‘Checking in’ with Doris: Veteran Village activist Doris Diether has sussed out and fended off phone scam after phone scam over the decades. Sometimes, she even sics the feds on the scammers, after tracing them down to wherever they were calling or mailing from. But when Diether, 88, got a call last week from a guy purporting to be from Publisher’s Warehouse who told her she had won $500,000, she was hoping this time that it might actually be true! The caller told her someone would show up at her Waverly Place door this Tuesday sometime between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. to present her with the check. Diether decided she would make an occasion out of it. After all — who knew? — maybe she really had won. She got some champagne and had a party, inviting over state Senator Brad Hoylman (who is one of Diether’s biggest fans back from when they both served on Community Board 2), C.B. 2 District Manager Bob Gormley, her pal Erin Rogers, Associate Minister Micah Bucey from Judson Church and a few others. Of course, The Villager’s ubiquitous Tequila Minsky was there to document it all. Diether decided to hold the possible big-win shindig outside in the building’s small front yard. She kept her front door locked, just in case any scammer was looking to sneak in. But, in the end, nobody with a half-a-million-dollar check — or any check at all — ever showed up. “I was hoping for the best, but I was preparing for the worst,” Diether told us, lightheartedly, as usual. Diether also checked things out a bit further, after the fact, and found out that if you win cash from Publisher’s Weekly, they won’t do anything to contact you beforehand — you’ll just get a check.
At the scene of the slime: File this one under the Shameless Self-Promotion Department. Village woman about town Jessica Berk snapped a selfie in front of Harvey Weinstein’s Village home — which is located just steps away from a high-profile scenester restaurant. Berk said the scuttlebutt is that, in addition to having finally been outed for multiple instances of sexual harassment and much worse, Weinstein is also harassing his neighbors in other ways. For one, it was reported a few years ago that the barking of this total dog’s two actual big dogs is horrendous. We happened to be passing by the place the other night, however, and see any pumpkin or mini-firs.
Ai, Ai, Ai: Sharon Woolums’s talking point in last week’s issue about how many of the parkgoers she knows really loathe — as she does, too — the Ai Weiwei “Fences” piece under the Washington Square Arch has been snagging eyeballs around the globe. Woolums and those she polled not only don’t like the “cage” art, but more important, the audacity of its being imposed on the Village’s most famous piece of public art. Anyway, a reporter from the Guardian interviewed Woolums last week, and a German art-and-lifestyle publication, Monopol magazine, wrote about her article — though incorrectly referred to The Villager as The Village Voice! Now reader Johanna Lisi warns us of the next public artwork slated for our area: the world’s largest rhinoceros sculpture, which is slated for Astor Place, coming in January. “This is an injustice to the people in the neighborhood to have our living place turned into Disneyland,” Lisi lamented. “Can this be stopped?” The rhino is in C.B. 2. Hopefully, if any members of the board have already had a meeting about it, they’ll let us know!
Oops: In last week’s print version of the paper, veteran waterfront protector Marcy Benstock’s letter to the editor about the demise of Pier55, due to an unfortunate editing error, referred to the importance of protecting the “nearhore” waters. … Umm, that should have read “nearshore.”
