"What you are eating effects everyone around you and the environment and the next generation. I believe that what you eat is a political act."

Billy Joel, of course, has a long history in the Hamptons, and can often be found winding around the back roads on his motorcycle, or taking his lobster boat, "The Alexa," out to sea. Kate now shares his love of the area, having spent the summer after her college graduation working as a fishmonger at Jeff & Eddy's. Whether grilling outside or taking the pugs, Finula and Sabrina (named for Audrey Hepburn's original Sabrina) out to Indian Wells Beach, Kate fits naturally into the spirit of summer on the East End. The couple plans to spend the Fourth of July on the balcony of their Sag Harbor home watching the fireworks in the harbor. "I'd say that's the extent of our plans, we're homebodies," she says. The Sag Harbor house has been on the market, but Kate says, "Just this morning, Bill was telling me how much he loves it here."

Splitting time between the Oyster Bay, New York mansion and their TriBeCa apartment, they get to Sag Harbor whenever they can, but usually make it out during the week. The hard-working Kate has been busy developing cookbook ideas, testing recipes, and polishing her food writing. In the coming weeks Kate's web-site, OliveAndPeach.com launches. She is co-authoring the site with her friend Aleishall Girard, a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu Academie in Paris and the granddaughter of the famous textile designer Alexander Girard.

The project joins two loves, writing and food. Today she's lunching on vegetarian Cobb salad, and eats seafood but no meat. "Part of what we are trying to do with the web-site is focus on conscious consumption. How what you eat effects everyone around you and the environment and the next generation. I believe that what you eat is a political act." Her husband, an unreformed meat-eater, is a big fan of her meatloaf with tomato relish and says, "Katie's cooking reflects our mutual love of the wonderful dishes we've tasted in our travels and her strong beliefs in the golden rules of great cuisine—seasonal, regional, uncomplicated, organic and fresh."

When she's in the Hamptons, Kate does most of her shopping at Citarella. "For Italian specialties, I usually go to Villa and for cheeses, and I really like the Village Cheese Shop in Southampton." She adores eating at Sant Ambroeus in Southampton where, "They do shrimp in a Dijon mustard sauce that's really incredible." When not picking tomatoes from her garden to make gazpacho or pasta sauce, Kate loves going out on the boat with Billy. "Billy is really into his boat designing. He created the Shelter Island Runabout, a 38' boat, which is manufactured on Shelter Island. Now he has designed a 57' commuter boat which will take us from our home in Oyster Bay, New York to Manhattan in less than 30 minutes - no traffic on the LIE!"

When posed the inevitable question about the 23 year age gap Kate says, "I knew that there was going to be scrutiny with that, but I think anybody who's ever been around us knows that we really click together. It's really just a number. My mother, like any mother was protective, but she met him and, like everybody else, she fell in love with him. He puts them at ease, he's a very laid back natural guy." As for a family, she'd love to have children. "But I've got time," she laughs.

Reflecting on her first cover shoot, which ends on the dunes of Sagg Main beach, Kate thanks the photographers, the make-up artists, and everyone she can think of. She can't help but be gracious. Off to a low-key dinner with friends to enjoy some fresh seafood she says, "It's not the material things. This whole life feels like a gift."

A Few of Kate's Favorite Things

Favorite Restaurants:
Sant Ambreous - for their pastas and shrimp
Sen In Sag Harbor - for sushi
The American Hotel - for lunch on the front porch

Favorite East End Charities:
Group for The South Fork
East Hampton Baymen's Medical Emergency Fund
ARF
Peconic Baykeeper
Bay Street Theatre
Favorite Shops
Blue & Cream
Scoop
Calypso
London Jewelers
Summer Reading
The Secret Life of Bees
The Mermaid Chair
Garlic & Sapphires
Memoirs of a Geisha
Endless Feasts
Favorite Designers
Oscar de la Renta
Tory
Missoni
Citizens of Humanity
Most Recent Splurge
A Digital Espresso Machine from Williams-Sonoma

"I couldn't imagine being on the road again," says Cruikshank, who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, lives in New York and loves to visit her grandparents in Laguna Beach, California.

But she says, "Yes."

A principal, or starring, role in the national touring company of "Movin' Out" pays more than $100,000 a year plus about $780 a week for room and board.

Of course she says, "Yes."

"It's like getting a sitcom," she says. Only instead of jokes, there is pain.

The dancing in "Movin' Out" requires such athleticism and endurance that the show is double cast, meaning the performers are only expected to work up a sweat every other night.

Cruikshank has danced continuously in Broadway productions since she was 18. She is a classically trained ballerina, but her nearly 6 foot stature, she says, kept her from getting jobs. As a teenager, she was ready to quit until she gave "one last shot" in an audition for "The Will Rogers Follies."

