Famous People #37: The gold rush
Kaitlyn: I hate to be crass, but this week’s Famous People has to start off with a confession: the newsletter has lapsed and it’s not because we’re not trying, it’s because we’re not famous. (And because we’re not trying.) NO ONE has been inviting us to parties. The closest thing to a party that I’ve been to in the last two weeks was a soccer game my teenage sister played in. The second closest thing was a horrible streetwear festival at which Travis Scott appeared, but only 29 hours after I’d left. To make matters worse, I mean, it’s heinous: I didn’t see Lizzie for two weeks. As part of my over-eager participation in a pretentious Twitter debate no one should care about, I re-read Patricia Lockwood’s review of the Joan Didion documentary today, and I seriously took note of the part where she says, “her face becomes heavy with the curse of heterosexuality,” no offense at all to Frankie. I’m just saying Famous People can’t exactly blog about the two of us drinking a polite amount of wine with my parents or renting Pretty Woman on Amazon Prime Video. You’d collapse of boredom and of thinking I'm annoying!
Thank god Lizzie rescheduled her eye doctor appointment so we could get drunk in the middle of the day on Saturday.
Lizzie: Turns out my eyes are pretty bad! The doctor said “Tell me what’s the lowest line you can read” and I was like, “Uhh, the first line.” Meaning the giant fucking letters up top! It’s not that I can’t read, it’s that I can’t see.
Do you guys go to parties every week? I don’t think I have the constitution for it. A day trip to a quaint town off the Metro North isn’t exactly a party, but there’s no one making the rules here but us.
Kaitlyn: Lizzie and I were 45 minutes early for the train to Beacon, so we spent some time perusing Warby Parker in Grand Central. Lizzie picked up a pair of glasses and said, “I think these might make me look like Jeffrey Dahmer.” The truth is that they did, and that Lizzie talks about Jeffrey Dahmer more than I think is normal, so I couldn’t encourage her to buy them. She picked up a second pair, which we agreed were nice. The whole incident reminded us that Sam’s girlfriend Jamie works at Warby Parker and neither one of them hangs out with us anymore. They are, like Joan Didion, cursed with heterosexuality.
Lizzie: The train ride was an easy hour and a half. We saved seats for Loren and Ashley, who showed up just in time with perfect hair. We talked about podcasts. I’m sure the scenery was nice, but as you can imagine, I couldn’t see it. Eventually we arrived in Beacon and everyone was hungry.
Kaitlyn: Beacon, New York is, according to the internet, “a former mill town built for romance.” A photojournalism project proposed and then quickly abandoned upon our arrival was to document all of the couples we saw there in outfits that screamed “We are visiting from New York and we are having SEX with each other.” Abandoned because it would have taken up the whole day and the rewards didn’t seem worth it. Anyway, whose definition of romance is limited in that way? I think it’s romantic enough that we talked clinically about Loren’s wedding invite B-list and pragmatically prayed that she will receive at least one Kitchen Aid and a lot of cash.
Lizzie: Any website that writes things like “Perfect NYC weekend trips” has probably included Beacon in its round-ups, because Beacon is relatively close to the city and features necessary day trip landmarks like “murals of trolls,” and “record stores.” But the actual truth is there’s not really that much to do in Beacon. We ate lunch, then strolled around town and peeped in some tiny “shops” and Kaitlyn bought part of her Halloween costume at a thrift store. She got a deal — $5 off — and now all she has to do is figure out how to hide the stain.
We drank some cider and ended up at a distillery, swayed by a chalkboard sign on the corner that said “DISTILLERY THIS WAY ---->”.
Kaitlyn: The proprietor of the Beacon distillery told us his ex-wife makes a better business partner than she does wife, which he brought up without prompting but then refused to expand upon. In our opinion, this gave us permission to berate him with questions about his business and personal life for the rest of the afternoon. (Ashley was quiet, because she was trying very carefully to store for later the ingredient list for a cocktail she had sampled and loved. She kept getting stuck on the word “rooibos.”) The distillery owner — who was wearing a t-shirt that said “Upstate and Chill” — told us the cost of each piece of his gear and said he did not need to take out a small business loan in order to afford it. We were like, oh are you a white-collar criminal or more like a murder criminal? One of the machines cost $135,000, plus shipping from Kentucky.
We asked him what he majored in at college and he started talking about jet propulsion, which was fun for Loren because she’s a space reporter. There was also a cocktail called “Gold Rush,” a spoonerism of Loren’s name, which is Old Grush. It was a perfect outing for her!
Lizzie: The distillery owner was a med school dropout who had sold an entirely different “business” to start the distillery. He didn’t elaborate on what the other business was. What I really wanted to ask him was, “How do you figure out what you want to do with your whole stupid life?” and “Are you happy?” but most of the audience was there to hear about the art of distilling and I didn’t want to make it about me.
Kaitlyn: On the train back to New York, we talked about going to a haunted house where you’re allowed to pick your level of scare. Lizzie kept insisting on “medium,” but we’ll see.
PARTY REVIEW METRICS
Did anyone bring a dog?
Lizzie: Probably?
Did we hear any good secrets?
Kaitlyn: In a quick dart through the apple brandy haze, it occurred to me that the distillery owner’s past experience with and financing from the US military meant he was probably more like a war criminal.
Lizzie: I hope he doesn’t read this and sue us.
Did anyone get engaged?
Kaitlyn: Well, definitely.
Did anyone get famous?
Kaitlyn: Heterosexuals of all stripes, including one ex-wife who is good at the bourbon business and 472 New Yorkers whose day trip outfits are lost to time.
PARTY SCORE
Kaitlyn: More romantic than the bathtub scene in Pretty Woman.
Lizzie: More questions than answers.