Village idiot goes to town
He has disparaged its traffic-clogged streets. He has mocked its liberal-leaning residents. And in a stinging rebuke to the Manhattan-centric, he has expressed a blunt preference for Staten Island and Queens.
But on Monday, Mr. Paladino held his nose long enough to make a brief campaign swing in Manhattan, determined to navigate it with the same rumpled everyman style and resolute anti-elitism with which he has campaigned to be the state’s chief executive.
He succeeded, up to a point. He insisted on sitting in the front seat of a taxi as it whizzed through Midtown (back seats, after all, evoke chauffeurs). He stayed at an unassuming hotel in the garment district. And he devoured an antipower breakfast: eggs, sausage and butter-soaked toast at an out-of-the-way diner.
But he became star-struck in the lobby of the CBS Building on West 57th Street when he stumbled upon a glamorous British actress.
A reporter pointed her out to Mr. Paladino as a star of “The English Patient.” The gruff, aggressive candidate gasped, saying he liked the film, and rushed over to introduce himself.
“I’m Carl Paladino,” he said. “I loved, what was that movie?” he asked the reporter. “ ‘The English Patient,’ ” he said, with a prompt. Shaking the woman’s hand up and down, he asked, “What’s your name?”
“Kristin Scott Thomas,” she replied.
He asked her to repeat herself, leaning in to hear her better. Leaning back, she put a hand to the side of her mouth and called out, “Kristin Scott Thomas.” And then she scurried away toward an elevator.
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