OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SECTION
12/19/2002
- Bang a gong
- Who needs ten forward?: Romulans, clones and a Bond Girl. Oh my!
- RELATIVELY OK: Blood is definitely thicker than water
- Only fools rush in
- Unforced gaiety
- Perfect attendance
- Time to score
- Let's spend the night together
- Respect their authoritay!
- Leading ladies

THANKS FOR BEING YOU: Before, during and after VH1's Big in 2002 awards show, taped this week at the Grand Olympic Stadium, the stars did some Christmas shopping at the Talent Retreat tent organized by Backstage Creations. The idea is to give the nominees and presenters really cool stuff for free. Like they can't afford it.

Kid Rock picked out a pair of Bella Dahl low-rise lace-up jeans for Pamela Anderson. Richie Sambora, a close pal of Dahl designer Steve Joina, grabbed the star logo sweats for his wife, Heather Locklear. Norah Jones stepped into a pair of brown pinstriped velour flares. Christina Aguilera picked up a pair of white denims, and Bo Derek wore her Bella bum-huggers on the red carpet with "Sex and the City" sweetie John Corbett.

Kid and Sambora also snatched Lois Hill silver chains for themselves and grabbed silver cuffs ($500) for their sweeties. (Check out http://www.loishill.com/ for prices.) All the stars got year memberships to Clay and French athletic shoes by Baliton.

Kid fell for Red Monkey's skull brass buckled leather belt. The company designed belts for Jennifer Lopez's "Maid in Manhattan."

Everyone, including Andy Dick, Jessica Alba, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Murphy, Michael Imperioli, even Kelly Osbourne,, got Calvin Klein eyewear to wear on their free round-trip business-class flight to London courtesy of Virgin Airlines.

They may also need the designer shades for their free weekend at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, where Lopez is thinking of opening another Madre restaurant. La Lopez approached the Hard Rock last week. But now we hear other hotels are making it a bidding war. That's why J.Lo spent five whole days there last week with fiance Ben Affleck and an entourage of about 20 people, including her mom.

And did we mention that Affleck bought his mother-in-law-to-be a $150,000 Mercedes Benz while they were there? Now that's what we call a good investment.

GLASS MENAGERIE: Imagine nibbling petits four, finger sandwiches and sipping Earl Grey tea while an award-winning composer tickles the ivories.

That's what happened Thursday afternoon at a private tea at the Beverly Regent Wilshire as Philip Glass played snippets from his haunting score for "The Hours," a provocative new film about Virginia Woolf and two women affected by her work "Mrs. Dalloway." The film, which opens Dec. 27, stars Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. "The Hours" is being touted as Oscar-worthy and was named best film of 2002 by the National Board of Review last week.

The trick for Glass was scoring a film composed of separate but interwoven stories about three women in three different eras. "It was a challenge," said Glass. "I think the main job of the music is to help articulate the structure. The film, which has three different stories, could appear chaotic. Each story starts in the morning, and goes through the late morning, afternoon and night. So I had the idea that the music would be a bridge to carry you through time, instead of making all the stories have different music, I thought the music should go through the time periods and help gel the stories together."