"The Will Rogers Follies" director Tommy Tune is 6' 7", and he didn't have a problem hiring the tall girl. Suddenly, she was making $1,000 a week in 1992, while her ballet friends were bringing in about $200.

She did "The Will Rogers Follies," "Hello Dolly," "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum," "Fosse" and "Contact" in the span of 10 years.

But she has never endured anything like "Movin' Out."

Working on the play in Chicago to get the show ready for Broadway, her knee gives out. At first, she says no to surgery.

"They told me I could dance on it if I could take the pain," she says.

For several months, her knee becomes the focal point of her life. Between shows, it's ice and rest. Rest and ice.

So she grits her teeth and dances. She opens with the company on Broadway. Then she goes in for surgery, which swells her knee to "seven times" its normal size, she says. She cries every day.

"I was scared I was never going to dance again."

The Actors' Equity Association protects her from being fired if she is injured. She gets workers' compensation during her seven-week recovery.

So what does she do? She comes back to the show and gets hurt again.

This time, during a rehearsal, another dancer slings her into the air and doesn't catch her. She falls and twists her ankle. Then her partner falls on her injured ankle.

She misses another month.

She works her way back from both injuries by doing yoga five times a week for 90 minutes a session. She says it balances her out, using different muscles than she uses in the show.

She is now "Brenda," the spinning, leaping, gyrating, high-kicking, go-go dancing star of the show.

When you're Brenda, the "queen of the prom" as Joel sang in "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant," you don't simply dance. Tharp, a choreographer known for authenticity, hires a historian to lecture the dancers about life in Joel's hometown, Long Island, NY, in the 1960s, life as a Vietnam War wife, life during the women's rights movement.

"She wants us to know the thought behind the action," Cruikshank says.

Since closing the show on Broadway in 2003, Cruikshank has taken her two suitcases - which is all she is allowed - to 36 cities. And she still has a year and a half to go.

She loves coming to Orange County, California. One set of grandparents lives in Laguna Beach, California, which is an easy place to get away from the pounding noise of the "Movin' Out" show.

"I'm five feet off the ground when people talk about her," says her grandfather Bob Sternfels. "She went to Broadway and made herself a name."

But not a huge name. Once, she was in a New York restaurant and a man told her what a big fan he was. He thought she was tennis player Monica Seles.

"You get paid the least, you work the hardest and you get the least amount of recognition," Cruikshank says.

In Orange County, California, she stays in a hotel. She spends about $400 a week for her room, then she has $380 for food, cabs and entertainment. Her entire salary goes into her bank account.

Being in a new city every few weeks is difficult. Cruikshank spends the afternoon trying to figure out where to eat. She eats about 4:00pm so she can be back for makeup and stretching by 6:30pm. Thursday she finds Quiznos.

The toughest part about being on the road, she says, is trying to find someplace to eat after the show. After opening night in Orange County, she and the cast eat at TGIFriday's. They don't know anywhere else open at 11:00pm.

Finding food isn't the only problem with being in a National Touring company. If you're not in New York, you can't audition for other shows.

Cruikshank says she hasn't told anyone, but she wants a part in the revival of "A Chorus Line" that is scheduled to open on Broadway in the next few years.

After that, she's got her eye on Hollywood. She may try to follow in the footsteps of Catherine Zeta-Jones, Neve Campbell, and Charlize Theron, who all began as dancers.

Until then, she tries to enjoy life on the road.

"I haven't had to clean my toilet for a year and half," she says.

"Telling a story was the point," Ms. Tharp says in a telephone interview from her Manhattan apartment. "But it had to be a financial success. Broadway does not subsidize the arts."

Some previous groundbreaking shows that didn't fit the normal Broadway mold, from Porgy and Bess on, have triumphed artistically. But this one - basically a modern-dance ballet - has outdone them all in reaching big audiences.

Except for her controversial stage version of "Singin' In The Rain," which Ms. Tharp dismisses as "13 lifetimes ago," her previous Broadway excursions had been limited-run dance extravaganzas. But the 64 year-old choreographer always knew she had the power to entertain.

"When I did 'Deuce Coupe'" - her 1973 ballet set to Beach Boys songs - "I looked at it and I said, 'This is Broadway. What's the problem?'" she recalls. "Broadway wasn't a goal - but showbiz was."

One aspect of the plan to make dance pay was to give dance and dancers a higher profile and command respect for them in the way American culture understands best - the checkbook.

"It has always been part of my concern for dancers," Ms. Tharp says. "When I had my own company, the dancers were paid 52 weeks a year. I maintained that for about 10 years."

In contrast, dancers even in major companies generally expect to cash unemployment checks as part of their annual income.

