On Saturday evening, President Obama finally made good on a campaign promise to his wife by taking her to a Broadway show in NYC.  Though the date night has stirred up a bit of controversy due to the travel expenses incurred by taxpayers, (rumored to be $24,000), many New Yorkers reveled in seeing the President and First Lady ride through the streets of Manhattan in the Presidential limousine. The First Couple enjoyed a romantic dinner at Blue Hill, a West Village restaurant that features food grown by chef and owner Dan Barber on his upstate farm.  President and Mrs. Obama then traveled up to the Theater District to enjoy August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, about a black America in the early 1900s, with residents of a boardinghouse recalling their migration from the sharecropping farms of the South to the industrialized North. Mrs. Obama looked stunning in a black Alaia dress, a blue clutch and Jimmy Choo Latern heels. [via Huffington Post and Mrs-O.org]

No religion, creed, sexuality, race, gender or pop-culture icon is safe from Trey Parker and Matt Stone. And thank God for that. The creative duo famous for South Park, the Comedy Central cartoon about quirky children growing up in a small Colorado town, and creators of the puppet classic Team America are now taking on live theater with a satirical play poking fun at the Mormon lifestyle. Recent Prop 8 events make the Mormon theme especially interesting: Polygamists who want to dictate the boundaries of marriage. Priceless fodder for comedy. Interviewed about the new Broadway show: "Cheyenne Jackson, a gay actor who played in the September 11 film United 93, told the New York Post that he had accepted the lead role in the film. He said: "It's hilarious: very acerbic and biting. It offends everybody, but does what South Park does best, which is [that] by the end it comes around and has something great to say." He added: "I play the main missionary, Elder...

Broadway has become something of a rite of passage for B-and-under pop stars and/or ex-American Idol contestants. Where that passage leads to, I have no clue - you’d have to ask people like Fantasia Barino, Ashley Angel, (sorry, Ashley Parker Angel) Taylor Hicks, Constantine Moroulis, Clay Aiken and, most recently, Ace Young. While we’re on the topic of Ace Young - soak it in, friends, soak it in - I met him. A couple years ago, I was working as a receptionist at a Manhattan recording studio, and Ace Young came in on my birthday to do some kind of voice-over work. My co-worker thought it would be cute to get him to sing Happy Birthday to me. We could all tell he was absolutely dying for any and all attention, so he obliged. He came up to the reception desk, leaned down and sang Happy Birthday to me not more than five inches from my face, as every single one of my co-workers stood behind me and watched this very, very uncomfortable moment unfold. At the end of the day, I...