DAN'S PAPERS, June 25, 2010 Page 23 www.danshamptons.com
Four Women Sarah Palin, Madonna, Lady Gaga and Dana Hammond By Dan Rattiner Have you heard? OMG!! Lady Gaga is renting a house in the Hamptons for the summer. Here is a woman who has captured the nation at the age of 22. And she’s done it the right way, on brains and style and talent. It’s even more amazing when you consider she is not knock-yoursocks-off beautiful. It’s quite an achievement. I want to warn her off Southampton Village, though. In all other villages in the Hamptons, you can walk around in whatever outrageous costume you wish. But in Southampton, there’s a dress code. You can read about it on the signs as you enter the village, both on Hampton Road or on North Sea Road. The signs read PLEASE OBSERVE SOUTHAMPTON’S DRESS CODES. This is a woman who went to a baseball game to watch the Mets play, and midway through it, with the press apparently tipped off ahead of time—she uncovered herself and stood up wearing only sunglasses, a spangled bikini and a
hat—and gave the middle finger to the world since she did not appear to be addressing anybody in particular with it, er, them. She held up two middle fingers. The next day, the photos of her in the New York dailies were shown on David Letterman, who commented that the purpose of her display was only to indicate that she too felt that the Mets should be #1. The dress code, by the way, requires all the people on the main streets of the Village of Southampton to be covered up from the top of the aureole (the nipple), to midway between the hip and the knee at all times. This, for Lady Gaga, would be a challenge. And so it is that Lady Gaga follows the lead of Madonna, who, after dipping a glass-highheeled-toe in the water, bought a horse farm out here last year. Another woman in the news this week is a Southampton socialite named Dana Hammond.
Ms. Hammond is being sued for $4 million by a woman who answered a help wanted ad in the newspapers. Agnes Cybulski interviewed with Ms. Hammond, and was told the job paid $150 for an 8-hour day, involved housework and, oh, by the way, you have to take and pass an AIDS test to work for me. The prospective housekeeper has filed this lawsuit saying the request violates the New York State Civil Rights Act. I’ve asked around but nobody has been able to adequately explain to me how being asked to take an AIDS test might make one liable in a civil law suit. You can ask someone to take a breathalyzer test if you want to employ them and deny them employment if they flunk, you can deny employment to someone who is a convicted felon who wants to work for you if you don’t feel comfortable with that, but you can’t discriminate on the basis of age, sex, color, religion or a few other matters. Maybe (continued on page 52)
NEW PROBLEM COULD BRING U.S.A DOWN By Dan Rattiner I know you are all on vacation and don’t want to be bothered with something important in a newspaper such as this, but I am beginning to think that we are developing a big, big problem with the Internet that in very short order could bring down this nation from the inside, while we are looking carefully on the outside for terrorists and extremists and so forth. And nobody is noticing this. I shop online with a fellow in Arizona for certain beach supplies and though I do much of it on the computer, I had an occasion recently to talk with him—in order to return something that
arrived broken which I had to send it back. “The address to send it to,” he told me, “is garbled up by the Internet.” Where I should send it was in the proper city where he lived, but the street address was different. “Don’t ask me why,” he said. “But if you want to get it here and you type in the proper street address, it gets sent to another address. This just started up last week.” He then gave me this garbled street address that he said would work. A few days later a friend of mine told me he stopped getting his bills from MasterCard. It had
been sent to him properly in the past. But now it was being delivered at another street address. “I spent a long time talking with Citibank about this,” he said. “I hadn’t gotten a bill from them in months. Sometimes I don’t use that card for months and so don’t get a bill for months. But then it came up as an alert from Equifax, the credit agency that MasterCard had filed a negative report against me. I had a balance of about $57 and hadn’t paid it in months.” He had tried to correct the address. He continued to not receive a bill. Finally he had the bill sent to his business address. (continued on page 30)