Looking chic in Chanel while facing criminal charges

I'm sitting on the deck outside the Starbucks in Walnut Creek's Countrywood shopping center. Life's not so bad.

I am working. Sort of. I'm writing this after poking through the Best Dressed List in the September issue of Vanity Fair and spying a headline in a New York Times being read by another Starbucks patron: "IMF Chief to Face Criminal Investigation."

What is it about IMF chiefs? And, did you even know what the IMF was before Dominique Strauss-Kahn did his made-for-the-tabloids perp walk after being arrested in Manhattan on sexual assault charges?

The chic new IMF managing director, Christine Lagarde, is facing a French criminal inquiry for possibly abusing her authority and misusing public funds as the French finance minister in 2007.

Lagarde is a tall, slender woman with an aging-gracefully silver bob. She likes Chanel suits, pearls, and Hermes handbags. Why do I know about Lagarde's keen fashion sense? Several photos of her were in Vanity Fair. She was among the world's best dressed, according to the magazine. Right there along with Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and other international high society types.

Well, Lagarde will look good while she awaits the results of the inquiry.

"Glee" offers reasons for why we should support arts in our schools

Okay, so I'm in serious good TV withdrawal. Mad Men finished up its third season a few weeks ago, and now Glee has wound up its "fall season," so there will be no new episodes ... until the spring!

In the January issue of Vanity Fair, contributing editor James Wolcott offers his take on the wonderfulness of this high school musical infused with the wicked comic sensibility of Heathers and Mean Girls:

Glee, a show that restored our faith in the power of song, the beauty of dance, and the magic of “spirit fingers” to chase our cares and woes into somebody else’s backyard ... Following a successful test launch of its pilot episode last summer, Glee has accelerated into the critical/popular hit debut series of the 2009 television season, a rocking confection that has achieved the wondrous feat of making musical theater look hip, mainstream, and sexily redemptive, empowering theater queens of every age, race, creed, sexual orientation, and landmass shape to embrace their inner “Liza with a Z” and let the sequins fall where they may. Let none dare call them sissy.

I'll second that.

Wolcott ends his piece by noting the unhappy irony of the show, hitting the small screen at this particular time:

The unhappy irony is that, while Glee is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues. To the bottom-line mentalities that make policy, the arts are still considered frilly extras, a myopic view that—oh, forget it. I don’t want to end this column on a downer. Five minutes ago, I was feeling so cheerful, and then I had to go introduce the real world into the discussion, like an idiot. Better I should go on singing in the rain, the way God and Gene Kelly and MGM intended.