It's an off week for the It Boy and It Girl Club, but something so dramatic happened that I had to choose an It Girl this week...

It Girl: Brooke Lampley '02... Every boy has been waiting patiently for the day when Brooke Lampley would be single again. Drop-dead beautiful, talented, intelligent, funny and stylish, she cuts her own path wherever she goes. The problem, of course, was that she was attached-and that, as we all know, makes your stock plummet. Well, now she's not. And thus buzz is spreading. Let the wooing begin.

SOMAN'S SHORTS

Visit www.somanintheknow.com followed by www.amihotornot.com, and you'll be giggling with glee... Last year, someone said that my column reminded them of Liz Smith and I threw a hissy-fit. The memory came back when I read this absolutely inane quote from Smith protesting Robert Downey Jr.'s arrest: "We'd better change the draconian drug laws of America before this country sinks under the weight of a prison population so huge that if we sent them all to Harvard instead of jail, we'd be a nation of educated achievers." Uh, no. I think if you sent the entire prison population to Harvard, dining hall decorum would suffer tremendously.... Word has it that Meg Ryan banished any girls who had the hots for Russell Crowe on the set of Proof of Life. If anybody even made goo-goo eyes at the guy, she'd have them on the next plane out... I tend to luck out when picking paper topics. For my junior paper for English, I wrote on American Psycho, handing it in a couple weeks before the movie came out. Now, just as I'm immersed in thesis work on postmodern fairy tales and a book called Wicked by Gregory Maguire, I get word that ABC is running the miniseries of the novel in the spring (Demi Moore might play the Wicked Witch of the West in this revisionist Wizard of Oz). Shouldn't I get points for picking hot topics?... A WB press agent gushed, "Tori Spelling is the next Lucille Ball." Where's the Kaopectate?... Blah blah UC presidential candidates blah blah. I'm tired of presidential elections. They're sooooo last month... I keep thinking about the budding romance of Ben Affleck and Shoshanna Lowenstein and my stomach starts to hurt. After Ben got dumped by Gwyneth, he tried to get back with her for a while and then gave up-since it finally sank in, he's been dating beneath him. Is that a general course of life? How long after breaking up with the love of your life does it take before you end the random rebound flings and actually start looking for somebody worthy?

Questions, Comments, Back Rubs? E-mail schainan@fas.harvard.edu

www.somanintheknow.com