Two Washington area studmuffins -- D.C. cake baker Warren Brown and Gaithersburg fitness trainer Joe Decker -- have just been named to People magazine's list of America's Top 50 Bachelors.
"I've never had an honor like this, so I have not a clue what to expect," the 31-year-old Decker told us yesterday. "I don't want a bunch of psychos calling me." We hope he didn't mean us.
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Two of People's Top 50 Bachelors: Warren Brown, left, and Joe Decker.
(Brown, File Photo; Decker by Joe Campanellie - Campanellie's Signature Portrait)
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"It's a thrill," the 30-year-old Brown told us. "I've had a lot of fun with it already."
Decker's path to hunkdom began when he joined the Army. "I flunked my first physical, so they put me on what they called the 'fat boy' program. So I started working out." After his discharge in 1991, Decker obtained a bachelor's degree in corporate wellness and found his way to Washington. Last year he was named the "World's Fittest Man" by Guinness World Records. "I love good cigars," Decker said. "I still eat pizza. I still drink beer. I still drink wine. It's all about moderation. You've got to be human. It would suck to do this stuff all the time and not have a reward."
Brown, meanwhile, slaves over a hot stove 14 hours a day -- and we could hardly hear him over the phone with all the pans rattling, water running and mixers mixing. "It's pretty hot in the kitchen," Brown said. "I use surgical gloves all the time, so my hands are hot, too."
Brown quit his job as a litigator for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last February to hurl himself into the cake business. "I could be the Ben & Jerry's of cakes," said the Cleveland native, who bakes 70 cakes a week in a rented kitchen on 14th Street NW and sells them via phone and the Internet. His ingredients are all natural, he said, and his greatest hits include a citron bundt cake and his specialty, "Susie's a Pink Lady" -- a confection of fresh raspberries nestled between layers of sponge cake, moistened by a raspberry liqueur. "Some of the bakeries just slap things together," Brown said. "I don't do that."
He's a Poet and Now We Know It
• The Library of Congress has named English professor Billy Collins the new U.S. poet laureate.
"I haven't done a cost-benefit analysis," the 60-year-old Collins told The Post's Linton Weeks yesterday from his farmhouse in Somers, N.Y. "When your country calls, you rise to the occasion. Or attempt to. My first reaction was: vertigo." He added that he accepted the post as the country's 11th poet laureate for the "sheer glory of it."
"Billy Collins's poetry is widely accessible," Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said about the City University of New York professor. "He writes in an original way about all manner of ordinary things and situations."
Consider these lines from Collins's poem "Victoria's Secret": "Who has the time to linger on these delicate / lures, these once unmentionable things? / Life is rushing by like a mad, swollen river. / One minute roses are opening in the garden / and the next, snow is flying past my window."
Collins's latest collection, "Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems," will be published in September. He replaces Stanley Kunitz in the position that gives him responsibility for a reading series at the library and for promoting poetry throughout the land.
THIS JUST IN . . .
• Looking for somewhere to have dinner while in Washington, Woman of Vision awardee Sharon Stone solicited our advice. When, as promised, we called back with a list of restaurants, she informed us: "You better be careful. The last journalist who stalked me ended up marrying me." Intriguing, but then again, there was that lizard business. And then Stone dissed us, completely ignoring our recommendations. Tuesday night, Stone and three friends dined at Teatro Goldoni (not among our suggestions) and, rising to the Celebrity Tip Challenge, left 20 percent on a $550 bill. "I hope that you have enjoyed my movies," she told chef Fabrizio Aielli, "as much as I enjoyed your food."
• King Hussein's widow, Queen Noor, has been stepping out lately with AOL Foundation Chairman Jim Kimsey. They recently visited the Balkans together and were spotted a few weeks ago in a group of dinnergoers at Washington's Cafe Milano. So we wondered: Is Kimsey a wooer or a walker? Neither, it seems. It turns out that the Washington billionaire, recently named chairman of the International Commission on Missing Persons, has recruited the former Lisa Halaby, an activist against land mines, to the commission.
