party reporting from cipriani wall street

brief encounters with project managers and famous astrophysicists

At Cipriani Wall Street, I’m seated across the table from a famous astrophysicist. He makes eye contact with me and, without saying hello, asks, “Do you want to know an interesting fact about springs?” I do. I tell him I really do. He says, “There’s an easy way to prove energy converts into heat. If you compress a spring and put it in acid, the acid temperature will increase as the spring dissolves.” 

It’s difficult to know how to respond to this. “That’s great,” I say. And because I worry this is now a fun-fact economy, I flip through my own arsenal of party-perfect information. I share the first thing that comes to mind, a fun fact I’m not even sure is actually a fact at all: “Spiral stairwells in medieval castles were usually designed to ascend clockwise, so that right-handed defenders would have the advantage.” 

Later, the astrophysicist addresses the others seated at our table, men and women who hold titles like “creative director” or “strategist” at advertising and advertising-adjacent agencies. Have any of us ever noticed how there are no white pigeons in the city, he wants to know. Most pigeons will get out of a car’s way, but the astrophysicist says once he was driving and he saw a white pigeon in the road. Would it get out of his way, he wondered. But no, seconds later he felt its body crunch under his tires.

“White pigeons are too stupid to avoid cars,” he explains. “This is really what survival of the fittest looks like. A white pigeon is a pigeon too stupid to live, to pass on its genes.”

At the beginning of the night, the comedian hosting this event announced that all winners were only allowed to say exactly six words as they accepted their awards. On a stage to my right, a man and a woman are accepting an award for a commercial they directed. But instead of using his allotted word count to thank the audience, the man turns to the woman, kneels, and presents a ring. The woman is tiny and wears a tiny white dress. If she doesn’t stand perfectly straight, her ass is sure to peek out from under the hem. The man wears a frock coat and white canvas sneakers. He’s laughing and laughing, as if to say, “Can you believe this? Can you believe this?” The woman says nothing, just covers her face and half-giggles as the man stands and tries to kiss her. And then he pulls her offstage, laughing all the while.

After the couple leaves, the comedian comes back out. She’s laughing too. “Did that girl even say yes,” she asks the audience. Then she says, “I’m recently divorced, I’m recently divorced” over and over and over while pretending to cry.

“Doves are just white pigeons,” I hear the astrophysicist say to no one.

The awards have all been given out now. I won nothing, which is fine. Really! I wasn’t even nominated, which I would argue is also fine. It isn’t necessary to be nominated for things in order to enjoy awards ceremonies. I find it’s reassuring to be in a room where there is so much at stake for everyone but you. 

Now I’m standing outside Cipriani Wall Street wearing a Barbour jacket over the most beautiful party dress I own. It’s only sort of raining — more like a cool, heavy mist — and the sidewalk is full of identical young men with closely shorn hair who are running from black car to black car, trying to pair up the Ubers. 

One of the young men opens the door to a car, leans in, and yells, “For Jocelyn?” He shuts the door and goes to another. “For Jocelyn?” To another. “Jocelyn?” He finds the correct car, and a young woman — Jocelyn, probably — emerges from the Cipriani crowd. She has the kind of heavy, mussed bangs the internet tells girls read as French. It occurs to me that this is the type of man I was conditioned (by whom? My parents? My private liberal arts college?) to find attractive: navy suited, brown brogues or boots, short hair, a real importer-exporter scrambling to identify the right thing and shouting a woman’s name over Wall Street.

Later that night, I crash a party at the Royal Bangladesh. The party is technically just for employees of the art-tech startup where I technically no longer work, so I wonder whether I should technically be there. My former coworker, a project manager, meets me at the door.

“This won’t be weird, I swear,” he says. “Everyone will probably mostly be glad to see there are no hard feelings. Just make sure you seem overly apologetic at first.”

I feel reassured. That’s the thing about project managers, they’re really just managing everyone’s feelings until a kind of equilibrium has been reached.

That evening, a girl from Ukraine whose job title is just “specialist” says to me, “Russian billionaires have to allow their girlfriends to open museums. It’s like a blood code.” And I nod hard and solemnly, because it feels like this girl has just imparted some hard-won wisdom — even though that’s simply common knowledge. 

I’m reminded here of a tweet by a writer and editor I like that reads, “i went to the intersection of art and tech and no one knew you.”