Jay McInerney, he of Bright Lights, Big City, Rielle Hunter, and Gossip Girl cameos, has found a new reason to melt his cynics heart. Barack Obama represents a new era of tolerance and inclusion, says McInerney, and he's just so happy Middle America has gotten on-board with the coastal states on this one:

While we were celebrating here in New York, we should have raised our glasses to the voters in Virginia and Florida and Ohio because they were the ones who decided to change course, and who decided the election. We should feel very glad to have them back. After all, a liberal elite can't run a democracy by itself. Perhaps they were responding as much to the frightening meltdown of the economy as they were to anything else; at any rate the Democrats in Washington would do well to treat them better than the Republicans did during their ascendancy.

Yeah Jay. You and your BFF Brett Easton Ellis did a really great job depicting how all-inclusive and magical LA and New York was in the 80s. Too bad the American Psycho era ended when all the Patrick Batemans of the world lost their jobs on Wall Street.

Just sayin': Jay McInerney made a career out of books depicting the hedonism and excess of the East Coast wealthy. Let's not pretend that those aren't the same people who voted for Reagan.

Because today hasn't included enough news about confusing musicals, here's another one for ya: Brett Easton Ellis' most famously depraved novel, American Psycho, is heading to the stage. The book and subsequent film prominently feature monologues about 80s Reagan-era bands, which will play a large part in the musical production's development.

Though taking a gamble on theater right now (which are not doing as badly as other economic ventures right now but still) producers Craig Roessler and Johnson-Roessler have high hopes that a satirical look at murder on Wall Street will strike a gallows-humor chord with the ex-Lehman brother crowd.

Below, one scene from the film version of AP that will definitely be a highlight of the dance numbers:

CONTINUED »

Sometimes we connect dots just for the sake of seeing how many lines we'll need. It's like Soduku, for the weary. So we took two of the biggest items from the news cycle right now — Rielle Hunter and her maybe-love-child with John Edwards, and Ben Stiller's sort-of-offensive-but-really-just-whatever film coming out this weekend, Tropic Thunder — and rigamarolled a game of Six Four Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Without Mr. Bacon. It involves two of the 80s biggest coked-out yuppie nihilist writers (pictured left), and it's fun for the whole family once the kids are put to bed!

CONTINUED »