Ask what Cathy Renna, news media director for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (whom The Insider came to know during the dust-up and flameout that defined the short run of shock talker Michael Savage on MSNBC), and her partner, psychotherapist Leah McElrath, did over the weekend, and they’ll say they got married.
They’ll cite Episcopal documents and Quaker/Friends theosophy and early Christian church traditions they believe support their contention that their ceremony Saturday in New York was a marriage, not just a commitment ceremony.
As The Insider went to press, it was uncertain just how The New York Times-whose resistance to same-sex wedding announcements Ms. Renna helped erase this year-would characterize the ceremony in the couple’s announcement. Ms. McElrath wore a soft-white sheath and organza jacket. Ms. Renna wore a white dinner jacket and tux pants. Both wore the nine-diamond rings they exchanged.
A Farrelly Funny Theme
Highlight of last week’s Center for Communication toast-’em-and-roast-’em luncheon in honor of News Corp. President Peter Chernin: filmmaker Peter Farrelly plugging his and brother Bobby’s upcoming “Stuck on You,” as a setup for a breathtaking poke at Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes. Mr. Farrelly summed up the comedy as the story of conjoined twins (Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear) who want to be separated, and then deadpanned: “Roger Ailes is getting his lips surgically removed from [Bush White House strategist] Karl Rove’s ass.” The Insider never before saw a mass spit take. Mr. Chernin’s variation on the theme in his rebuttal? A freeze-framed image from the Farrellys’ “Me, Myself and Irene” in which a bird appeared to be surgically attached to the butt of someone the Farrelly unhip Insider is fairly certain is not Karl Rove.
An E!-nsider at `Dateline’
In Hollywood, the word is that “Dateline NBC’s” new entertainment booking producer, Stacie Gottsegen, is just what the magazine-which lost a sweeps interview with Britney Spears to ABC’s Diane Sawyer-needs to lock up newsmaker and celebrity interviews.
Ms. Gottsegen spent the past five years at E! Entertainment, where, said a source, “She was always assigned to the difficult `gets.”’ She’ll be based in Burbank, Calif.
“I think `Dateline’ is lucky to have her,” said the source.