The man approached me like he’d just figured out the answer to a riddle that had been bothering him for ages. His denim button-down shirt was tucked into jeans, and clear snot was collecting in the divot between his nose and upper lip. “Hey!” he yelled. He stared at my shirt, which had leather appliques arranged in a vaguely Inca-looking pattern. “That’s a nice top. It’s like Cleopatra, but subdued.” He drawled “subduuuued” like Keanu Reeves. Then he introduced himself as Neo.
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Caroline Berger, who cohosts the original Sunday Salon in Brooklyn, kicked off the night with a series of emotional, high-concept passages about being a woman and dealing with love lost and misdirected. It was a little too Janet Jackson for me–“My name is not ‘Hey baby,’” she ranted in a missive directed at men who whistle at her on the street. Next Gina Frangello read from her novel My Sister’s Continent, giving what would end up being the most together performance of the night, sassy and stylish, not sagging with feminist cliches or snark.
Told from the view of a reckless twentysomething ragamuffin with loose morals and an identical twin who’s annoyingly successful and mature, Frangello’s piece stirred a familiar anxiety: when am I going to settle down? Earlier in the week I’d instigated a Jager-fueled cluster of fistfights at Heaven gallery during a fund-raiser for this year’s Version festival; later I would have taken off on an impromptu 4 AM road trip across the country had the ATM not taken my debit card hostage.
I don’t know how many times I said “Shut up” and “No, she’s married” en espanol to that old man, but Antonio would not let up. The four of us figured if we were going to let him kiss our hands and let his sweet but goony disciples fawn over us, he was going to buy our next round of drinks. We asked our server for glasses of Veuve. “Are you sure you don’t want Mo’t’s Brut Rose?” she said with a wink. After we finished our bubbly, which was delicious despite its resemblance to UTI pee, we checked the menu and discovered she’d recommended a real wallet buster–it was 20 bucks a glass.
