🍸 Astonish me

Three unexpected encounters this week.

Apr 03, 2025

This is Cocktail Charm, a weekly email filled with delicious little things to talk about at parties. In today’s edition: dinner party kaftans, pleasant melancholy penne, and one very pure marching band.

A programming announcement! This newsletter’s about to start showing up in your inbox more often, courtesy of a new interview series. Cocktail Chats will ask interesting people around the internet — in art, design, food, style, media, and more — about what they can’t stop thinking or talking about offline.

You can expect to hear what one fashion critic’s dishing over drinks, who a cookbook writer is discussing at their cookie swaps, where a podcast host is getting her gossip IRL, and so much more. Consider it your happy hour with fascinating company. The first edition publishes tomorrow, and I’ll see you then!

My heels beat against Belgian block as I climbed out of the Canal Street subway. I’d exited in search of the Jeffrey Deitch’s SoHo gallery, a chalk-colored space tucked on Wooster Street, to see a show of a young artist I’d read about online.

The show’s opening ceremony, which I’d also read about, had totally upended my idea of what a gallery opening should be (more on that below). In fact, this week I kept discovering social engagements that upended convention — what you might expect to find at an art show, a ribbon-cutting, a stroll down the street — and used that upending as an entry point. This week: three encounters that use surprise and disarm as tools to start a conversation, to extend a hand, or maybe to create an ingress that one person can pass through to another.

Trumpet this

I approached the doors of Jeffrey Deitch yesterday in search of ascent. I’d arrived to look at Flying High, the first solo exhibition of Tyler Ballon, where the painter depicts two groups at work: the football team of his high school, Abraham Lincoln High in Jersey City, and the marching band of a nearby school, Malcom X Shabazz in Newark, arranging each group in poses akin to 19th-century history painting, and drawing their parallels to the precision, valor, and might of Black Civil War troops.

But what attracted me was what I heard of the show’s reception, something I’d caught after the fact but could watch back on video. On opening night, the gallery reconvened his subjects for a marching band show to the streets. The Shabazz band, some graduated and returning for one last show, processed with their instruments up the SoHo streets and played their way into the exhibit. “I feel like I’m known,” one trumpeter tells a camera inside the studio.

Ballon had selected the show’s title, he says, to show his subjects’ capacity to rise above the adversities of inner city life. “My work focuses on the lives and experiences of the people in my community,” Ballon writes in his artist’s statement. “I believe in capturing moments that can inspire and validate their existence…I want young people to see themselves as worthy of being immortalized in art.” Watching the band process up the blockstone streets, I think about how they’ve made art twice over, in painting and sound, for one inimitable party impression.

Give us a grandmother

When his Grandma Eileen could no longer travel to where Mike Matthews lived in New York about a decade ago, he came up with an unconventional encounter. “I had the idea of kind of letting New York virtually connect with my grandmother. And so I set up a little lemonade stand. Put a laptop on it. Noise-canceling headphones. And then I would place it somewhere in the city and then my grandma could virtually meet anyone in New York City that was walking by," Matthews told ABC7. "Every person who talked to my grandma feels elevated, feels seen, feels heard. And she also benefited — she felt like she was valued.” It became so popular that the two continued the stand weekly for six years.

What evolved from there is a guerilla pop-up project he’s named The Grandma Stand. Now more than 30 grandmothers give their time to sit at a purple stand he sets up around the city, each time with a conversation-opener Matthews has sourced from social media. Anyone can sit down to chat.

"The conversations have been precious. You know I think grandmas bring something different to the table. We have the power of experience and unconditional love," Grandma Dana, who sat at the stand that day, told ABC.

Chance encounters, guaranteed mistiness. The stand made NBC News last month and Good Morning America this week.

Break glass for dessert

Over at the very luxe, very non-nouveau riche gala held on Monday to celebrate the reopened Frick, guests got the ol’ razzle dazzle in a surprise final course. Folks, I have to wholeheartedly endorse this ostentation.

“Long live the Frick!” Mr. Wardropper concluded, and everyone in the room, flanked by two Turners on velvet-coated green walls, leaped to their feet and applauded. Suddenly, a stampede of waiters emerged ferrying miniature shipping crates made of chocolate, adorned with “fragile” stickers and accompanied by little golden mallets.
With puzzled — and then delighted — looks, guests cracked into their desserts, shattering the packages to reveal Frick masterpieces in cookie form — making collectors out of all who attended.

Photos: Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

Now I have to ask: What’s the best surprise you’ve been given in a social encounter? A guerilla invitation? Big-top entertainment? Parting gifts fit for a king? Hit reply and let me know.

Tell me about it

Conversation-starters to take to happy hour, your group chat, or your surprise party.

So what’s on your do-not-playlist? For the uninitiated, it’s a list of songs that you are definitely not queuing up at the function.

When Maria Del Russo and Ben Tuber, who live in Brooklyn, married in Jersey City, N.J., last June, they banned Justin Timberlake’s discography. “I have had a problem with Justin Timberlake since he ripped Janet Jackson’s bra off at the Super Bowl,” said Ms. Del Russo, a 35-year-old writer.

Who’s making this their hostess uniform? A Vogue-approved atelier has dropped their answer to the house dress: the dinner party kaftan. Personally, I don’t have $550 for a dress I’m bound to splash diavolo sauce on, and in New Delhi, where one-half of the collaboration is based by, the price is nearly equivalent to the average worker’s monthly salary. But hey! It has smart sleeves.

Are you adding any of these words to your vocabulary? The Oxford English Dictionary incorporated 42 new words borrowed from other languages this month, including this superb one from Tagalog. Gigil is “a feeling we get when we see someone or something cute, a feeling so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze whatever it is we find so adorable.”

Or are you going with emoji instead? And Emojipedia announced 8 new emoji designs this week, including one important expression in these trying times: face with bags under eyes.

One story that made me laugh this week

Pew Research — the center that does public polling — sent out a survey that inadvertently replaced every instance of “yes” with forks.

One debate my book club couldn’t agree on last night

Does dialogue with no quotation marks kill a book for you? Most of us really liked Trespasses, the Irish Troubles-set novel by Louise Kennedy, but those who didn’t said it was partly because of the punctuation.

One endorsement I’m making to anyone I meet this month

The sweet cat I’ve been fostering, who recently started cuddling like this. Send this boy to someone who loves tuxedos — whoever adopts him will be very lucky.