Although Ms. Tharp set out to create a narrative, she didn't start "Movin' Out" with a particular story in mind. She was thinking of a body of music, instead.

Throughout her 40-year career, which has made her the world's most respected living choreographer, Ms. Tharp has alternated between lofty classical masterpieces and popular hits for inspiration. She grew up in a drive-in movie theatre her father managed in Southern California, but "on the other hand, my mother trained to be a concert pianist," she says.

The choreographer has tackled formidable stuff from Bach to Brahms. But since "Deuce Coupe," her first big crossover hit, she has mined songbooks such as Chuck Berry's and Frank Sinatra's. She collaborated with David Byrne on 1982's "The Catherine Wheel for Broadway."

For "Movin' Out," it all started with Mr. Joel. Ms. Tharp invited the singer/songwriter to her place, where she made an elaborately planned pitch. Impressed, he sent her a copy of every CD he had recorded and gave her carte blanche.

The choreographer devised a plot using figures named in the songs themselves - Eddie, Brenda, Tony, and Judy. "Goodnight Saigon" told her that the men would have to go to war in Southeast Asia.

The men come home broken by their nightmare experiences, and the women take parallel routes to hell and back. Did Ms. Tharp have archetypes of death and rebirth in mind?

"I don't think that mythically with that piece," she says. "My spine for it was, 'Get Eddie home.'"

Eddie gets home most emphatically, with one of the most joyful outbursts of dance energy ever to grace a stage as the show's grand finale.

Ms. Tharp's book documents the intense labor that goes into all her work. For "Movin' Out," her research included learning such minutiae as how soldiers in Vietnam communicated silently via hand signals. Although it became a piece about the war almost by accident, that aspect has turned out to be important to many audience members - and to the choreographer.

"I'm very proud of the piece - and that it has meant so much for the vets," Ms. Tharp says.

Tell a story well enough, and even old soldiers will come.

"I'm going to dip the halibut into the egg mixture, and then we are going to drench it into the corn flakes," she showed us. "And all it takes is 15 minutes."

Add a side of tomato, avocado, corn relish, and you're good to go!

You can check out the recipe and other important food information on Kate Lee Joel's new web-site, OliveAndPeach.com.

"The Stranger" won him Grammys and well-deserved attention, but his other work was just as significant and important to pop music, in different ways. His debut, "Cold Spring Harbor," was a sparse, skeleton-crew record that could be considered his equivalent to Bruce Springsteen's pivotal "Nebraska" for its simplicity and quiet power. His second record, "Piano Man," spurned the star-making single of the same name and was incredibly diverse, touching on spaghetti-Western country, arena-rock bombast and the kind of touching balladry that snuggled inside each of his subsequent records.

The Contradiction Man

That wouldn't come until later, on "Streetlife Serenade" and "Turnstiles" and, really, "The Stranger" and its follow-ups, the massively popular "52nd Street" (with its leave-me-alone anthems, "Big Shot" and "My Life") and "Glass Houses," a straightforward rock and roll record, essentially, but one subtly layered in his intricate piano work. "Glass Houses" marked two other milestones in his career: It launched two of his biggest hits, "You May Be Right" and "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me," and was his answer to contemporary music of the time - which he notoriously hated (proven by the album's cover art of him getting ready to cannonball a rock through someone's very nice house) - but ironically bought into on at least one of the songs, the very New Wavish "All For Leyna."

That's how Billy Joel worked sometimes, though; he often contradicted himself, or at least gave things a second thought. Although he once sang, "I once believed in causes, too/I had my pointless point of view/But life went on no matter who was wrong or right," he put out "The Nylon Curtain," an openly political and conceptual record that touched on Vietnam, the Reagan era, the dissolving of small-town industries and people's obsessions with the media.

Because they felt the songs on it were too mushy, fans started to bail on him when he put out his next album, 1983's "An Innocent Man." It was his tribute to doo-wop, the love of his childhood, and Christie Brinkley, the love of his adulthood. She starred in one of the videos ("Uptown Girl") and is name-dropped throughout the record.

"An Innocent Man," and the backlash it caused, was the first of many ensuing problems: Brinkley divorced him in '94, after nine years of marriage; Joel also became entangled in a vicious court battle with his one-time finance manager, who reportedly stole millions of dollars from him; and the quality of his records began to sink. "The Bridge," "Storm Front," and "River of Dreams" simply could not match the intelligence, passion, musicianship and overall quality of his prior work. And Joel admitted he was beginning to feel insecure and tired of the rock and roll lifestyle, especially the touring. He wanted, he said, to stay home, relax and make classical music. And then Billy Joel pretty much disappeared.

"Movin' Out" could be and should be the spark that relights his creative fire. His music is out there again, his name is out there again.

