OPEN POST: 1980s Dinner Party

The party is already in full, frothy swing when you arrive, and you're 45 minutes late. Welcome to Greenwich Village, mid-1980s, and Elkie’s apartment is packed tighter than a cocaine executive’s day planner. Her duplex walk-up smells like Campari, Shalimar, and hair products. The stereo's blasting the Talking Heads at an anxiety-inducing volume, and someone’s brought a ferret. It’s wearing a leather collar. Naturally.

Elkie herself—daughter of a dubious, possibly fascist German businessman and a former Miss Switzerland runner-up—is gliding around in a backless gold lamé number and neon green heels. She has the posture of a disco giraffe and the voice of a chain-smoking dove. She never blinks. No one knows what she *does*, but everyone knows she’s *done* things. Legendary things. She curates chaos.

Warhol is in the corner, snapping Polaroids with slow, skeletal movements. Basquiat’s tagging the inside of Elkie’s coat closet with a Sharpie he stole from the hostess stand at Danceteria or Limelight or someone else's party. Keith Haring is drawing radiant babies on the bathroom mirror in steam and pink lipstick. Julian Schnabel—painter, filmmaker, and professional narcissist—is lounging on the couch wearing polka-dotted silk pajamas and explaining to a wine spritzer that he invented postmodernism. Madonna is in a corner in shades dropping cigarette ashes into a potted plant pretending to want to be anonymous as if she is already the superstar she later becomes.  

A waxen-faced British pop singer, Colin St. James—known for one club hit in 1982 and now trudging the C-list circuit like a doomed ghost—keeps hovering near the bar asking, "Does anyone remember *Crush the Moonlight*? That was me." No one does. 

Three drag queens openly judge everyone's fashion and find most of it wanting, but agree that Elkie might actually be a man named David. 

Grace Jones, The Cure, and Prince is on rotation, of course, and Elkie keeps shouting about how Duran Duran's John Taylor winked at her once outside the Mudd Club. No one doubts this. Calvin Klein’s date is a model who’s so thin you can see her childhood trauma through her clavicles. Iman has entered, glowing like a deity, escorted by a soft-spoken gallerist wearing suspenders and self-importance. 

                              

Tama Janowitz—author of *Slaves of New York* and Manhattan’s reigning high-low lit queen—is lifting a wallet from Tad the yuppie’s Members Only jacket “for research.” Jay McInerney, author of *Bright Lights, Big City*, is mumbling something about second-person narration and how cocaine is a character.

 

Chip, another yuppie, is loudly debating whether to invest in fax machines or frozen yogurt franchises. He nearly starts a shouting match about the value of Reaganomics with an MTV VJ.  His date, Bitsy, is wearing shoulder pads so wide they scrape the hallway paint.

 

 

 

The food is 80s absurd: a pyramid of jumbo shrimp cocktail on a glass tower, crostini smeared with duck mousse, crudité nobody touches, warm sushi on a silver platter, and a mountain of breadsticks jammed in a Lucite vase. There are Perrier bottles sweating beside bottles of cheap California chardonnay and Sky vodka. Some genius brought a fondue set. Elkie keeps offering guests carob brownies and calling them avant-garde.

Someone’s dog that resembles an iguana is dressed like Boy George. Someone’s boyfriend is dressed like Boy George. Molly Ringwald is in the kitchen holding court over Fresca, tequila and sour cherry Jell-O shots, and no one will admit to inviting her.

The night winds on well past 3 a.m., long after someone puts on David Bowie and everyone pretends not to watch a music video on MTV playing on the tiny TV atop the fridge. Tad passes out in the bathtub. Bitsy tries to sell Tama Janowitz a screenplay. Someone offers Warhol a bump and he declines, saying he’s already high on being misunderstood.

At some point, Elkie climbs on the coffee table and demands everyone describe what they would’ve worn if this party were happening in the future—say, 2025. Everyone rolls their eyes, but then they start answering, because this is New York and no one wants to miss their close-up.

Before the dawn cracks, someone’s crying on the fire escape, someone’s proposing a Vegas elopement in the hallway, and someone has ordered Chinese food to the wrong building.

It’s a perfect night.

And you were there. Sort of.

So now we ask you—dear Peckerwood readers—what would *you* have worn? Who would you have brought? Who would you have danced with? And how would you have made your entrance.

photos: blogs, pinterest