So as you might know, I did not get to celebrate Halloween this year. But I think I may have made up for it last night and, not to brag or anything, I also think maybe I should go into the last minute costume business. I pulled this Addams family quartet together out of nothing at the final hour in Berlin a few years ago, did a pretty good job for my girls the morning of this one and then it was Frida.
My friend Rachael invited me to the Come As You Art Ball a few days ago as her aunt had gotten the couple hundred a head tickets somehow for free through her work. I thought it sounded like a fun and totally out-of-our-ordinary thing to do, so I said I'd join her even though I had no idea what piece of art I had the means to dress up as. Rach borrowed this Magritte costume from a friend and I still had no idea what I was going to wear when I woke up Sunday morning. But after scouring my closet, my roommate and friend's jewelry boxes and buying two bouquets and some eyebrow pencil, a little Frida Kahlo came to life inside of me. And boy was she a hit.
Not only was it fun to dress up and get in touch with my mustached unibrowed side, the event itself was quite an experience. We spent the evening in high-ceiling rooms full of intricate moldings and velvet couches, off of wooden staircases and long hallways, in what could have once been a Greenwich Village mansion but was now a mysterious members only club. We nibbled on mini sandwiches, drank gin cocktails, ogled at the art on the walls while rubbing elbows with an echelon of people who wouldn't usually mosey into our Brooklyn dives but could definitely give any of the wannabe hipster artists that frequent them a lesson in cool. The kind of cool New York you may think about, but never really see outside of the movies or the pages of a certain Patti Smith novel.
They were writers, artists, photographers and professors who all seemed to have inhabited Manhattan since before we were born and will probably still be here attending art parties and chatting with new faces like ours about their openings, book releases and lectures until way after we are all long gone back to California. Maybe I am wrong and building up a Woody Allen fantasy in my head, or maybe I was able to have such intriguing conversations with these intellectuals because I was dressed up as an artist, but either way I have been smiling about my little Frida New York moment all day.