His car accidents - three in two years - have been parodied on "Saturday Night Live" (he subsequently spent 30 days detoxing at the Betty Ford Clinic), but he should take advantage of making headlines to make different kinds of headlines; Billy Joel really and truly should come out of "retirement."

With all that has happened in his life over the past several years (including at least one beam of shining light, his marriage to culinary student Kate Lee last year), he certainly has a well of material to sift through.

He needs to put that stuff down on piano, not tuck it underneath it. Every year, it seems, another band or musician comes out of retirement. War horses around the country, playing their obvious hits, then standing in line at the bank; they do it for all the wrong reasons.

If Joel came out of hibernation, it would be for the right reasons: He would have an armful of new songs, a revitalized attitude since he's been off the road so long, and just enough bitterness (he knows he's never really gotten his due) to make his live shows an emotional experience, as they used to be. Billy Joel's got more money than a .38 Special. He doesn't need to tour anymore.

Maybe this is supposed to be it, though. Maybe we won't get to see him again, hear him play "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" or "Allentown" or "New York State of Mind." Maybe we won't see him dance around the stage during "Only The Good Die Young," a middle-aged man proud to look silly, or bounce from one side of the stage to another, from one keyboard to another, during "Pressure," or hear him share anecdotes and bad jokes with the crowd. Or hear him close the show with his infamous advice, "Don't take any shit from anybody."

When I asked Joel how he wanted to be remembered, he told me, "I would like to be remembered as a writer. Rock star, that has no meaning to me. Writing is the hard part, and it's the most satisfying thing for me. But once I heard Beethoven, it made me realize how insignificant I am."

That's his opinion.

Essential Billy Joel Recordings

For the novice listener, we reluctantly recommend his double-album "Billy Joel: Greatest Hits Volume I & II." Has all his big songs: "Just The Way You Are," "Uptown Girl," "New York State of Mind" and, of course, "Piano Man." Only reason we're touting this greatest hits compilation - his records really aren't meant to be chopped up like this - is that it contains a fantastic song unavailable elsewhere, the grandiose "The Night Is Still Young."

The album that shows all the emotional sides of Billy Joel - angry, frustrated, humorous, empathetic and tragic - is 1977's "The Stranger." His sprawling, dramatic "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" is here, as well as one of his most underrated ballads, "She's Always A Woman." Listen to "The Stranger" all the way through and you'll find a new appreciation, and maybe have a better understanding of "Just The Way You Are," from which this originally comes. It won't seem so icky.

"Streetlife Serenade," and the also-recommended but somewhat overrated "Glass Houses," is a reactionary record, Joel at some of his meanest moments. "The Entertainer," for instance, takes a jab at his own record company for trimming "Piano Man" into a radio-friendly single. His overall disgust and disillusionment is with Los Angeles, California, where he briefly lived, as a whole; the tone of this record led into the leadoff track of "Turnstiles," his next record. That song: "Say Goodbye To Hollywood."

Speaking of "Turnstiles," that, too, is one of his masterworks, his self-rolled-out, red-carpet return to New York, about which he waxed eloquent via "New York State of Mind." He still doles out plenty of bitterness and self-confusion on "Prelude/Angry Young Man," not only one of his best songs lyrically, but with its complex prelude, it's also one of his most accomplished moments musically.

The other record to obviously recommend here would be "52nd Street," a slightly jazzy effort that contains some of his most intelligent and melodic swipes at whoever's bugging him: "Big Shot" and "My Life," and one of his most affecting ballads, "Honesty." But if you want to hear Joel in his musical infancy, start from the beginning, the sparse and ghostly "Cold Spring Harbor," recorded on a bread-and-water budget and featuring mostly just Joel and his piano. If "Just The Way You Are" is the perfect wedding song, this record's two closing tracks, "Nocturne" and "Got To Begin Again" should be used for funerals.

"From what I hear, she's pretty talented. That's the buzz out there" in the Hamptons, said D'Orazio, who runs a Hauppauge-based modeling agency, Ambassador Promotions.

D'Orazio is hoping to tap into Joel's Grammy-winning father's fan base on the East End, where the singer/songwriter has long partied and his ex-wife, Brinkley, is a veritable institution.

"I think people will be very interested in seeing if his daughter is a prodigy like he was," he said.

Joel has begun to follow in her "Piano Man" dad's footsteps.

Two years ago, she left the Ross School in East Hampton to spend her senior year at Manhattan's Professional Children's School, where she studied musical theatre.

After leaving the academy, whose alumni include Macaulay Culkin and Christina Ricci, she attended New York University.

"She's on hiatus [from New York University]. She's going to pursue her musical career," Claire Mercuri, a spokeswoman for Joel, said.