Just Say No to Ebay!

I know why your food doesn’t have quite the same flavor as it did a year ago, why the sky doesn’t seem as blue, and why those old Seinfeld reruns just don’t seem quite as funny as they once did. You miss . . . The Gates!

Well, I’ve got great news for all you performance art–loving, European movie–watching, museum-going, sushi-eating world citizens—Anita Klaussen’s "The Gates—2006" calendar is hot off the presses!

Klaussen is an amateur photographer and my colleague and friend Bud Collins’ companion, and she went bonkers for The Gates, taking a zillion pictures of them. Now she's made a deal with a printer in China, who has run off 3,000 calendars featuring Anita's photographs of those flapping orange sheets they erected all over New York’s Central Park (the fabric was flame-retardant; trust me, I know. . .).

Anyway, if you share Anita’s passion for The Gates, you can go to Bud's website and you’ll find ordering info right on the home page, right below the picture of Bud wearing—surprise, surprise—a pair of trousers that look like they were made out of Gates fabric. So why not go for the calendar—on the condition you get one autographed by Bud?

Incidentally, Bud has been on the mend from his second surgery of 2005—this time for a torn rotator cuff. As Anita wrote me: “It’s been no fun for Bud. Too much tennis over a lifetime. But the last shot was a winningforehand, he would want you to know!”

Too much tennis? Is that possible?