It’s That Time Of Year Again

October is high season for tourists and . . . drag queens:

At a busy wigmaking studio in Hell’s Kitchen on Tuesday, half a dozen craftspeople could be found hunched over synthetic mesh scalps, tying individual human hairs into them as fast as they could. Hair was everywhere: draped across tabletops in horsetail lengths, clinging to the fabric of chairs, scattered across the floor in unruly clumps.

The artisans had seen and even built wigs of all descriptions, from flowing brown manes for classical operas to buoyant white up-dos for fantastical Broadway musicals. But even the veterans looked up from their needles when Maurice Neuhaus, a 28-year-old German-born wigmaker, actor and sometime drag queen, pulled out a neon-blue extravaganza that looked at first glance like an otherworldly wild animal being released from its cage.

. . .

During Halloween season, the demand for professional drag performers rises, so Mr. Neuhaus has been busy doing performances booked by a talent agency called Screaming Queens Entertainment. Yesterday, Mr. Neuhaus expected to wear a black, Asian-style wig with bangs while entertaining guests at a bar mitzvah reception in Midtown. On Friday, he planned to wear his over-the-top blue wig for a Halloween gig at a game arcade in Englewood, N.J.

For all its high camp and artifice, his wig possesses an exceptional degree of realism — when he wears it, it looks as if “real” blue hair is growing from his head.

Such artistry is much admired by those in the know.

“Only certain very meticulous and experienced drag performers have custom-made wigs,” said Alex Heimberg, chief executive officer of Screaming Queens, who performs as Miss Understood, a character for whom Mr. Neuhaus built oversize wigs in both bright pink and bright green. “You have to reach the point where you know you’re serious about what you’re doing.”

Who has a drag queen at a bar mitzvah?

I’d Use The Words “Meta” And “Ironic” If I Could Only Remember What They Meant

And we’d watch but the infinity mirror started to hurt our head too much:

The Burg is a single-camera scripted series filmed mostly inside this apartment and on a few street corners around the block. The episodes, ranging from one to 15 minutes in length, can be viewed at www.theburg.tv or downloaded through iTunes. Or observed in real time at any number of stops along the L train.

“The thing about Williamsburg,” said Kelli Giddish, a blond aspiring actress who plays a blond aspiring actress on the show, “is all the ugly people are trying to look pretty and all the pretty people are trying to look ugly.” She paused to let the observation sink in, then pulled a faded white satin nightshirt over her starlet-thin frame, belted it up tight with an oversized tan suede sash, topped it off with a white crocheted shawl and pronounced the new look “Granny Chic.” Several of her co-stars applauded.

The Burg is about the precious scenesters of Metropolitan Avenue and the silly things they do to be cool. Ms. Giddish has another soap job, on actual television, playing a onetime stripper named Di Kirby on ABC’s All My Children. On the Web, she plays Courtney, a sporadically anti-capitalist ditz.

Courtney’s friends in the Burg are more of the same: Spring, played by Lindsey Broad, is a youthful brunette who cares about the environment and wants to break her generation’s credit cycle. Jed, played by Bob McClure, wears thick black plastic glasses and forcibly prevents his friends from drinking anything other than Pabst. Xander, played by Matt Yeager, is a starving artist with a huge inheritance.

In place of holding steady jobs or contributing to the local economy, Spring, Xander and the gang spend their days coordinating their American Apparel leggings and their thrift-store cowboy boots with 18 plastic bracelets and two vinyl headbands from junior high. Their days are occupied with chemical boycotts, bike trips to Astoria, auditions for independent films and hours spent cursing gentrification and analyzing the complicated etiquette of modern bohemia.

It’s like Rent, only instead of AIDS, some of them have trust funds.

Hell House, New York City Style

This year features borough-specific haunted houses:

Last Halloween, [Timothy] Haskell, a theatre director, staged a public haunted house on the Lower East Side, and so many people showed up that hundreds never made it inside. “We realized that we had to turn away a lot of local people,” Haskell said. So this year he put up haunted houses in all five boroughs, tailored to prey on the fears peculiar to each one.

For months, Haskell and his crew polled residents of the five boroughs to find out their worst nightmares. . . . People from the Bronx and Queens, they said, tend to fear things that might actually happen, like being mugged (harpaxophobia), while Manhattanites are frightened of fantastical and unlikely occurrences (flying sharks, riding in an elevator that rockets through the roof of a building). “In Manhattan and Brooklyn, we heard ‘fear of the homeless,'” [chief designer Paul] Smithyman said. “Then, in the Bronx, we heard ‘fear of becoming homeless.'” Staten Island residents apparently dread chemical spills and gas leaks.

