Small Magic

There’s this glimmer of hope again, where with the imminent arrival of spring it feels like we are all collectively, slowly but surely, literally and metaphorically, removing ourselves from our caves and returning to the sunlight. It’s a wild 60-something degrees today and I am wearing shorts for the first time in months. I’m eager to push my jeans to the back of my closet, though I know the moment won’t quite arrive for several more weeks. But a girl can dream.

The past few weeks have been a flurry of moments attempting to chase away winter and ease back into life as we knew it in the Before Time, even though the return to such is still far away. But there are glimmers of the New York I fell in love with, and still love, too meaningful not to share.

On a Tuesday in February, somehow it is Fashion Week again. I remember what my Fashion Weeks used to look like, a hustle of camera and models and lights and backstages, and I am in the audience this time. A brand is debuting at a hotel downtown, and I am an invited guest. As if somehow the tide had turned, the usual 30-minute wait by which one could set one’s watch has disappeared, and the presentation opens almost exactly on time. Down a long corridor, models in gender nonconforming clothing sit on ornate couches and talk, gesticulate, laugh, eat hors d’oeurves. Their hair is shellacked, their cheekbones angular, their shoes shiny. I feel like I have seen this so many times before. I amble as best I can past the countless people taking photos and videos of themselves in the space and occasionally actually the models. I try to take a few pictures of the ensembles myself but the models keep moving. The best part is a beautiful jazz trio with an older woman’s experienced voice filling the space with music so nostalgic I must have heard on a record at least once before. The bar is exploding with people all vying for free drinks. I am not among them, and soon I leave. I always preferred being behind the scenes, watching hair get sprayed or teased, skin moisturized, lashes glued. There was more magic there to me somehow, in the stirring of the batter more than the eating of the cake itself.

But having been at this show maybe 20 minutes at most, I’m not about to go home: it took me longer to get there, dolling up not included. I wonder what else New York will have to offer me this evening, and I remember a film series at the Museum of Modern Art I’m interested in–Dames, Janes, Dolls, and Canaries: Women Stars of the Pre-Code Era. Pre-code cinema romantic comedies are delightful for their cheekiness and innuendo, this time before film topics were censored by what became the Motion Picture Association. There’s a film starting at 7pm–Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor’s One Hour With You from 1932, starring a young Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald–and if I boogie uptown on the 6 train I can just make it. Plus, films at MoMA are only $12. On the way, I chat with a man who identifies himself as a film director but doesn’t know what Pre-Code Cinema is. I wonder if continuing to chat with him is worth it.

Arriving at the museum, I’m not aware of batting my eyelashes, but maybe they bat for themselves because the ticket attendant lets me in for free. I realize I’ve never been to see a movie there before, ticket paid for or not. An escalator takes me downstairs to a large grey screening room. A gaggle of men in fine sweaters to my right, a few rows back a young couple in camel coats and loafers, some others sprinkled throughout the theatre, and me. Collectively we laugh at pre-code naughtiness, the wackiness of speech spoken in rhyme alongside songs sung operatically, the way some 1932 statements sound in a 2022 context, awkward but still somehow hilarious. I have this distinct feeling that people who make their way out of their apartments in the midst of a New York winter, in the midst of a pandemic, to see a pre-code romantic comedy are absolutely my people. There’s a sort of warmth to this experience I wonder if I have felt in a while. It keeps me warm enough that when I walk back to the 6 train later. Stores on Fifth Avenue have all closed for the evening, but their light continues to fill up the street. All I can do is continue to marvel at New York, still New York-ing away in spite of everything.