Anyone see the article in the Connecticut section of a recent Sunday edition of The New York Times? The one about how, slapped by America's recession, even the notorious rich-folk enclave of Westport has been hit with Tough Times?

Tragic, is what it is. Simply tragic. (Repeat those two sentences in your best Thurston Howell III voice to get into the spirit.)

Truth is, I had to check to make sure it wasn't an Onion piece - that's how (presumably unintentionally) hysterical the story was.

So what I thought I'd do is, I'm going to list below some horrible things and you get to guess whether they actually have come to pass in Westport - as detailed in the Times article - or they are false, as detailed by Me and, because I'm mean-spirited and poor, we only WISH they'd come to pass in Westport.

(Correct answers below.)

1. A home furnishings and jewelry business has received at least 10 bad checks in the month “after the Lehman shakeup.” The proprietor, whose interior design fees sometime reach $500,000, doesn't remember even one bounced check in the six years she's had the Westport location!

2. The Westport Polo Fields have been torn up and are being rezoned for a mobile home park and meth lab!

3. At the Liquor Locker, wine sales still account for 99 percent of the store's business, but “customers have stopped buying $70 and $80 bottles” and bottles in the “$12 to $17 range are the current bestsellers”!

4. The Liquor Locker is also selling a lot of Boone's Farm and these vintages seem to be going specifically to citizens the owner knows to have lost jobs on Wall Street!

5. “In a town where image matters” and “the women of Westport are known for their smart appearance,” the owner of a dry cleaning establishment says more of the town's fashionable ladies are shopping at Goodwill!

6. Women in town didn't even know there WAS a Goodwill in Westport!

7. Town fathers have set up a Paul Newman Hall of Fame hoping to cash in on the kind legacy of their recently deceased most famous resident. Visitors to the attraction's snack bar can sign up for the Cool Hand Luke Challenge, where they'll try to eat 50 hardboiled eggs under life-size cardboard cutouts of Strother Martin and George Kennedy!

8. Owners of the town's spectacular Splash restaurant have decided to re-open the place as a Popeye's Chicken 'n' Biscuits franchise!

9. “Families are having conversations about whether to forgo or scale back the expensive ski trips, birthday parties, landscaping and more. Teenagers can no longer assume they can snap up cashmere sweaters at J. Crew or Juicy Couture sweats at Wish List … “

10. “The city council has initiated a new town slogan: 'Westport is the new New London.'”

ANSWERS: 1-true; 2-false; 3-true; 4-false; 5-true; 6-hmm: possibly; 7-false; 8-false; 9-true; 10-false.

This Is The Opinion Of Rick Koster.

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