. . .

The challenge of creating a tableau representing acrophobia, the fear of heights (and the seventh most common fear of Manhattan residents), almost stumped the designers. “One idea was that we’d have people walk up a staircase and onto a Plexiglas floor and see teeny-tiny furniture beneath them,” Haskell said. “But there were liability issues.” Instead, they paired a video of someone falling off a ledge with an evocative sound effect: vroooooom, splat. For illyngophobia (fear of dizziness, No. 11 among Manhattanites), the team installed a giant spinning tunnel; for entomophobia (insects, No. 3), they glued a thousand dead cockroaches onto a wall; and for musophobia (mice, No. 6), they ordered an essence of dead rat from an outfit in Chicago called Sinister Scents.

When It Comes To Breaking In Pre-Schoolers, Some Claim Size Matters

Preschoolers don’t just seem older, they actually are older:

Children who turn 5 even in June or earlier are sometimes considered not ready for kindergarten these days, as parents harbor an almost Darwinian desire to ensure that their own child is not the runt of the class. Although a spate of literature in the last few years about boys’ academic difficulties helped prompt some parents to hold their sons back a year, girls, too, are being held back. Yet research on whether the extra year helps is inconclusive.

Fueled by the increasingly rigorous nature of kindergarten and a generation of parents intent on giving their children every edge, the practice is flourishing in New York City private schools and suburban public schools. A crop of 5-year-olds in nursery school and kindergartners pushing 7 are among the most striking results.

“These summer boys have now evolved to including girls and going back as far as March,” said Dana Haddad, admissions director at the Claremont Preparatory School, in Lower Manhattan, referring to children who turned 5 in those months but stayed in nursery school. “It’s become a huge epidemic.” In some corners, the decision of when to enroll a child in kindergarten has mushroomed from a non-issue into an agonizing choice, as anxiety-generating as, well, the private school kindergarten admissions process itself.

“It’s kind of crazy to hold them back,” said Jessica Siegel, 40, whose daughter, Mirit Skeen is back for another year at Montclair Community Pre-K in New Jersey, although she turned 5 in late August and the public school cutoff there for kindergarten is Oct. 1. “Someone’s going to be the youngest. Someone’s going to be the smallest.”

Ms. Siegel and her husband considered the decision for months, waiting until the week before public school started before making it final in case Mirit “suddenly had some kind of huge emotional shift.”

“I felt like her whole experience is about being the smallest and the youngest, and I wanted to change that experience for her,” Ms. Siegel said, adding, “The more people do it, the more people do it — partially because you don’t want yours to be the last.”

To stave off preschool fatigue, some city parents send their children to public school kindergarten for a year, hoping to transfer them to a private kindergarten the next year. Columbus Park West Nursery School on the Upper West Side is considering opening a “junior kindergarten” to accommodate children who in the past would simply have headed for the real thing.

New Yorkers Love Lines Even More Than Robert Downey, Jr.

Suggesting that it just may be a gyro* after all, the New York Sun invokes the halo effect:

The daily pita pilgrimage begins at 7:30 p.m., when New Yorkers — and a handful of in-the-know tourists — begin lining up at the corner of 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue. Within minutes, the line emanating from the fragrant gyro stand there stretches halfway down the block.

Two other gyro carts within a half-block radius have no wait at all. But city foodies contend that Halal Gyro and Chicken is worth waiting on a line that can exceed 45 minutes on some evenings. The stand’s $5 platter includes chicken, lamb, rice, salad, pita, and, most importantly, customers say, a tasty combination of white and red sauces.

. . .

In New York, a city of seemingly limitless choices, inhabited by famously fast-paced people, there are still some things for which residents are willing to wait in line. What’s worth the idle time? For some it’s a bargain; for others it’s a status symbol. For some, it’s a gyro platter; for others it’s a pair of sneakers, a basket of Buffalo wings, a museum exhibit, a stuffed toy, a cupcake, or two tickets to “Shakespeare in the Park.”

The heightened anticipation for what’s deemed worth waiting for can enhance the mind’s perception of those cart-cooked gyros, saucy chicken wings or buttercream-frosted cupcakes, a New York-based clinical psychologist, Robert Leahy, said, referring to a phenomenon known as the “Halo Effect.” “Today people are very insecure about getting the right thing, and the easiest way to make a decision is to seek out what everyone else is buying,” Mr. Leahy, who heads up the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy on East 57th Street, said. “If they didn’t feel like they had to fit in, and they just looked at what they value, they might make different decisions.”

*Or Buffalo Wings, Noodles, Buttercream Frosting or Cheese Omelettes.