This image was lost some time after publication, but you can still view it here.

Last night, our special Learning Annex correspondent Eric Deamer took in the wise counsel of PR queen Lizzie Grubman. Lizzie doesn't disappoint in the slightest: in fact, her team gives the best definition of the difference between advertising and public relations we've ever heard. Chilling.

Lizzie Grubman used her PR skills to the utmost in her Learning Annex class, by controlling every aspect of the situation to make sure that there was no mention of the recent, um, unpleasantness, and by staying relentlessly on message.

The message: Lizzie Grubman is a clean, sober, virtuous, hard-working, early-rising little flack, who protests I hate the word flack! She wakes up at 5:30 every morning and works out. She hasn t socialized in night clubs in five years. (If you re wondering, the SUV-running-over-white-trash-yelling thingie happened less than five years ago.) She even does community service that isn t mandated by the state, I do a lot of charity work, endless charities. There s not a week that goes by that we don t do a charity event. It s very important to me.

Her first line of defense against us white trash in the audience was her two enormous bodyguards. Next was Michael Katz, the Learning Annex s gleefully boring in-house version of James Lipton, who led the class by asking such probing questions as, What s a typical day like? Then, finally there was the fact that Lizzie was the only Learning Annex teacher I ve yet seen who actually forced the students to follow the procedure of writing all of their questions on 3 by 5 cards beforehand, so she and Michael Katz could make sure that nothing interesting got through.

In her defense, I should note that this is now my third Learning Annex class, and everyone I ve gone to has been attended by a skinny, pale, twitchy guy who looks like a homeless junkie and always wears a white t-shirt with the words Nevada is Legal written on it in black magic marker and an oversized pair of professional boxing shirts with letters spelling out Fountain of Youth stitched on. He is shaved-headed except for a gray-green patch vaguely in the shape of the letter F, and he spends most of the class twitching and talking to himself. So, given this guy and a few others, I might bring a bodyguard too.

Lizzie s bio went something like this: In college she liked to party , so she became a night club promoter for Seth Greenberg. She eventually dropped out of school to be a full time night club promoter, but she says she doesn t recommend it (dropping out of school). Upon having dropped out of college, her father told her that she had to get a real job. So she used a family favor , the only time she s done so, to get a job working in PR for MTV. The woman she worked her hated her because she knew that she only got the job because of family connections, so she made poor Lizzie do all the stuff that normal assistants do like answer phones and fetch dry cleaning. Lizzie hated it, but she couldn t quit a job that she was given as a favor so she found some other, mysterious way of ending her employment at MTV which she didn t divulge.

From there she got a job in PR for, bizarrely enough, Big Apple Circus, by bullshitting." She worked there for three years, working with elephants," and walking through mud." Then she moved on to Page Sixer Richard Johnson s wife Nadine s PR firm, where she began to handle high-profile, trendy clients such as Spy Bar, Bowery Bar, and of course, Conscience Point. She started her own PR firm in 1997 with the two girls she brought on stage with her: Sabrina, who handles the corporate accounts, was selected because she s Lizzie s sorority sister. Brenda graduated from NYU with a degree in journalism and aspirations of being a writer. (A heartening story no?) She was selected because Lizzie can t write a paragraph properly.

Next Michael Katz plunged on to the What advice do you have for people trying to break into the business? portion of the evening. The answer: internships. More specifically, the answer is to be a hot enough looking girl to get a job cocktailing at the Hudson Hotel. Lizzie had three girls who had gotten internships with her get up and tell their story, and all of them had been offered internships by Brian, the CFO of Lizzie Grubman Public Relations, who discovered them there. [Ed Note: Another attendee reports that "One girl admitted she had worked for 'months and months and months' for no pay, doing 'anything I was asked.'" Yeesh.]

Michael Katz asked if she had ever refused to represent a potential client. Lizzie said that just that day she d had a meeting with a reality TV show star , from the upcoming ABC show Wife Swap (not to be confused with the similarly-themed show that s on Fox now). Apparently, this future Omarosa, Came off horrifyingly obnoxious. She thinks she s going to be a movie star but America s going to hate her. I didn t like how she treated the people who work for me. As you ll see on the show, she s not very nice. Wait til you see the show.

Then it was on to the thorny topic of relationships with reporters. Lizzie Grubman: I have great relationships with the media. When we re talking to the media, we don t always talk about our clients. We talk to them about story ideas, help them. They like that. If we do them favors, they help us out later. It s a give-and-take relationship. We re friends with people. We go out for drinks together.

At this point, Michael Katz said, There might actually be people out there who don t know the difference between PR and advertising. Could you explain?

Brenda fielded this question: Advertising is paid editorial. PR is when it s written in the content of publication. When people see it written in a publication. They believe it.