Dim Sum and Mango Pudding

Lots to discuss...but first: time to answer some fan mail:

A reader from someplace called Rowhouseland (I think that might be somewhere outside of Encino) writes,

Dear Dex:
Jerry O'Connell looks so familiar to me, but he just seemed to pop up with the advent of the beefcake photos/ the Rebecca Romijn thing. where is he from?" ---

Dear Rowhouseland Lady,
Jerry got his start in the film, "Stand By Me", he played the fat kid. I think he did some TV work and then went away for awhile, got hooked on amphetamines, lost a ton of weight and did some films and that TV series, "Sliders". In a just world, he'd be doing gay-porn, but this being Hollywood, he's a star!

Joey Badafuco of Jersey writes and asks,

Yo Dex,
Heard a rumor that Eric Stillman will be playing a Mormon ski instructor named Wes, who is strangled by a lift operator in a low budget indie coming up at the end of fall called The Real Salt Lake City: Unscripted. Is dat true?

Dear Joey,
Provided he sleeps with the producer, the producer's wife and the director, it's a done deal!

+++++

Last night, Hank and I went to the unveiling of a star on the Walk of Fame for Antonio Banderas... yes, it goes without saying that Antonio and I go way back. I met him when he first got here sixteen years ago, and it was due to my instance that he get his first big break in films ... of course, Madonna hated the fact that while Antonio wanted nothing to do with her, he slept with me in a heart-beat( poor thing really made a fool of her self in that scene from Truth or Dare); of course, I knew our relationship would be complicated, so I pushed him in the direction of Melanie Griffith (heck, I did not even know he was married at the time)...and the rest is history...anyway, Antonio looked great, Mel looked fab and Tippie Hedren was there also (she looks great, BTW) ... Demi Moore was there, but she could not find Ashton, later on Hank told me he saw Ashton in an alley off Gower Street propositioning a street hustler... Beyonce was in the crowd, it was really sad, her weave was not in tight enough so she was wearing a dreadful headscarf and kept swatting at tourists who were trying to take her photo ... later on Hank and I joined Antonio and Mel for dinner at Mr. Chows where we dined on dim sum and mango pudding.

After that we drove over to Jeremy Piven's place in Bel Air where he was having a private fete in celebration of his success on "Entourage" as well as the announcement that he'd be hosting the Al Pacino thingy for the American Cinematheque Award ... as always, John Cusack was right at JP's side; those two are inseparable ... later on we found Ashton passed out naked by the pool, somebody had taken a Magic Marker and wrote, "Cheap Date" on his left buttock...Cusak came out to the pool with a video camera and shot the still life and said he was going to send it to "Punk'd"... on our way out we saw Lindsey Lohan in Piven's driveway throwing-up into a potted palm...