SOCCER moms and Joe Sixpacks, listen up. Get your beer, mooseburgers and caribou dips ready. Sarah Palin is doing “Saturday Night Live.” Not Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin doing “Saturday Night Live.” But the Sarah Herself. She has already OK’d it. She’s booked. It’s confirmed. Done deal. Sketches are being sketched as we speak. She – eyeglasses, haircomb, designer jacket and trunkful of gosh-darns, golly-gees and gol-dangs – will be on “SNL” Saturday night, Oct. 25. Sarah’s rehearsal time has already been penciled in for Friday the 24th. And it’s because she wants to do it.

So, my question is: Does this mean Tina Fey has plans to run for VP?

SINCE OJ‘s aborted Vegas heist, arrest, trial and conviction, I have written about celebrity memorabilia dealer Thomas Riccio, the centerpiece of this deal. We met years ago when he peddled Anna Nicole Smith’s diaries. From the Social Register, he isn’t. But, guess what, he feels sorry for BSOJ.

“He’s no personal friend. I hardly know him. We just did two deals together. And this whole Vegas thing took only 10 hours of my life.

“What I’m saying isn’t popular,” he told me. “Even my mother says OJ got what’s coming to him. Look, the world wanted him, and the world got him. Congratulations to the world. What happened 13 years ago, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I only know he doesn’t deserve 8,000 years plus double life for this. I’ve been in prison. I know what it’s like.

“Not like he actually planned an armed robbery. He was just stupid. I told him in front, ‘Have security next door monitoring what goes down because . . . who knows . . .’ And he said, ‘No, I got my own guys with me. It’s OK.’ It’s his guys did him in. They set him up. They even had a video camera on him so they could sell it afterwards. And he covered for them, lied to cops, because these thugs were his friends.

“Another thing. Simply saying, ‘No one leaves the room until we get this figured out’ constitutes kidnapping in Nevada. That automatically gets you life.

“This OJ publicity hurt my business. I had to sell my auction house to my partner because right now nobody wanted to work with me. And forget an appeal. Even if OJ had 87 different grounds, anybody who’d hear an appeal could kiss a career goodbye. The hate for him is such that if Satan came up from hell and sat on your lap, it wouldn’t be as bad as doing business with OJ.

“Listen, they wanted to get him, so they got him. I’m impartial. I’m only saying this he didn’t deserve. But 98 percent of the people want him put away forever. Everyone hates him. My own mother hates him and says he deserves it.”

Me, too. So don’t cry for Argentina or scumbag pig Simpson.

PEOPLE smarter than I say that, since McCain needs to pull another trick, he could show what he’s doing to heal our dying economy. Announce a panel of doctors – like Bloomberg, who knows how to run a big operation, Giuliani, who knows from smoking out Wall Streeters, rich businessman Ken Langone, who knows how to fight . . . Just repeating what I’m hearing.

I now report how I watched this week’s presidential debate. Nazalene, my Indian housekeeper of 11 years, had made lamb curry. One bone and out went my front tooth. A hole the size of the Lincoln Tunnel. My dentist Dr. Marc Lazare was on the island. Knowing he once did an emergency session in Liza Minnelli‘s own bathroom, remembering he once flew somewhere to help Gina Lollobrigida, I called. Late at night, as Obama was again telling us, “Let’s make one thing perfectly clear,” the doc drove back to his 74th and Park office. At 10 p.m., this creature whose smile looked like something out of the Ozarks was under novocaine. I am suggesting sainthood for Dr. Marc Lazare.

PREACHER: “Do you take this man for richer or poorer?” New York bride: “I’ll take richer.” . . . Yesterday the Times announced Oliver Platt will be in the revival of “Guys and Dolls.” I announced it Sept. 24 . . . So how much sleep do we get? Jay McInerney: “Five hours. I’ve been an insomniac since I was 6.” Tucker Carlson: “I do a mental exercise in bed. I build the ultimate cabin. Every nail. Every wire. It relaxes you.” Tom Wolfe: “Six and a half hours. And sip an espresso before I go to bed. The warmth goes through my body.” . . . Ed Koch: “I go to sleep midnight and get up at 5, about two minutes before the alarm goes off. I can sleep on a wood floor or iron rail, so I take catnaps during the day.” . . . Kevin Bacon: “Kyra (Sedgwick) and I hurt ourselves by living in New York. We’d have different careers if we lived in LA. It’s a company town. It’s where you need to be.”

BUTCHER shop. Assistant, trimming fat, suddenly says to his boss, “I’m tired of taking orders from you,” and points the knife at him. The boss replies: “Put down the knife. You should be ashamed of yourself,” then immediately turns to his customers and says, “Next.”

Only in New York, kids, only in New York.