Freeing up rich-country real estate currently clogged with cots and playpens would lower rents; liberating time currently wasted in story-telling and tummy-tickling would raise productivity.
No matter, the message that domestic violence is not as bad as other kinds, that a man's home is still effectively his castle, harem and torture chamber – in the same week as the crimes of Fred West came under the spotlight once more – came over loud and clear from this most unlikely of prime-time playpens.
But pop stars are differently abled, to put it mildly; coddled and catered to for decades on end, they inhabit playpens of complete caprice, cooing and grasping at shiny, noisy political issues the way that cot-bound babies gurgle with excitement at activity boards.
And they were sampling the food of Geoffrey Zakarian, a veteran of such high-profile playpens as the Royalton Hotel's 44 and Patroon who has come into his own in the dining room of the Chambers Hotel, a new, pocket-size dormitory catering to people who are likely to have wandered in from Norma Kamali's shop next door.
American universities, he says, have become playpens for empty legacies of the rich; there is no recognition that the historical trend has run in the opposite direction.
When she turned 3 months, cousins I had not seen since my bat mitzvah appeared with used playpens, vibrating swings, and an Elmo collective.
(His dressing room at the arena held two playpens).
From a borrowed wheelchair in front of orange bleachers, Lise Coachi, 87, surveyed the neat rows of playpens and Army cots, the soldiers in camouflage acting as bellhops, and the blue-shirted workers from the State Department of Children and Families cradling babies.
The downtown tents covering parts of Howard and Mason Streets house alcohol-soaked evenings sponsored by Fujitsu, fully stocked candy bars and Lego playpens where people win prizes from Google for interesting constructions.
Normal people, if they can be located outside the playpens of mythology and tall tales, are exactly those we do know, in our families and relationships, by choice or happenstance, or as is so often the case in this impossible city, out of necessity.
As a ringmaster of Chelsea nightclubs like Marquee and Avenue, Mr. Tepperberg, along with his professional partner, Jason Strauss, presided over some of the city's most enduring celebrity playpens of recent years.
