Tryst

The husband of Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) told authorities that he used the Internet to arrange a $150 sexual tryst with a prostitute at a metropolitan Detroit hotel, police said. Thomas Athans, 46, co-founder of the liberal TalkUSA Radio network, was stopped by police who were investigating prostitution at the hotel, according to a police report. Athans issued an apology.

A low-budget, no-excitement thriller, "The Victim" was written and directed by Michael Biehn, who also stars as a loner whose chance encounter with a frantic stripper leads to all sorts of mayhem. Annie (Jennifer Blanc) turns up at the cabin where Biehn's Kyle lives with a tale of a woodsy tryst with dirty cops, a friend (Danielle Harris) murdered and herself the next target. He springs into action as a wild-eyed protector, leading to some premium-cable-ish sexy time with Annie. It seems she has the emotional fortitude to set aside her fear of death to purr seductively over her savior's well-preserved bod. (Blanc happens to be Biehn's wife.)

Hey--watch your language, you guys! Stop bashing those of us who live in trailer parks but do not necessarily tryst here ("But Are They Still Journalists?," April 16): ". . . nearly every ("Hard Copy") featured grisly crime stories and sleazy trailer park trysts." Surely "Hard Copy" had other more juicy headlines you could have pulled for your examples of predilection toward profiling low-life types. I happen to live in a reputable trailer park and am a free-lance writer in the fields of natural history and horticulture.

At first, the paparazzo didn't recognize the middle-aged man who slipped discreetly into Kristen Stewart's Mini Cooper. All he knew was that the guy wasn't her boyfriend, Robert Pattinson. But as Stewart and her passenger approached Pacific View Trail, it quickly became clear that they were more than friends when the pair started pawing each other like teenagers in the"Twilight"star's car. The photographer started snapping images and called his agency, FameFlyNet Pictures, to request backup.

My (male) actor friends await the day women are the norm on the Presidential ticket. They want the boost to their acting careers a tryst with a female candidate would assure, including exposure in a Calendar cover story. MIKE SHINABERY Duarte

A federal grand jury in Charlotte, N. C., returned indictments against two more former associates of the defunct PTL television ministry. Sam Johnson, who was minister at PTL's Heritage Village Church, was charged with 12 counts of perjury for his testimony to a special grand jury about a cash payment to former church secretary Jessica Hahn.

A low-budget, no-excitement thriller, "The Victim" was written and directed by Michael Biehn, who also stars as a loner whose chance encounter with a frantic stripper leads to all sorts of mayhem. Annie (Jennifer Blanc) turns up at the cabin where Biehn's Kyle lives with a tale of a woodsy tryst with dirty cops, a friend (Danielle Harris) murdered and herself the next target. He springs into action as a wild-eyed protector, leading to some premium-cable-ish sexy time with Annie. It seems she has the emotional fortitude to set aside her fear of death to purr seductively over her savior's well-preserved bod. (Blanc happens to be Biehn's wife.)

If one were to ask any criminal defense lawyer in America what advice he now would give Bill Clinton if he were not president of the United States, one would receive a remarkably consistent response: "Take the 5th."

"A Little Hotel on the Side" delivers low-brow humor with a high-gloss finish in a very funny, very faithful revival at Rancho Santiago College. This classic French farce has survived 96 years, and its calculated silliness only seems to improve with age.

There may be more monkey business going on among chimpanzees than scientists once thought. A study suggests that half of all chimpanzees may be conceived on the sly when females sneak off for risky trysts with males outside their social group. Female chimpanzees' secret sex lives come as something of a surprise to researchers, who previously thought that they almost always mated within their own group of 20 to 100 animals.

The governor made off to a monastery after having affairs with transsexuals, but not before the cops videotaped a tryst, all flesh and white powder, and offered to sell copies to a magazine owned by the prime minister, who, at the time, was rumored to be entangled with an underage Neapolitan model. Then one of the transsexuals, a Brazilian named Brenda, turned up naked and dead, her laptop computer submerged under a running tap. Oh, yeah, and the drug dealer who supplied cocaine to the governor and Brenda would meet his own demise.

This one calls to me from behind the glass at patissier Pierre Herme's thronged Paris shop on the Rue Bonaparte. It's a study in elegant, precise strata: layers of hazelnut dacquoise; crunchy praline mixed with crushed hazelnuts, Piemontese hazelnut paste and La Viette butter; and chocolate ganache and milk chocolate Chantilly cream sandwiched between fine sheaves of chocolate. One of Herme's classics, it's an over-the-top dessert aptly named "plaisir sucre." Which is exactly why I've come to Paris--for all of its plaisirs sucres, or sweet pleasures.

The husband of Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) told authorities that he used the Internet to arrange a $150 sexual tryst with a prostitute at a metropolitan Detroit hotel, police said. Thomas Athans, 46, co-founder of the liberal TalkUSA Radio network, was stopped by police who were investigating prostitution at the hotel, according to a police report. Athans issued an apology.

Gov. David A. Paterson said Thursday that he never used campaign money to pay for a Manhattan hotel room for a liaison with a woman other than his wife. "I can tell you affirmatively that I never used my campaign funds for anything other than campaigns," Paterson said, speaking in Rochester. He added that the campaign's lawyer was reviewing records for potential discrepancies and that a report would be forthcoming.

"Married Life" turns out to be as indefinable as the condition it's named for, not to mention as variable. What starts as a dark comedy that plays like a film noir, or a film noir that plays as a dark comedy, detours into a melodramatic comedy of manners and ends up confused. Maybe this was what director Ira Sachs, whose "Forty Shades of Blue" won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2005, was going for in tossing together genres like salad greens, but they never gel into a consistent point of view.

Change is hard, as Meredith Grey has observed more than once in the signature voice-over of "Grey's Anatomy." After the show's strange slide into bathos last season, everyone involved, including show runner Shonda Rhimes and pinup star Patrick Dempsey, acknowledged a certain creative downturn, a gloomy earnestness, that would, they swore, be rectified. "We're bringing the fun back," Rhimes said. Indeed, the first episode of Season 4 was entitled "A Change Is Gonna Come."

There's not a lot of jiggling going on here. There's hardly any movement, unless you count the motion of Absolut being poured into a glass. Or two people making eyes at each other through Jean Paul Gaultier frames. The place is a cutting-edge concept for a New Age. Very grown up, very intimate, very dark. Yes, trendoids, the lounge is baaaack. Only the lounge lizards have changed. The name explains a lot: Tryst. Get it? A place to forget about doing deals and fall in love.

An intended Valentine's Day celebration apparently turned into an attempted kidnaping that was foiled when Mexican police found two California youths bound and gagged in a Tijuana home, a police spokesman said Saturday. After receiving an anonymous tip that two bodies had been deposited in an eastern Tijuana home, Mexican police arrived to find two teen-age boys tied up and alive.

A teacher accused of running away with a 13-year-old student planned a romantic life with him in his native Mexico, but she was nearly broke when they were captured there. Their border crossing during a week on the run may mean the teen, an illegal immigrant, will not be able to come back to the rural Nebraska town of Lexington, where he was an eighth-grader.

It was a match made in illicit heaven. Actress Gloria Swanson was one of the grand divas of Hollywood. Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, was one of the major movers and shakers of the film world in the 1920s. He is the only man to run three film studios -- FBO, Pathe and First National -- as well as a theater circuit at the same time. Both were married when they fell in love in the late 1920s. Shortly thereafter, they collaborated on their first film, "Queen Kelly."