🍸 Happy birthday, Cocktail Charm
Should we invite Bella Hadid?
This is Cocktail Charm, a weekly email filled with delicious little things to talk about at parties. In today’s edition: one year of this newsletter!
What do you do when your newsletter has a birthday? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Bella Hadid?
This week marks one year of Cocktail Charm, and I’m dang glad you’re here with me for it. I started the newsletter a few weeks after quitting a shitty job, and it’s been a companion of mine as I’ve floated (mostly anxiously) through different and often isolating phases of a new professional life — relaunching my freelance business, heading abroad for a few months to work from there, striding through job applications and rejections (and more rejections, so many rejections), and picking up some really cool professional projects while I work as a company of one. I’ve held on to this newsletter all the way along, and I’m proud of it.
In today’s edition: a year in review, starring a few things I learned in the last twelve months of this project.
When I started this thing, I thought I’d just write silly little blurbs about fun did-you-knows I learned about online — the kind of tidbits you drop as fun facts to sound interesting among acquaintances. Instead, it’s turned into a sort-of interior-gazing project about how to connect with people again. I’ve looked at what it means to start up a social club, sit down to a pop-up dinner, set a welcoming spread, crowd around a talk table, gather for a made-up holiday, or casually ask your barista about their life. Sure, it amuses me to act like this project is about going to chic little parties and tipping a chic little martini to your lips while you have a chic little something to remark. But really, it’s just about hanging out — about breaking the intermediation of our screens, extending an invitation, and really talking to each other.
We are categorically, data-confirmedly going to fewer parties than we did at the beginning of the millennium. Seriously: a quickie look at the American Time Use Survey, an annual government report on how Americans spend our minutes, finds that between 2003 and 2024, the time that Americans spent attending or hosting a social event declined by a literal 50 percent.
I think of what we lose when we stop getting together for any kind of celebration — all the vanished chance encounters, loose introductions, and relaxed minutes we’d spend in each others’ company. If I can give you a reason to go and something to talk about, then I’m thrilled.
And now, fair reader, I’ve got to ask you for a favor. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter over the last year, would you forward it to two friends to subscribe?
I’d like to bring this little project to as many people as I can, and truly nothing beats a personal recommendation. Plus, it’s a free way to remind your friends that you’re a person of élite taste and startling cultural munificence. Generous you!
DEPARTMENT OF INTERLUDES
A year of what we’ve learned
1. Embrace talking to strangers
In January, I had a little realization: the local barista I’d had a fondness for had a super-fascinating former life as a pro skater. But I didn’t find out by asking him. Nope! I found out by reading it in the paper of record. For all I liked this guy, I didn’t even know his name! I realized that if I cared about having better conversations, I should probably be starting more with people around me.
Listen, it’s easy to be generous in passing. I nod at people to go ahead of me around a tight sidewalk, because I am a benevolent giver in this harsh and cold world.
I always wave to babies, because I am magnanimous to small creatures, and also have you felt the dopaminergic eruption that comes with one of them waggling their fat fingers back at you????
I have happy but brief exchanges in places like the coffee shop, almost as if to say, yes, of course I am a cheerful, friendly person, so long as the sum total of this blessed interaction is twelve words or less. Hey, how you doing? Great, thanks! Off to read my book.
But I don’t really engage more than that. And learning that my barista was formerly a nonamateur half-piper in the New York Times, of all places — embarrassing! — has made me realize that I don’t want to be nearly so complacent. I don’t want to nod, smile, and move along none the wiser; I want to offer an invitation.
2. Blind friend dates can be pretty good
As I learned by trying TimeLeft, the app that sets you up for dinner with strangers.
“So he asked me, ‘If we were in a movie right now, what would happen next?’” T said, tipping her frosty glass of grüner forward. “And that’s when I realized this stranger was trying to pull a move on me less than fifteen minutes into our date.”
Across the table, C and M were cackling, a Bradshaw-Jones alliance of libertine glee. Around the other end, K had cocked her head, lips pressed in Mirandesque conviction. That left my only available role as the Charlotte. An offensive position to be in: I’m never the Charlotte. The mores of the tennis-bracelet class don’t appeal to me, although I wouldn’t turn down being an upstate rake’s model-slash-muse. But leaning in towards the other four, I actually don’t mind being the Charlotte tonight. I’m having so much fucking fun.
3. We could all probably be better dinner guests
As I learned from talking to Casey Elsass, author of the new cookbook WHAT CAN I BRING?, because these suggestions never occurred to me.
If you're always on time, bring appetizers. If you're reliably late, bring drinks. If you're stopping by later, bring dessert. And if you bring nothing else, bring a gift that's good to your host. If you know you're always leaving the door the moment you're supposed to be there, don't sign up to bring the cheese plate. You're going to derail the whole thing!
We should all embrace room-temperature food. Don't show up at your host’s house expecting to have oven space or fridge space, because they’re playing their own game of culinary Tetris in the kitchen. There are some things in the book that do require warming up or chilling — for those kinds of things, just clear it ahead of time so they can factor it into their plan.
4. To make a party memorable, add a dash of surprise
Like at this opening reception for a downtown art show.
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.
5. People really do appreciate a party for no reason
There’s something deliciously frivolous about ad-libbing an occasion for occasion’s sake, about erecting and enforcing arbitrary rules for a day, about gathering and celebrating just because we say so. Why wait for a birthday or anniversary to give you the excuse? Make up a party; make up a fauxliday.
The fauxliday is a holiday of indulgent self-construction. It’s an invented fête, a just-because célèbre. The fauxliday insists we get together grandly and gratuitously, and only when there’s nothing on the calendar to justify it. The fauxliday says, “I appreciate having you in my life, and I’m going to devise an absolutely deranged affair to show it.” The fauxliday says “I’m inviting you to run around the city in costume;” it says, “I’m inviting you to toast my pet iguana’s baptism;” it says “I’m inviting you to jump into freezing New York channels just because I am sad lately and I decided to!”
6. And party games don’t have to be lame
Would my annual brunch be better with a gimmick? Spoiler: yes.
I’m usually hesitant about a party game. To me, dropping them in without expectation — time for bingo! charades! guessing games! — can come off as gimmicky, cornball, hack. Come on. Can’t we trust our people to have a good time getting to know each other organically?
But if I were serious about giving this brunch purpose, I reasoned, I should try one. If I could prompt people to break away from their instinctive bubbles — to not seek out the guests they knew in my living room and stick with them — my brunch would be the better for it.
Last chatter
Thank you so much for reading and being here. This project has been important to me in the last year, and I’m enormously grateful to have you be along.
Clink clink!
Gabriela
Thanks for being a reader of Cocktail Charm! Has this newsletter helped you out at happy hour? Let me know; I’d love to hear it.