Utica Folks Don’t Want Jenny Is Their Playmate

Jenny McCarthy is unlikely to be offered the key to Utica, N.Y.

Utica is a source of comedy (so to speak) for McCarthy’s new NBC sitcom “Jenny.” The plot involves McCarthy, a grocery clerk, who leaves Utica for Los Angeles.

But the town is never far behind. In one scene, a lawyer tells McCarthy to “go back to your little burg… marry a couple of nice boys named Buck and Bo, join a bowling league and start popping out babies.”

Such jokes prompted Utica Mayor Ed Hanna to label “Jenny” as “indecent” and “horrible.”

“The best punishment we can give is for her to come to Utica and see how wrong she was,” Hanna said Wednesday. “In the meantime, neither my wife nor I will watch the show. Who needs it?”

Loose talk

Kim Basinger on her temperament (in W magazine): “I have an ego, like anybody else. But I have good days and bad days. That’s so normal. It’s refreshing.”

Once again now, was she Beauty or was she the Beast?

Linda Hamilton turns 41 today.

You need good choppers to eat the burgers there

So why was Burt Reynolds willing to donate a Harley-Davidson motorcycle to the Las Vegas Harley-Davidson Cafe? Well, for one thing Reynolds had used it in his 1981 movie “Cannonball Run.” “We pushed it out of the back of an airplane,” Reynolds said at the cafe’s opening on Wednesday.

In other words, it’s still worth dancing to

Wondering how the latest Rolling Stones concert is going? You decide. One critic who attended the Tuesday opening in Chicago described lead singer Mick Jagger as “a competent pro going through the motions.” Another wrote, “Ultimately, it’s not the age of the songs or the performers that matters. It’s the richness of the music and the Stones’ best is as rich as rock ever produced.”

Hey, people, there are lives in the balance

Jackson Browne took a couple of shots at singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell for lyrics she included in a song that appeared to criticize him. “She’s not really well,” Browne told the Dallas Morning News. “She’s not a happy person, and what she said in that song is absolutely, 100 percent wrong.” The song concerned Browne’s relationship with actress Darryl Hannah, who accused Browne of beating her in 1992.

There was no question, though, of who would go first

Hillary Rodham Clinton proved to be an ordinary woman when she bought three pairs of gold-framed, wide-rimmed glasses Tuesday at Manhattan’s Morgenthal-Frederics on 62d Street. Said one bystander, “She tried on glasses and asked people how they looked. She was very down-to-earth.”

His sentence: to listen to his own songs

Julio Iglesias received an unwelcome 54th birthday gift from the Argentine government: a tax bill for $200,000. He says he already paid.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster