About 10 years ago, maybe more, Indianapolis Monthly ran a story that was, well, a marvel. Constructed as a profile of a high-flying local CEO and his wife, it was one of those things that walked a line so delicate that at some points it didn’t seem to exist at all. How to tell the story of a 40something CEO and his 20something second wife, a woman he supposedly met when she jumped out of a cake at his son’s bachelor party, without seeming, oh, to be just a little too in love with the details?

And what details they were — there was that cake, of course, and the obvious matter of her last paying job (at a strip club). There was the charm school she happily admitted attending — and sending her mother to — so she could move with the CEO class and know which one was the fish fork. And there was the house, oh, the house. The 23,000-square foot mansion has a name (Le Château Renaissance), along with carved this and gilded that and the murals, so many murals:

Stepping through the massive mahogany double doors and past the neoclassical murals in the marble-floored foyer, visitors to Stephen Hilbert’s Carmel mansion are greeted by a giant likeness of the former chief of Conseco Inc. Hilbert gazes down upon his guests from a domed mural fantasy two floors up. Dressed as a Greco-Roman warrior, Hilbert stands astride a cloud, with a breast-baring queen beside him.

There was also a replica of Indiana University’s Assembly Hall out back, complete with replica NCAA championship banners, where John Mellencamp and Evan Bayh played pickup games with their host.

As someone once said of Bob Greene, it was as though these people had no embarrassment gene. And the marvel about the story was, it was the sort of thing they would read, put down and say, “What a nice story that man wrote about us” and everyone else would read, put down and shudder.

My reaction was: The first wife got the best part of that deal. As I recall, she settled for a big, fat bag of money and the Colorado ski house. She got a new lease on life, a Get Out of Indiana Free card and the perfect place to watch her ex-husband make a fool of himself over a stripper.

Well, as you can imagine, it all ended badly — the business, that is. The CEO and his wife, the ineffably named Tomisue, were forced to leave the murals behind when the corporation sued them for it, and had to move into veritable pauper’s quarters down the road (a mere $2.4 million house). But they’re still married! And Tomisue, anyway, is still swingin’!

She has, she tells, us “a passion for helping others.” And what better way to help others than to launch your own line of handbags: Launching a line of purses and apparel gives me another vehicle to give back to the community. Lending a helping hand to others and my love of design and fashion are both very near and dear to my heart. For this reason, I am so pleased that a portion of all proceeds from my handbag and apparel lines will benefit charitable organizations. Giving back to the community has been, is, and will continue to motivate me in all that I do.

Well, good.

Knock around Tomisue’s site. I especially enjoyed the video clip of Tomisue presenting personalized photo purses to the Denver Broncos cheerleading squad.

You’ve heard of “My TiVo thinks I’m gay”? Welcome to “The iTunes Music Store thinks I’m retarded.” This is the playlist it suggested for me, based on my previous purchases and, I suppose, the evil spies who creep into your room at night and root through your files.

Hey Ya! / OutKast
O-o-h Child / The Five Stairsteps
I’m Too Sexy / Right Said Fred
Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going to Be a Long Long Time) / Elton John
The Humpty Dance / Digital Underground
For Your Love / Yardbirds
Cinnamon Girl / Neil Young
Pictures of Matchstick Men / Camper Van Beethoven
Owner of a Lonely Heart / Iowa State University
The Reason / Hoobastank
Lights and Sounds / Yellowcard
America / Neil Diamond
I Will Survive / Gloria Gaynor
Dancing With Myself / Billy Idol
Ride Wit Me / Nelly & City Spud

Who the hell is Yellowcard? And why would I like them?

Pity the drama of the invisible suburban mom, running errands all alone on a Monday morning. Where is she going? Dry cleaner (husband’s shirts), Blockbuster (return “The Aristocrats” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”), Target (she needs sunglasses).

At Target, she selects a pair of sunglasses. Nine ninety-five. The cheaper ones don’t fit, the more expensive ones seem so, oh, extravagant. She’s so practical she disgusts herself.

So she stops in the music section. Buys “Back in Black” on a special CD/DVD double disk. Why? Because. She didn’t buy that record when it was new, because she was into New Wave then and AC/DC produced the anthems of the enemy, preferred by all those mouth-breathing radio program directors who thought the B-52s were for faggots. We were fighting a culture war, dammit! But that Nike commercial reminded me they weren’t totally worthless, so Angus? All is forgiven.

I checked the copyright on the album. 1980. Sweet Jay-zus, that was a long time ago.

Are we back to the first person, then? OK. I was feeling a little like a really bad memoirist, there.

For the record, I liked both those movies. They were both dirty, but very different. The John Roberts Story “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” was the biggest revelation, as I expected it to be half-crap and it was wholly entertaining.

I needed some light entertainment today, to keep me from thinking about rioting religious lunatics freaking over a bunch of cartoons, and the AC/DC to remind me that whenever you rock out, Allah kills a kitten.

My, my, but it appears we pulled it off. Fingers crossed — it’s not halftime yet — but it looks like the beat up old D actually put on a week’s worth of great parties public and private, cleaned up the streets and behaved itself enough that anyone who didn’t have a good time was constitutionally incapable of having one. Good gravy, Paris Hilton Herself was spotted in Grosse Pointe last week. If that isn’t amusing to you, well, go back to Seattle. I’m sure everyone in a position to care will be thrilled by the media reaction.

We had our share Friday night. I took Kate down to the Winter Blast after school, and we hooked up with Alan at the RenCen. To be sure, the Blast wasn’t all it could be — the snow had to be manufactured and kept melting, the dogsleds were modified with wheels, and we had to duck in and out of the warming tents not to warm up, but to get out of the rain. But. There was so much food you could have whatever you wanted with no waiting, booze equally plentiful and smiles? Oh, the smiles. Everyone was so happy. We were in downtown Detroit, and the streets were so thronged it was like VJ Day in Times Square.

But just in case you forgot where you were, there was a bit of violence.

Getting home was no picnic, though. We crammed onto a People Mover packed like Tokyo, and overheard a couple discussing how long it would take to get back to Campus Martius Park from their starting place, the RenCen.

“You’re, like, a block away,” said another passenger. “You could have walked there in five minutes. Where are you folks from?”

They looked sheepishly at one another. “Here,” they said.

Well, I’m glad they came, anyway. Maybe now they’ll come back.

You don’t have to approve of pornography to admire the business acumen of someone like Jenna Jameson. Most prostitutes have to do their two-backed-beast-making with many men, collecting their fortune one grubby C-note at a time. Whereas Jenna has figured out a way to do it with relatively few, and make millions of others pay her for it. This is a model any Harvard MBA would love to apply to more legitimate business, but Jenna’s even ahead of them there — thanks to photogenic, slickly marketed gals like her, porn is a legitimate business now. I can recall a time when her visit to town — to “host a party” — would have been studiously ignored by most metro newspapers, much less covered on a minute-by-minute basis.

There are three links there, to short stories from the Free Press website; go ahead and click through them to see how it went. If you don’t have time, it’s pretty simple: The crowd waits for Jenna. Jenna arrives, but immediately bolts for her super-secure VIP room, to which only “Jenna and her girls” are admitted. And then Jenna leaves, again quickly and without any crowd contact, although the girls put on a lingerie show.

Tickets to this pigeon-plucking ranged in price from $500 to $1,000.

Jenna is quite the dish, so maybe getting a glimpse of that blonde ponytail was worth it. Can’t say, but I will say her behavior underlined what must be the real downside of her line of work, i.e., those millions of others. The fans. I mean, do you blame her for bolting from a crowd of several hundred self-confessed wankers? Would you want to shake hands with some of these guys? And you know, of course, that many would want to give her a little hug and kiss, too. Man, I’d be in that secure VIP room so fast the ponytail would be all you’d see.

I think I’ve read too many mystery novels. When the city of Grosse Pointe had its first homicide in over 30 years last summer, I scanned the details in the paper: Middle-aged bookkeeper gunned down outside the home of an elderly woman she worked for. The old woman was loaded, or at least had a big perk of loadedness — a house near the lake. The shooting was execution-style and had no apparent motive (purse was left behind).

I read all this and thought, The old lady’s adult kid did it. The next day, police said witnesses had seen two black men fleeing in a green Taurus. I thought, The old lady’s adult kid paid them to do it.

Well, needless to say…sometimes life really is a mystery novel.

Homicide is a strange crime. The media keep count of them, nothing makes law-abiding people feel less safe, and yet, it’s the quirkiest crime, subject to wild fluctuations from year to year. The best advice, if you don’t want to be murdered, still seems to be, don’t deal drugs, stay away from criminals and don’t keep loaded guns in your house, particularly if your domestic relationships are dicey. And yet, you can follow all those rules and still find yourself shot to death in a driveway. Statistically? Bookkeepers have the safest job in the world. Yeesh.

Let justice be done. Poor bookkeeper.

Cards on the table: I’m not much for alternative medicine. That’s not to say there isn’t comfort, even healing, in herbal teas, reflexology, chiropractic and the like. As my doctor friend Frank says, “Hey, I like a massage as much as the next guy.” I just don’t think it can cure asthma. Not yet, anyway. Research into alternative therapies? All for it. Herbs are just drugs in green leafy form. But I’m always wary of its practitioners. I don’t know why I should trust someone pushing vitamins and practicing iridology more than one who graduated from Johns Hopkins’ med school. That’s all.

That said, I think even someone who’s less skeptical than I am could be dismayed at the news that Coretta Scott King died not at home or in a hospital close to home, but in a Mexican cancer clinic in Baja California. How sad.

Even as a work-at-home mother, I’m amazed at how little extra time I have for things that at-home mothers are supposed to do — help with the Brownie troop, bake cupcakes for the school party, whatever. But every so often the guilt becomes overwhelming, and I volunteer to do something like today: Drive to and help chaperone a class visit to the theatuh, in this case a production of “Annie Get Your Gun.”

A middle-school production of “Annie Get Your Gun.”

The things we do for our children.

Actually, it was quite an accomplishment — I don’t think they cut a line. It went a full two hours, quite a lot of play for sixth, seventh and eighth-graders to tackle, never mind all the singing involved. And they did it well. As I told the student teacher who rode with us, “I could almost forget the leading man in a romantic musical comedy wasn’t old enough to shave.”

Our junior-high play was “Our Town.” Requirements: A cute couple to play Emily and George, the mature kid to pull on his suspenders as the stage manager, and various others to flesh out Grover’s Corners. No singing.

I used to be in awe of people who could ante up the guts to get up on stage and sing “Anything You Can Do.” After watching “American Idol” audition shows, I’m in awe of the people whose job it is to tell the also-rans that they just don’t measure up. Why do so many of these people leave saying, “You’re going to be buying my CD someday, Simon! You jerk!” Who told them they could sing? And they still believe it, after they’ve caterwauled their way through some perfectly harmless song. All that self-affirmation we’ve been doing with young people? Mistake.