DON’T be surprised if you bump into Duran Duran vocalist Simon LeBon or keyboardist Nick Rhodes on the beach or at the clubs between now and Labor Day. They’re dropping by the East End regularly, crashing at a friend’s home in Water Mill.
The five founding members of Duran Duran are back together after an 18-year break.
They have a gig next Wednesday at Webster Hall, followed a day later by an appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City.
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A curious ad in the classified section of Dan’s Papers offers to rent piping plovers to oceanfront homeowners, with the promise, “Keeps people off your beach.”
Piping plovers are the endangered birds whose nests on the beach are roped off by environmental officials to keep people away. They’re the birds that kept East Hampton Town from draining rain-swollen Georgica Pond – causing an as-yet-unidentified local to do it illegally in the dead of night.
The ad offers a $650 plover kit that includes four live male and four live female plovers, four nests, and a three-month supply of plover food.
When Diary asked publisher Dan Rattiner if the ad was a put-on, he deadpanned: “You have to send an order in to find out. We may be out of them. We may not have the color you want.”
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This year’s Hampton Classic will feature wines and whinnies. The horse show will kick off on Saturday, a day earlier than usual, with its first Long Island Wine Classic.
The event starts at 5 with a grand tasting and silent auction, followed at 7 by a gala wine dinner, live auction and music from a Long Island Philharmonic ensemble. “It will be everything Long Island,” said the classic’s executive director, Tony Hitchcock.
Tasting tix are $150; tasting and dinner, $400. Proceeds will benefit the three hospitals serving the Hamptons.
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State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is determined to kill the Shinnecock Indians’ plan to build a sprawling gaming hall in Hampton Bays.
“We’re going to litigate as aggressively as we possibly can. I think we’re going to win. We’re not going to permit illegal casinos to be built,” Spitzer told Diary Monday night while attending a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Bridgehampton.
A solution to the Hamptons’ two hot-button issues – the casino plan and the proposed creation of the ultra-exclusive oceanfront village of Dune Hampton – was offered this week by adman/restaurateur Jerry Della Femina.
He proposes that the beachfront homeowners who want to secede from Southampton Town be given the go-ahead if they agree not to bar access to the beach for everyone else – and if they pay the town $266 million.
The $266 mil would then be turned over to the 266 Shinnecock Indians involved in the “gambling threat” – each getting $1 million.
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Have the Hamptons gone Jamaican?
Burning Spear played at Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett Monday night, entrancing the crowd with his singing and his backup band’s rhythmic dub beats.
Last week, Jimmy Cliff appeared at a packed Hampton Hall in Southampton.
And tonight, Shockshine, a popular local reggae band, stirs it up from 6:45 to 7:45 p.m. in a free concert at Southampton’s Coopers Beach.