Born in 1945 in Brooklyn, Paterson's father Basil was a labor lawyer, and later a state senator, secretary of state, and deputy mayor of New York City. Paterson when was three, he suffered an ear infection that spread to his optic nerve and left him with little to no vision in either of his eyes. His family moved to Long Island so that he could attend a mainstream school, and he was the first disabled student to graduate from Hempstead High School in 1971.

With his popular parodies of music videos and TV commercials, Samberg has become a bright spot on Saturday Night Live.

The high-profile former creative director of Gucci is now the creator of Tom Ford fragrances as well as a stratospherically expensive eponymous menswear line.

LeCompte is the co-founder and director of the Wooster Group, the experimental acting troupe that has been delighting and confusing audiences for nearly three decades. With its space at 30 Wooster Street since 1980, the tightly-knit Wooster Group has not just survived but thrived in underground theater for decades, despite rising rents and the commercialization of SoHo. Known for its weird casting choices, perhaps not surprisingly, one of the hallmarks of Wooster Group productions is audience members walking out in frustration or disgust. LeCompte hardly cares: as long as she incites controversy, she'll likely keep selling tickets.

The daughter of billionaire Pete Peterson, Holly is a longtime socialite and occasional author who chronicled her Park Avenue exploits in The Manny.

A young social fixture, Olivia Palermo grew up in Connecticut and attended the New School, but quickly finagled her way on to the society "It" list. Her aggressive attempts to scale the social ladder landed her on the cover of New York Magazine in May 2007 after Palermo was at the center of vapid socialite controversy in March 2007. In 2008, she briefly became a reality TV staple thanks to her role alongside Whitney Port in MTV's The City "working" in the publicity department at Elle. She launched oliviapalermo.com in 2011 and has a long-gestating reality show that will follow the creation of her fashion line in the works. [Image via Getty]

A fixture at events around town, Genevieve Jones is one of the few young African-American women on the social scene and one of the more controversial, too. Once described by Vogue as the "Girl of the Moment," Jones's "It" girl status dissipated in late 2006 after a series of articles revealed she'd been lying about her age and family roots. She's since founded her own line of jewelry.

The muckracking conservative columnist at the New York Post was born to immigrant parents, grew up in Queens and graduated from SUNY New Paltz and Albany. She landed her first journo job for the AP in Albany right after college, and in 1989 joined the Post.

The man who built the Gap into a multi-billion dollar retail powerhouse, Drexler was inglorious evicted from the company's top slot in 2002. He's now the chairman and CEO of J. Crew.

A former model and flight attendant, Grace Hightower is the second wife of Robert De Niro and the mother of De Niro's son, Elliot, and daughter, Helen.

Via her eponymous firm, Schelter dabbles in photography, marketing and design for the likes of Zac Posen and Victoria's Secret, but she's better known for her busy social calendar and prodigious party planning abilities.

With William Donaldson and Richard Jenrette, Lufkin co-founded investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in 1959 and cashed out 41 years later, selling DLJ to Credit Suisse for $11.5 billion. His wife is lady about town Cynthia Lufkin.

A former publicist at Tiffany, Lufkin is now a full-time socialite. Her (second) husband is investment banking veteran Dan Lufkin.

The indie film-making with attempted Einstein-tribute hair is from Akron, Ohio. He was briefly enrolled as a journalism student at Northwestern, before dropping out. He graduated from Columbia in ‘75 with a B.A. in English. He was subsequently accepted to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, with no prior film making experience.

Evans lets viewers know what meteorological mediocrities Mother Nature has in store for the tri-state region as the weatherman for WABC.

With his business and romantic partner James Huniford, Sills is one-half of Sills Huniford Associates, the decorating firm that has picked out expensive furniture for the likes of Vera Wang, Brooke DeOcampo, Nan Swid, Linda Wells, and members of the Newhouse family.

The former president of NBC News, Shapiro is the president of public television channel Thirteen/WNET.

The chief of advertising monolith Interpublic, Roth oversees a portfolio of publicity, branding, marketing, and advertising companies, including McCann Erickson, Lowe Worldwide, Draftfcb, Deutsch, R/GA, and Weber Shandwick.

A superlatively flaming ubiquity in downtown social circles, Boardman is a parody of fierceness and author of the "Ask Mr. Mickey" column for Paper.

Full name Christopher Julius Rock III, the perennial jokester and ofter provocateur was born in 1965 in South Carolina and raised in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy. His father was a trucker and deliveryman who died of a stomach ulcer 1988, and his mother was a social worker. After dropping out of high school due to racially charged bullying (don't worry he eventually got his GED and got to laugh in the face of those bullies when he got rich), Rock worked a series of highly paid, dignified, lucrative fast-food restaurant gigs while he began to experiment with stand-up comedy.