Cherie Currie was just a Bowie-obsessed 15-year-old smoking a cigarette at the Sugar Shack, an under-21 club in North Hollywood, when she was spotted by producer Kim Fowley. A Svengali, visionary and predator, he was cruising the underage clubs with a young Joan Jett in tow, looking for recruits for his brand-new teen rock band, The Runaways. With her bleached-out hair and tight pants, Currie had the goods—or at least looked the part. Fowley had also approached Currie’s twin sister Marie that night, who dismissed him as “creepy.” more

ZACHARY GERMAN IS sitting at a table in the back of Coffee Time.The cafe is on the corner of Bleecker Street and Bowery. Zachary has short brown hair and is wearing oversized glasses and a tie underneath a sweater. He is drinking an iced soy latte. Its 5 oclock. more

It’s been a fairly cold summer until now, but believe you me, there are polar bears losing their homes to ice-foreclosure up in the North Pole. Act now before they come down here and lower our property values. more

They thought they had the place another 10 years. Sandy Glover and Bud Schmeling, owners of Black Betty, the Williamsburg bar, Mediterranean restaurant and homegrown music joint, had even signed a lease. But the landlord left it open to other bidders, so they lost it to someone willing to pay more. But at midnight on June 15, that was no longer a worry. more

In the fluorescent-lit community room of Westbeth Artist’s Community—an affordable haven for creatives in the West Village—a woman was cutting candelabra out of cardboard for the birthday party of the late Liberace. The over-the-top piano man would have been 90 on May 17, and what better excuse to get the old gang together? more

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN one’s self-destructive tendencies can’t be therapized, medicated or even loved away? What if it’s not a phase, something you grow out of? Laney lives in New Jersey with a saintly husband and two kids, yet she can barely get through the banalities of civilized life—school drop-off, a vacation, a baseball game— without a bump of coke here, a wildly inappropriate tryst there. It’s the sort of acting out that a good man, a good shrink, rehab and even reconciling with her absent father hasn’t been able to fix. Good mothers, especially welloff ones, aren’t supposed to fall down after taking too many Xanax.They’re not supposed to get caught licking cocaine off the bathroom floor. more

When Bettie Page began posing nude in the 1950s for New York City’s camera clubs—amateur photography groups for gentlemen—scandalized critics whispered that they didn’t even have film in their cameras: They were simply using them as an excuse to look at a naked woman. That said, nothing cures a hangover at 3 p.m. on a Saturday like drinking more beer and admiring sequined, sporadically costumed models—you know, the kind of girls who wouldn’t go home with more