The Andy Cohen Diaries (30 page)

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16, 2014

I have tickets to
Hedwig
Saturday and the question is whether to bring Liza or the date from last night. I would probably have a better time with Liza, but when was the last time I brought a date to a show?

Bruce and I took Barkin to Cafe Cluny for a birthday lunch. Amy Poehler was there and we awkwardly said hi.

We taped Lindsay Lohan tonight for air tomorrow. There was a bet going in the control room about what time we would start taping. It was
Price Is Right
rules, so whoever came closest to the time without going over won. Dave Stanley won the pool—seventeen bucks. He guessed 8:34 and we started at 8:37. She had a crown, which she decided she was “over” midway through the show and took off. She was incredibly nice and kind of fragile. Her
Housewives
intro line brought down the house: “I'm through with mug shots and ready for my Oscar.” I kept her cigarette butt and put it on a shelf in the Clubhouse next to Patti LaBelle's half-eaten Life Saver, and as I write this I'm wondering where we put the fake joint Seth Rogen rolled on the show. I know we kept it. Hmmm.

The live show was a treat: Joan Rivers and Tracy Morgan. I fangirl over Joan every time I get a chance to be with her on TV. I go right back to watching her on
The Tonight Show
and pinch myself that she's on my show. Speaking of pinched, you think she's a little more unrecognizable every time you see her, but then she opens her mouth and whips out some Helen Keller jokes and “It is JUST…” and
she
is just … Joan! She often brings a list of topics she wants you to talk about and tonight was “death, plastic surgery, Melissa, Kanye West.” It is a joy to set her up to land a joke and watch her kill, and she did. Amanda and Jim were there—he's a big Joan fan and I got him a pic during a commercial. Tracy Morgan was in awe of her and we kept the after show going for a long time. It was a purely joyous night.

THURSDAY, APRIL 17, 2014

I'm 165 pounds! I can't even think of the last time I was this weight, maybe ten years ago. Wacha played with a very barky dog named Bellini at the dog run. Bellini's mouth doesn't move when he barks, so I've decided he's a ventriloquist dog.

I hailed a cab to take me to 30 Rock and was all excited when I opened my cab door and it was a LadyDriver wearing Dior sunglasses. I thought we were going to have a breezy fun ride uptown but she was mean as fuck. Scary, actually. She wanted nothing to do with me, my newspapers, my casual convo about traffic and Taxi TV. In summary, she was nasty. Nonetheless I gave her a three-dollar tip on fourteen dollars and she didn't seem too pleased with that either. Is that actually a really bad tip? I spent the day at Bravo. It was great to be back there. I need to go more. Julia Roberts isn't doing
WWHL
for
The Normal Heart
in May, so that's a bummer. I guess that schmooze over Oscar weekend didn't do the trick. One day …

Went to the Waverly for dinner with Mark and Kelly. Our waiter's skin was amazing and we bet on his age—
Price Is Right
rules—and I won. He was twenty-six. I did see the flirty waiter, and after all this time I have revised my opinion of him once again; he's nice and the fact that he's a dad has mellowed me about his history of flirting.

FRIDAY, APRIL 18, 2014

All I really care about is Wacha's Instagram. I constantly think about what cute photo of him I can post and when. I am obsessing. He is up to 12k followers. This from the man who couldn't believe it when @GiggyThePom demanded attention from me on Twitter.

Billy Joel is doing a residency at Madison Square Garden—one Friday a month for two years—and tonight Bruce, SJP, and I went. It was phenomenal. I guess Billy likes to leave the second the show is over, so he sees guests before he goes on, which seems efficient but, now that I know how incredible the show is, I would've been so much more enthusiastic back there after the show than I was before. We had pre-show energy, which pales in comparison to post-show ebullience. Backstage were Paul Reiser, Barry Levinson, Rosanna Scotto (I love a local news star), and John McEnroe. True to form, McEnroe said he was wearing the Björn Borg undies but that he's running out. I said I was sure Björn would send him a case and he said Borg is actually hard to track down. I wondered if he wasn't simply reachable at [email protected] Ha-ha.

