Who rings the bell?
Living in a post-dancing prom
You can’t write an article about nightlife without invoking this queen:
If you’re not in the know, this shot is from the final season of Sex and the City, around late 2003-early 2004. In this scene, the doomed Lexy Featherston laments the PC-ification of nightlife: you can’t smoke indoors anymore; can’t get rip-roaringly drunk at a society party, can’t have fun.
I’ve never been the craziest one at a party, but I am interested in nightlife as a social concept, and investigating the qualities that make an event great or dull. One could quote Lexy Featherston’s words today in response to the same qualms: parties aren’t the same anymore - whether because of the internet, the post-Covid era, or “because of woke.”
My husband is a high school vice principal, and he chaperones prom every year. This year, he was texting me from the event, perplexed.
“Prom started an hour ago and there are no kids inside.”
I chided him, saying they were just having fun taking pictures outside in all their finery. But then, two hours later, I get this text:
"With 41 minutes left, do you think dancing has started?”
I came to learn that the kids never really danced at their own prom - aside from short spurts in front of their phone cameras, to apparently give their followers the impression that they were having a good time.
I don’t judge these kids - they exist in this time through no choice of their own. They are doing the best with what they have. They lived through Covid starting when they were in the 8th or 9th grade, and are now assuming their own teenage-hood in the ways that make sense to them.
I actually remember planning a post-prom party with my husband (back when we were still just friends in the 11th grade). The excitement of being out with friends, all dressed up and ready for anything was deeply thrilling. Not that we did anything cool or chic or exciting - this was suburban New Jersey, not Gossip Girl, after all. But we had a damn good time.
I see this phrase often online: WE ARE SO BACK. It’s funny - a meta analysis of the Covid dark times. We repeat this phrase ad nauseam because its repetition makes it funnier and funnier. The employee at Chipotle gives you an extra large scoop of guacamole - Oh, we are so back. Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist make out in front of Zendaya in Challengers - We are so back. People seem to feel nostalgia for the years Lexy Featherston lamented - around 2003-2015 - because we were apparently all just “living in the moment.” Perhaps that late-Bush to late-Obama era was the best life had to offer us, and we didn’t even realize it.
Jessica DeFino, an ex-beauty industry exec who now de-influences others with her excellent writing and cultural criticism, tweeted something recently I’ve been thinking about a lot.
Her words are sort of a gorgeous summation of the BloodKnife article Everyone is Beautiful, and No One is Horny. We seem to have all agreed as a society (or at least Hollywood decided, and we’re dutifully, tiredly, following along), that people look really hot when they’re extremely thin, absolutely shredded, with perfect tight skin, hairlessness, pumped cheekbones and plumped lips.
This leaves most people in the lurch, as they don’t have the means (or dare I say, the desire?) to pursue this look. But we see Kim Kardashian, squeezing her form into tinier and tinier corsets for the Met Gala, barely able to comment on her couture ensembles, because she has no air with which to say anything.
What is the Met Gala, really? It’s a party. Some people walk the carpet of course, but plenty others do not - they just go in the side door and do all of the things people who pay $100K-plus for a fancy dinner do. Let’s say Kim changes into another outfit when she’s inside, so that she can sit down. Or let’s say she doesn’t, and has to stand the whole evening (unlikely; I’d say a corset stunt like that has about a 90-minute window before EMTs need to be involved). Either way: does she have fun at this nightlife event? Potentially one of the best and brightest nightlife events that occur annually in this great city of ours?
I’m not poking fun at Kim; her choices do not affect me one bit. I’m simply curious if there’s a desire, buried under everything, to have a Real Night Out, capital R-N-O. I sometimes feel funny when I go to a dinner party with friends, or out to a movie, and don’t document it. I’m trying this new thing called “living in the moment” - or as people used to say in the olden days, living.