“Whether women are better than men I cannot say – but I can say they are certainly no worse,” said the Israeli leader Golda Meir.

***

Great Britain’s Daily Telegraph, one of my pop-culture guilty pleasures, is holding the feet of Tory grandees to the fire. And they are adding titled persons who take advantage, as well as politicians in general.

The paper has opened its front pages for several weeks with photos of offenders who misuse their privileges and charge the government for everything from their swimming pools, to repair of their lawn mowers, the upkeep of domestic staff and on and on. Sometimes these offenses take up the first three pages. Just imagine if The Washington Post or The New York Times decided to do that about our own lawmakers in Washington!!

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They put Jane Fonda’s caricature up in Sardi’s famous theater restaurant this week. And all because of her current, incredibly good Tony-nominated performance on Broadway in “33 Variations,” a show that she herself produced. It’s taken only 46 years for Jane Fonda, a household name, to make it up on the walls at the house of hams and cannelloni. (It was back in 1960 that Jane made her theater début in “There Was a Little Girl.”) 

And this reminds me of a story. I was lunching in Sardi’s not long ago with my godchild, Spencer, and his mother, Cynthia McFadden, and we were wondering if the caricature of Katharine Hepburn was still there in the restaurant. Spencer decided he wanted to see it because he remembered his “Aunt Katty” from the years just before her death.

We asked the headwaiter and he found us the great Kate’s drawing, even bringing it to our table. “Would you like to have it during lunch?” asked the man. He then brought up a chair next to Spencer and stood Miss Hepburn’s framed likeness on it.

We lunched with Katharine Hepburn that day and we all enjoyed the visit.

***

The famed Nobu restaurant in Tribeca, the brainchild of movie star Robert De Niro, chef Nobu Matsuhisa and partner Richie Notar, is weathering the recession as if it never happened. Now this idea is a global chain with 20 Nobus across five continents. There are Nobus today in Dubai and Cape Town.

The company says now it is pointing toward opening hotels on the Nobu concept. Notar says, “Instead of putting Nobus into hotels, which we do at the moment, we want to build hotels around Nobu.”

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Texans know how to mourn their own. Willie Nelson sang at the writer Bud Shrake’s funeral in Austin. The audience about lost it when he came to the words about angels being too close to earth. The speakers were funny, irreverent and a little sad.

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Literacy Partners hit the jackpot the other night with its authors’ readings in Lincoln Center’s new David H. Koch Theater (formerly the State Theater). By the end of the evening — and with Sony sweetening the auction deal by providing dozens of the latest Sony Reader Digital Books —  they had raised $1,150,000 plus.

Barbara Walters, David Wroblewski, Marie Brenner and Christopher Buckley were our stars. They wrangled the audience from tears to laughter. One of our student readers, Emma Davis, slayed us by telling how she is now going for her PhD. The wonderful playwright Stephen Daldry stepped up to accept an award for Kate Winslet and their movie, “The Reader.” (Kate studied with Literacy Partners for the role and won an Oscar.)

As the host of the Literacy event, along with Arnold Scaasi and Parker Ladd, I had an easy job and, also, I got to dance with the nine-time Tony-winner Tommy Tune when the Bob Hardwick Orchestra began to play. (And Tommy never dances except for money as a rule.)