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 Danc...

    In Williamsburg, before the rents ballooned and the irony calcified, there was a window of time when people believed they were creating something important. It was 1997/8 and for one humid, candlelit evening, we were in Notting Hill — or at least pretending hard enough that it almost held. This was before 9/11, before algorithms, before Uber and influencers and curated realities. Nostalgia has turned it golden, but even then, we knew something delicate was happening. Fragile. Possibly delusional. But pure in its own chaotic sincerity.   The apartment belonged to Caulder, a 29-year-old gallerist with no formal gallery and no formal income. He wore tuxedo pants every day and claimed not to believe in chairs. His loft had one couch, no television, a salvaged butcher block table, and a faint, inescapable scent of eucalyptus.   The party began late because parties always began late. The guests arrived in staggered waves, all limbs and linen, clutching wine bottles wit...

Darlings, throw on your pearls and peel yourself off the fainting couch — this Sunday, we’re going somewhere deliciously decadent. Tonight’s setting? A roaring 1920s dinner party that would make Gatsby feel underdressed. There is no specific year — we’re simply in the 1920s, the decade that invented champagne-soaked chaos.   Arrivals & Aesthetic The guests arrive in chauffeured Hispano-Suizas and Packards, stepping out in velvet cloaks, chinchilla wraps, and the occasional scandal. Josephine Baker glides in like silk dipped in firelight, fresh from a Paris revue. Ernest Hemingway, still smoldering with youth and trauma, saunters in with a flask of something strong and a story twice as strong. And Cole Porter? He’s already at the piano, turning your indiscretions into sheet music. Dorothy Parker is parked on a tufted velvet chaise in the corner, armed with a gimlet, ready to dismantle everyone’s ego in ten words or less. “Brevity,” she purrs, “is the soul of lingerie.” Oscar Wil...