Clive Owen, Steve Nash and Juliette Lewis celebrate Strombo at the Hazelton Takeover party

Clive Owen, Steve Nash and Juliette Lewis celebrate Strombo at the Hazelton Takeover party

The man of the (half-) hour (Image: Stefania Yarhi)

The plebs swarmed Yorkville last night in droves, and the red carpet and photographers stationed outside the Hazelton Hotel acted as a honing beacon for star-seeking hopefuls. “Is that a celebrity? Who is that everyone’s looking at? That’s that model–she’s famous in Canada and internationally.” That would be Stacey McKenzie, sometime Top Model guest and Toronto party scenester, who had to push through a thick group of onlookers to get inside for the CBC’s Hazelton Takeover party, a bash for George Stroumboulopoulos’s new half-hour show, George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight.

The place to be was the patio, where Juliette Lewis gabbed with some friends about music and Little Mosque star Carlo Rota sipped his cocktail. Lisa Ray scoped out the scene and vanished. David Suzuki mingled while a strapping young man tried to talk up a woman we think was Suzuki’s hot daughter. Good luck, buddy. We spied Sloan’s Chris Murphy shaking hands with Ron Sexsmith and a young man named Mike trying to pick up women by telling them that he’s Norman Jewison’s grandson—always a classy move. Clive Owen also arrived in the wee hours.

Our favourite moment was watching the hobo chic Steve Nash (he didn’t wash his hair for the Olympics, why start now?) get cozy beside the bar with a young woman as well as Designer Guy Anwar Mukhayesh. “Woo! TIFF!” Nash yelled with sarcasm then told his posse, “We should go to a hip-hop club.” A woman then tapped him on the shoulder and said, “I just want to thank you for being such a great ambassador for Canada.”

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