“Divorced! You and I have both been divorced!” said the widow, Patricia Schoenfeld, to me this week when we met by accident.

Only days ago I was describing Mrs. Schoenfeld as looking smart and snappy when she came onstage at the Majestic Theater at the end of her famous husband Gerry’s star-studded memorial. When I asked Pat what she was talking about, she said, “Well, you have been ‘divorced’ by your tabloid newspaper, the New York Post, and I have been ‘divorced’ by the Shubert Organization. They have dropped me!”

So I called up my longtime pals at the Shubert Org, the most powerful and influential of all Broadway producing units, and asked head man Phil Smith about this situation.

He says, “We have the utmost respect for Gerry’s widow and are helping her in the transition. She will always be welcome in Shubert Theaters. But I fear she has the idea that Gerry somehow owned a part of what is not a ‘family business,’ but a ‘foundation.’ The Shuberts invented and own it and we just run it. I think she has misunderstood this. Nevertheless, we will continue to be her friend and do whatever we can for her now that Gerry is no longer here.”

Word on the Rialto is that the mighty Gerry left his wife very well fixed. Perhaps she will become a Broadway producer in her own right!

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As for me, well, my “divorce” has put me in the limelight as never before. I laughed this week to find my longtime friend, the brilliant creator of “Doonesbury” – one Garry Trudeau – doing a cartoon segment with a character who is being let go from The Washington Post after 33 years! (The “33 years” part of this “funny paper” item was pretty close to home.) But Gary’s character is a bearded man who is being offered a buyout.

Oh, how terrific it would have been to be offered a buyout from the New York Post and for that matter, maybe I should grow a beard. 

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Ralph Fiennes must be the most prolific actor working today. He seems to be “in” everything with no deleterious effect on his brilliant acting.

Now, his much more elusive brother, Joseph, is rumored to be about to enact the evolutionary Charles Darwin in a movie to be titled “Mrs. Darwin.”

While Darwin developed his controversial theories, Mrs. Darwin, who was his first cousin, lived a quite religious life, and her husband’s theories put a strain on their marriage. Rosamund Pike is likewise rumored to play Mrs. Darwin. 

Meantime, the talk of the town is The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, whose latest is Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, coming from Knopf. The award-winning writer offers as his theme that Lincoln and Darwin, born on the same day, February 12, 1809, were men who were alike in helping to shape the modern moral world. They affected a “liberal civilization” based on democratic politics and scientific reasoning.

The other night, NYC’s most energetic and effective hostess, Tina Brown, tossed a party for Gopnik at her East 57th Street salon. The mayor of New York showed up along with the dynamo Barry Diller, the Broadway star Frank Langella and the saucy writer Chris Buckley, to name just four of my favorite guys. 

It was here that international literary agent Ed Victor and his wife Carol enlightened us to say they had been living in New York for over a year and now they will go home to London’s Bedford Square for this year and will only visit Manhattan.