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liBOWSK1

A FILM BY SANDI

Friday, February 8 at 7 & 9:30 p.m.
Saturday, February 9 at 4, 7 & 9:30 p.m. • Sunday, February 10 at 1, 4 & 7 p.m.

"PROVOCATIVE"

— International Herald Tribune

"UNFORGETTABLE"

— Variety

`1111e Times Three'

New York Times" lifestyle writer Alex Witchel writes
her debut novel, a comedic coming-of-age story.

and her best friend Pau Romano er
gay pal from their days at the Yale
School of Drama, is working at
William Morris in Los Angeles.
Sandra and Bucky grew up together
in the leafy suburb of Green Hills.
He's a descendant of Founding
Seamstress Betsy Ross, and she "comes
from a long line of Polish Jewish horse
thieves who, once in America, took to
reinventing themselves." Her grandfa-

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Novi

A

t a cocktail party at the
Metropolitan Museum,
Sandra Berlin discovers that
the man she has dated since
high school and is engaged to marry is
also engaged to two other women.
She's the "Me" in New York Times
reporter Alex Witchel's impressive
debut novel, Me Times Three
(Knopf; $22).
A romantic comedy — film
rights have already been acquired
by Miramax with Gwyneth
Paltrow slated to star and co-pro-
duce — the novel is a coming-of-
age story set in late 1980s
Manhattan. Sandra Berlin could
be a distant cousin to Marjorie
Morningstar.
Witchel was also at a party at
the Met when she learned that
her boyfriend, the guy she had
gone to the high school prom
with and dated for 12 years, was
thrice engaged. But it was only
some years later that she realized
it could be the starting point of
a novel.
"Look," she recently told the
Jewish News in an interview in
the Times cafeteria, "If some-
thing like that happens to you,
it's crazy not to use it."

"If something
happens to you,
its crazy not to
use it." — Author A, il,„;

on fiction writing

Misadventures In Dating

Like many novelists, Witchel
uses some facts of her life and
embellishes; most of the charac-
ters are invented. But, as she
explains, the transition from
journalism, with its demands for accu-
racy, to fiction wasn't easy.
."It took a while to learn how to lie,"
she says, adding that she ultimately
came to find "great freedom in making
things up."
In her stylized profiles for the New
York Times, Witchel seems to have per-
fected the art of noticing. She brings
the same eye for detail to this novel.
As it begins, Sandra, 26, is up for a
promotion to arts and entertainment
editor at the glamorous fashion maga-
zine Jolie!, her boyfriend Bucky Ross
is a rising star at an advertising agency

ther renamed himself Berlin to pose as
a German Jew.
In love-of-her-life Bucky, Sandra
finds her "own ancestral ladder to the
top," and dreams of a life in a Tudor
mansion in a place like Green Hills,
where she'd be among the right people
and accepted as one, "even by associa-
tion."
Once Bucky's deception is unveiled,
Sandra mopes and mourns and begins
to move on, slowly. Readers follow her
adventures with Paul and her mostly
misadventures at dating.
At work, she navigates around a sab-