I'm no Woodward or Bernstein, but I was at the forefront of getting out the buzz on the famed club kid slaying when word started percolating in 1996.

I had chronicled Michael Alig's rise and fall from day one. I was the first one to write about him and was involved in many of his events, celebrating what was exciting about the scene while also acting as an elder statesman and critic who chided him when he went too far, which was often.

And he had started to go so far over the top that I'd decided to stop writing about him. There was no fun around him anymore--just caked-on makeup, drugs, and desperation.

But suddenly he was newsworthy again.

The first week of April 1996, Alig called me to say he'd been fired by Peter Gatien, owner of Limelight, where Alig threw his outrageous and colorful club kid bashes for years.

Alig sounded jittery and messy--really on the edge--and was giving various suspect reasons for his firing.

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XL--the gay dance club that's attached to the Out NYC hotel--has gone through some changes this year, including the letting go of co-owners John Blair and Beto Sutter, who resurfaced with a hit party at Stage 48 on Saturdays, thereby giving them heavy competition.

The contest has gotten fierce, so XL keeps upping the ante and changing their slate,which is either wonderfully invigorating or terribly confusing, depending on your point of view. On certain nights they're just plain closed, but on others, they've got tons of s**t going on. On Sundays they've instituted a Strip 'N Grind party "featuring over 30 dancers, lap dancers, pole dancers, champagne rooms, live erotic acts and burlesque."

Thanks to the talent alone, the place will always look crowded

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And that's good because she gets to play them a lot. She's brill as the rotten cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on Glee. And in Broadway's Annie revival, she's just stepped into the part of the sour orphanage lady Miss Hannigan, the one whose driven crazy by "Little Girls" and all their cute hairdos and frisky antics.

And Lynch has a point of view about this kind of role-playing.

She tells Manhattan magazine:

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It happened to me twice in the last couple of years.

Two people I bitterly broke up with reached out on Facebook, filling me with a large mixed salad of weird feelings.

My immediate response was being surprised and actually flattered that, after such vitriol was thrown my way, they clearly still kinda like me and want to reestablish some kind of relationship, even if just as friends.

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The role of Evita Peron has appealed through the years to grand divas like Patti LuPone, Faye Dunaway, Madonna, and that Argentinian woman from last year.

But did you know that froggy-voiced, bulging-eyed British vaudeville entertainer slash actress Hermione Gingold sort of had a shot at it?

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Last night at an Out Professionals event at the LGBT Center, I was on a panel of experts being tossed etiquette questions by Philip Galanes, who's the Times' answer to Dear Abby and who has a book out called Social Q's, about what to do in awkward situations.

And one of the premises we were asked to chew on had to do with a couple that had gotten married, but broke up only 10 weeks later. Their relationship in tatters, they desperately started wondering about the important thing: You know, what do you do about all those gifts?

I instantly screamed out, "Nobody wants their juicer back!"

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The guy behind the Vulcan ears has a whole other mission and it's to save lives in reality, right here on earth.

Star Trek Into Darkness's Zachary Quinto says he came out in 2011 in response to a rash of teen gay suicides that were happening at the time.

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The problem with success is in trying to keep it, especially when your pricetag is so high and the sands of time are slipping through the hourglass.

Robert Downey Jr. has had a triumph in the Iron Man films, and part 3 is such a blockbuster it's expected to surpass $400 million dollars--that's a lot of tuna sandwiches for the Paltrow family.

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Image by Courtney Nicholas for Vice magazine

James Franco the film star also turns out to be a pretty good film critic, suggesting that the old adage should be amended to "Those who can, teach."

For Vice, Franco took a look at The Great Gatsby and decided it was an engaging adaptation and he didn't even mind the 3D. That's good because a major film star writing a pissy review of someone else's film would come of like sour grapes, which as you know tend to make for very flat champagne.

But here's the really interesting part. In discussing the plot developments, Franco writes:

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Lower than her variety show costar Lena Zavaroni. Lower than the band. Lower than a frog.

And it's kind of powerful, and all that jazz.

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