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Miss something? Read last Tuesday’s Nothing Personal.