Joni Mitchell crosses paths (almost) with Paul Gross

Last Wednesday at Prego: a TV Mountie, a singing icon and a certain gossip columnist. The impeccably pecced Paul Gross missed Joni Mitchell by a whisker, but I caught both of them at the ever-popular eatery. He left just before she got there, although I'm not really sure if he left full. The guy smoked more than he ate.

When he wasn't puffing, Gross was fuming about the dire straits of Canadian TV to his dining companion, and offering a fairly deep but droning dissection of The West Wing. Didn't hear the Due South star talk about the new show that he's developing for CTV (or so says the word on the street).

Mitchell, so you know, arrived en famille, looking well-rested and frolicky. Nothing like the happy-challenged Joni Mitchell profiled in the current W, in which she talks about quitting the music biz, and grouses at one point, "What should I do? Show my tits? Grab my crotch? Get hair extensions and a choreographer? It's not my world."

Rather, the warbler seemed in serious grandmother mode, as she settled at a table with her formerly long-lost daughter, Kilauren Gibb, and her kids, wrestling amiably with one of the tykes' coat zippers. All seems peaceful between Mitchell and daughter -- "hummin'," as she puts it in W. "We're more like sisters. Our relationship is beautiful -- since I didn't raise her, we don't have the scar tissue that's frequently built up between mother and daughter."

FYI: Earlier that evening, just before Prego, I hear that Joni left a trail of gasps of recognition when she swept into a little cocktail party on Richmond Street. It was for some arty and media type organizations, such as McIllroy & King Communications and Paul Alexander photography, who recently shacked up together in the same building. "I started smiling at her, because I thought I knew her," a spy tells me, "but I then realized I didn't really know her. Has that ever happened to you?"

It was a top-drawer guest list at the first-ever Material Ball last Thursday at the Royal Ontario Museum. A Nicole Eaton-Melanie Munk sort of night.

Put together to coincide with the ROM's superb new exhibition, Elite Elegance: Couture Fashion in the 1950s, it wasn't just the fashions that were retro. The whole evening seemed quaintly uni-cultural. I haven't seen so much white since the great Mel Lastman-call-in-the-army snowstorm of 1999!

Catherine Clark, one of the few younglings in the crowd, looked spectacular dressed in a pink-and-white, girly-but-still-ladylike get-up. Dr. Botox, Trevor Born, couldn't walk a few steps without some rich broad trying to talk to him. "Your clients?" I asked him. He didn't deny it. The ROM Raj, William Thorsell, had on a dinner jacket that seemed to me more brown-tie than black. When I said this to him, he smiled broadly and said, "Actually, plum."

(Seems Thorsell is on a definite push-the-limits-of-clothing bender. In his column yesterday in The Globe and Mail on the subject, he decreed, "It's time for women to dress up again" -- adding that most women at the Queen's gala last month looked like "sparrows," as if they were sporting "longer versions of their office wear.")

Some readers tut-tutted me for writing last week about Antonia Zerbisias' incredible weight loss but neglecting to mention the shrinkage of Matthew Fraser, her co-host on the new CBC talk show Inside Media. So here goes: The TV guy and National Post columnist confirms he's lost 10 or 15 pounds, not the 110 Antonia has. "It was due entirely to rigorous tennis (almost every day) all summer," he says.

The pound-shedding had nothing to do with a CBC directive, though. What the Corp did insist on was a little necktie-shedding. "I was against this," Fraser says, "but my senior producers insisted -- they wanted a more casual look. So I am tieless, grudgingly."

He shrugs: "At least I don't have to wear a black turtleneck like Evan Solomon."