Faces in the crowd: Specifically, the musical crowd at W's inaugural geehaw, where the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra played the Inaugural Ball.

        Two Cincinnatians and one ex- were onstage wailing away.

        Steve Schmidt, keyboard for the Blue Wisp Big Band, founder and guiding spirit of the Steve Schmidt Organ Trio and a right familiar sight at pianos all over town, did the keyboards.

        “Brent Gallaher, the tenor sax player, played with the Dorsey band and lives here now. He asked if I'd do it. He was going, and he had also lined up Steve Barnes on drums. He's in Chicago now, but he used to live here.”

        Schmidt accepted without knowing much about the gig. “It's the convention center,” he said last week. “And I guess it's the main ball, unless Ricky Martin shows up.

        “From what I hear, it should be crazy, with all that security and the blocked streets.”

        Playing the inaugural, that's a good thing, and so is this week: The band packed up Sunday and flew to Baton Rouge to join the American Queen for a week-long cruise. “It's a three week date, cruising the first and touring the next two. But I can only play a week. I'll do Pensacola, then fly home next Monday.

        “But I'm glad to get just this part. It should be fun and interesting.”

        As long as Ricky doesn't show.

        Cover boys: Well, look who's all over the February edition of Cosmo Girl! It's Cincinnati's 98 Degrees on the cover and four pages inside — three full of pictures of Cincinnatians Justin Jeffre, Nick and Drew Lachey, and Northern Ohioan Jeff Timmons — and a page full of story.

        But it's more fun than most of those fevered-up interviews we see.

        Here, we find they're not perfect. Like, yeah, Drew did cheat a bit at School for the Creative and Performing Arts: “All the time using Nick's papers, and I was two years behind him, so I figured I'd never get caught.” He did.

        And yeah, Nick was once dumped by a girl who found herself a new man whilst he was in California. And Jeff got the brush-off from a girl who told him she thought it would be romantic to have some love puppy toss stones at her bedroom window in the middle of the night. He did. She told him to go home.

        That probably doesn't happen a lot anymore.

        Wedding March: Oh, and did we mention, these guys are everywhere?

        Like In Style's annual celebrity weddings edition, featuring 50 pages of photo and stories about 19 celeb couples who recently made the leap.

        Such as 98-er Drew Lachey and Lea Dellecave, who have dated since high school and married here last October at downtown's Covenant First Presbyterian Church, then danced the night away at Peterloon, the 72-acre Indian Hill estate.

        It was a fairly small wedding (257 guests) and not a lot was known at the time.

        But, for those of us whose invitations were lost in the mail (again), Style was there and breathlessly tells us that the bride, a dancer and choreographer for the band, got a 1.5-carat rock, wore a Vera Wang gown with a loooong veil and a diamond tiara.

        The gents, meanwhile, gussied up in dark Hugo Boss suits and they all ate from a four-tier Bonbonerie cake with icing in a lily-of-the-valley design to match Delecave's gown.

        And how's this for coincidence and another local tie? The page facing the Lachey wedding has the Catherine Zeta-Jones-Michael Douglas wedding. Douglas, recall, spent all kinds of time here last summer filming Traffic.

        Contact Jim Knippenberg at (513) 768-8513; fax: 768-8330.

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