Entertainment

WIFE SUPPORT

ANDY Warhol was so wrong.

In the future everyone will not be famous for 15 minutes. Some people will be famous for one minute only – which is about 59 seconds too long, in some cases.

Take the women who are about to – for reasons totally inexplicable to anyone with a sense of, er, reality – become reality TV participants on Bravo’s upcoming cringe-maker, “The Real Housewives of New York City.”

There must be a missing gene in some people that makes them unable to be content with a happy, healthy family, lots of money, and seemingly everything they (emphasis on they) want. These missing-gene types crave fame to go with their fortunes.

In all, five women are featured. They don’t seem to actually be friends, though they show up at the same tennis dates every now and then.

In the meantime, they go to parties, they go shopping, they worry about their weight. (Oh wait, they don’t do that. I do.)

If you live in New York, you can do all this stuff yourself – or you can stay home, watch this and save yourself the trouble of putting on Spanx and going out.

The women also do things that most women here would be loathe to do.

These “housewives” cater with a special kind of desperation to their husbands (always bragging about how happy and sexy their marriages are).

They go shopping with their husbands, who sit in chairs and watch them prance around in outfits like they escaped from “The Women.” This allows their husbands to boast about how much they’ve spent.

These “housewives” even refer to themselves as socialites and say how cool their kids’ friends think they are – though their own children find them neither hot nor cool.

They don’t have great relationships with their kids. In one case, the stepdaughter and the self-proclaimed socialite’s husband don’t particularly like one another although said socialite tries desperately to force it. It’s miserably uncomfortable to watch. Why in the world would anyone want the world to know this?

The women include:

* Alex, who is married to a man who runs an Eastside boutique hotel and is in “visual merchandising,” which I think means she designs ads for the Internet. Their au pair speaks to the kids in French. How do you say “push the merch” in French again?

* Bethenny is a natural foods chef, and the sincerest seeming of the “housewives” but isn’t. A housewife, that is.

She’s divorced and a professional reality show contestant, who was on the short-lived The Apprentice: Martha Stewart.”

* Jill, who’s married for the second time is the one that appears the most desperate for fame and for acceptance.

She says things like, “I’m a New York socialite and have my picture taken for a lot a fancy magazines and I love it!” (Oh dear. I think she just lost her shot at “The Social Register.”)

* LuAnn is a former model married to a count whose family built the Suez Canal. She refers to her husband as “the count.” I felt like I was watching “Sesame Street.”

She’s much in demand at social events. I guess in a country that, thank God, has no titled monarchy (excluding the Clintons and the Bushes), getting someone to show up with a title other than the ones you have to check off on return labels is a big deal.

* Finally there’s Ramona, who owns a fashion business and is married to Mario, a third-generation jeweler.

She and her friends hang around in bathing suits throwing each other into the pool and talking about pole dancing – much to her 13-year-old daughter’s great humiliation.

The point of it all? Pointless. And just a little sad. Count(ess) me out.

Clarification:In last week’s review of “Lipstick Jungle,” I mentioned that “Cashmere Mafia” was also based on Candace Bushnell’s novel. Producer Darren Star denies that emphatically and wants to make perfectly clear that despite nearly identical plotlines, “Cashmere Mafia” was conceived independently.