I had spent a few nights with Joel around the time Katie Lee was hosting
Top Chef
, and at that time he was kinda poking me, wondering when we were gonna pick up the show because season one had been such a hit, but I knew we were likely going to let Katie go, so it was a precarious dance. I wondered if he remembered any of it—he didn't let on one way or another and couldn't have been a more gracious host. Also they had some gorgeous Barolo back there, which we brought out to our seats and it took us through the night. We were about twenty-five rows back on the floor and I really hit the loser lottery with my seat partner, who was a curly-haired Billy Joel
fanatic
, amped up to beat hell, flagrantly violating my personal space with undulating dance moves and unyielding passion, which for me begged the question “Is ‘Pressure' a song worthy of going all out?”

“You gotta rush the stage with me when ‘Allentown' comes on! That's when you rush it! C'mon!!”
He was begging me. I laughed, although I should mention that if there was a song that would've made me rush the stage it actually might've been “Allentown,” because whenever the video came on—when I was sixteen—my pants went down and it was bedlam as I watched the bare-assed coal miners showering. It was before you had the capability to pause or rewind or anything, so you just had to do it the minute it came on. (I have spoken to other gay guys of my generation who experienced the same “Allentown” phenomenon. The Internet didn't exist!) Misplaced erotic memories of the video aside, I refused the opportunity to rush the stage when the first chords of “Allentown” emerged, and he was severely disappointed in me, and then probably more so at security, who kiboshed his rush mid-song.

When a chorus of uniformed officers came onstage during “Goodnight Saigon” I started tearing up, and by “Piano Man” I even began to soften towards my neighbor when I overheard him telling the people behind us (he was talking to everybody) that he was from Seattle and it was his dream to see Joel at Madison Square Garden. By “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” he turned around to take in the sight of the entire New York metro area singing in unison about Brenda and Eddie and sighed to himself, “We don't have this at home.” At that moment I was completely smitten. This man was having his moment and why should I begrudge him that? I was happy to have shared the night with him.

After the show we were searching for SJ's car and a woman, Patti, came up to me wanting an autograph, which I gave and enjoyed because it was old school. I was so immersed in searching for our car—OK, maybe I was actually freaking out a little bit because the guy was nowhere to be found—that when I noticed she was still standing there, I kind of shunted her away with a “Goodbye, Patti!!” Turns out she was the wife of the NYPD Chief of Patrol, who had parked right in front of MSG (um…), and we were standing in front of their car, blocking it. Good ole Patti was waiting for
me
to get my
ass out the way
!

We went to Odeon, which was a refreshing blast from the past. I learned that Diana Ross is not available to come to the Met Ball. Why would she be? She is Diana Ross, after all. I think SJ is going to ask André Leon Talley, who is something of an approximation of Ms. Ross if you really think about it.

SATURDAY, APRIL 19, 2014

Wacha has 21k followers on Instagram. I feel like JonBenét's parents, pushing him into the spotlight. (Although I won't wind up being suspected for his murder, of course.)

Ralph Fiennes met me at the dog run and as we caught up, Wacha was having intense playtime with a huge pack of dogs. Out of nowhere, all the owners started gathering their pooches and splitting like a bomb went off. “What's going on?” I asked one of the owners, who pointed at a man in the corner who concurrently said, “Who does this beagle belong to?
He has my dog's ball
.” What I learned is that this man is notoriously obsessive about his dog's ball to the point that no one wants to deal with him and everyone splits. After two rounds of him telling me to control my dog, I did too. We ran into a couple of the displaced dog owners on the street and Ralph became a cross between Lord Voldemort and Norma Rae: “You must
stand up
to this bully and
reclaim
your dog run! He does not have
jurisdiction
over your dog grabbing a random ball.” He is so right! I can't wait to do the right thing next time I see this guy.

Jerry Seinfeld's mom died. The shiva starts Monday. I met her once and she was lovely, so it's sad. And on another note, I can't imagine how gorgeous the food will be at the shiva. Is it wrong to speculate?

I went to see
Hedwig
with the Tinder date. NPH was great but it's not my show. I didn't love it fifteen years ago and I didn't love it tonight. NPH said he'd been dealing with stomach flu and I told him to stick with it because it's making him really ripped. After the show we went to the Algonquin of all places and I was at least relieved to see that that was one New York institution that hadn't been converted into a Bank of America. We had a few drinks but I felt like the gulf in our ages was somehow getting more pronounced as the night went on, and we mutually ended the date by midnight. I happily went home, but Bruce was texting me to meet him, Barkin, and Bryan at Marie's Crisis (“Come for a few songs, I'll order you something”), which I was refusing to do. Then he sent me exactly the kind of text that will automatically get me to leave my apartment: “Someday we will all be dead and you will be praying for a Saturday night at Marie's with the gang.” I went and it was, predictably, a lot of fun. Messy, but fun. I wound up at Two Boots breaking my great diet, bingeing on two pieces of pizza. Bryan dragged me out of there at two before I did something I would really regret.

SUNDAY, APRIL 20, 2014

Happy Easter! Happy 420! We had a debrief at the dog run about the bully, and we agreed to stand up to him next time. In the meantime Wacha fell in love with a big German shepherd.

It was a lovely drive upstate, where Vanessa Redgrave hosted me (and the WachStar) for Easter lunch—a mainstay holiday that Natasha pulled off flawlessly up there every year. It felt sweet to be there and catch up with everyone, with a sad undercurrent of memory and longing. I visited Tash on the way home. Dinner with Bruce, Bryan, and family at Mr Chow, where everything tastes like fried sugar, and then I got hammered on Twitter all night for my behavior at the Atlanta reunion. Everyone thought that I caused the fight and was wrong to tell Porsha to apologize. How can the producers and I have had the complete opposite reaction from the viewers to what happened?

MONDAY, APRIL 21, 2014

I am back up to 168—thank you, Two Boots pizza and Mr Chow.

The Met Ball is white tie this year, which means tails, and one of the few people who carry them is Ralph Lauren, where I had a fitting for mine. I looked like the caricature that Risko did of me.

I am still being hazed on my Twitter feed from people who hold me accountable for the fight at the reunion, for allowing the props and not foreseeing trouble. Violence is not in my vocabulary, but they don't believe me.

I had dinner before the show with Sandy and Barry at that steak house in the Time Warner Center. I can't get used to eating in a mall.

TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 2014

There's not going to be a doorman strike, so I won't be volunteering for any more door shifts. I am secretly a little disappointed. I like it when strangers have to band together through tough (but not too extended) times for the greater good. Anyway, I am happy for Surfin.

Wacha walks into that dog run and makes everything great—he's everybody's best friend and he loves to play. He's good energy. (That's what I think, but maybe when we leave they all talk about him, what do I know?) It turns out that his new German shepherd bestie has brain cancer. I am speechless.

An architect came by for an interview and we talked for an hour about various options for combining the apartments. My problem is that I have no attention span and after forty minutes my mind started to move on to the next thing. Not great. It's for
my benefit
, is what I always have to remind myself in situations like these.

I had been looking forward to tonight's show for some time because we had Jon Jay and Shelby Miller from the Cardinals behind the bar, and an audience full of Cardinals wives. (They're in town playing the Mets.) Nonetheless it took me a while to conjure up things to say to them. They were so sweet, but the longer you talk to them you realize how young they are. In your mind they are heroic, almost larger than life, because you mainly see them in uniform on the field playing or talking about the game, but when you start scratching the surface, they're twenty-four. So it became like a Tinder date after the show when they stayed hanging out drinking in the Clubhouse for a few hours. I asked Shelby Miller about the MLB softball thing and he said, “You got this.” I said, “No, you don't understand, I got nothing.” Given that my fantasy is to be a baseball wife, I had plenty to say to the ladies. One thing I asked the wives is if they get sex when the husbands play well. They said they are men—they want it whether they hit or not. Daniel Descalso was there too, so that was a bonus. And they all played with Wacha (which was very meta) and stayed till after one.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23, 2014