Famous People #50: Sarah Hyland doesn’t know anything about my life
Kaitlyn: It’s fall in New York — like on Sex and the City! I am not working this week, so yesterday I went out and bought a “Go Away Evil” candle for our home. I got a J. Crew sweater from a thrift store, and carried it home pinched between my fingers — who would wear this? I put on a new pair of jeans and rode the 4 to White Horse Tavern, the best terrible bar in the Financial District, where I reserved a plastic card table by sitting at one end and spreading my arms out across it in a triangle with my chin on the crease.
This quickly felt silly, so I just sat up and put my tote bag on one of the other chairs. A few minutes later, the extremely famous writers and editors who work at The Goods by Vox showed up to sit with me! The event was my “goodbye drinks,” because I don’t work at that website anymore. Oh, oh.
I told them about the needlessly secretive, literally underground Facebook Dating press event I’d been to earlier in the day, where dozens of tech journalists were given expensive bouquets and forced to listen to Modern Family star Sarah Hyland and former Bachelorette contestant Wells Adams explain how they messaged each other on Instagram and then got engaged. During their presentation, which was at least 45 minutes long, I texted a blogger one table over: “this is truly hostile toward single people!” A famous person explaining how to ask someone out for tacos? I mean, I’m not alone because I don’t understand the power of Facebook’s suite of connection-oriented products, I’m alone because I am emotionally unwell and it’s a career year. Also I’m sitting things out until the men of New York work through their “starting a streetwear line in celebration of my boys, who are underdogs” phase. This is the kind of thing I would have said in our public Slack channel, were I still able to access it. Painful!
Meredith told us about Irish Tinder and Julia told us a secret, my god. I told everyone which small website my Twitter crush works at and Rebecca said “Wait, my ex-boyfriend works there” and we took a few minutes to decide who should say a name first — haha pretty tense! Alanna encouraged me to repeat my 2017; I can’t explain what that means in this space because it’s mixed company in the subscriber list. We had three gas station pinot grigios apiece, except Julia, who got her “fun drink,” which is a glass of Coke with grenadine and maraschino cherries. We had mozzarella sticks and boardwalk fries and Alanna told us about her boyfriend’s younger brother’s short film Hoop Dreams 2, for which she is hosting a premiere party.
It was a pretty classic conversation, lots of screaming. I’m hoarse even now from reacting to a couple of the things. When I hugged Julia goodbye outside the bar I said “Thank god there are no professional boundaries anymore,” and Alanna said “Were there ever?” Good point!
We’re just getting started. It was Stephanie’s birthday, so I dragged my butt to brownstone Brooklyn and sat on a planter outside the karaoke bar she has gone to every Thursday for the entire time I’ve known her. Honestly, I was drunk. I tweeted three times. I texted Julia and Alanna and Meredith and Rebecca a screenshot of an Instagram post and they dunked on it over and over — the talent! The professional boundaries that never were!
For the birthday, it was the roommates, the classic four: Katie and Stephanie and Tamar and me. We had dinner at the karaoke bar, outside, at metal tables with Aperol-branded umbrellas — fried pickles and veggie burgers and Diet Cokes with rum, then a Kahlua cheesecake from a recipe that I found on a blog that is possibly run by Laura Bush.
Sam walked past on his way to Ample Hills, and Stephanie said “Isn’t that your friend?” I said “oh,” and yelled at him. He came back and laughed, pointed at the door behind us and told me, “We were just saying this looked like the worst bar of all time.” I thought something really mean and then I turned to his friend and said, “Um, Ample Hills? You’re better off buying a Snickers ice cream bar at the bodega.” Which is true. Regardless, they kept walking.
Suddenly it was time! We brought Jared the Karaoke DJ a piece of Kahlua cheesecake and flipped through the song binders with new rum and Diet Cokes in our hands. Stephanie’s karaoke friend Maya gave her a plastic novelty necklace with a light-up red heart the size of an apple, and Stephanie accepted it, muttering under her breath in a falsetto, “But I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in the end.”
I put “Ugly Lights” by Miranda Lambert and “Mama’s Broken Heart” by Miranda Lambert into the queue — I learned from Stephanie that real karaoke kids give the DJ options! Katie picked Blink-182, Tamar picked Kelly Clarkson. Stephanie’s selections were varied and fascinating, obviously. She did “Bad Romance” and brought the house down, she did “Thunder Road” and pulled me onto the little wooden platform surrounded by taxidermy, and we sang about car skeletons together. I was like, “I don’t even need that Dell monitor for this one!” in a very braggy way, but the truth is I didn’t, and if nobody else was impressed then that doesn’t matter right now. My mom would have appreciated it!
Some boy sang “La Vie En Rose,” and pairs of friends slow-danced in that funny way they do at middle school dances when they’re making fun of fake pre-teen couples. “I can’t twirl with anyone to save my life, it’s very sad actually,” Stephanie told us. But she wasn’t very sad, she was happy and beautiful. Everybody in the room took photos of her, even people who didn’t know her.
Jared the Karaoke DJ is, as I have said, the last sympathetic character left in this city. He is tall and bearded and bald and wears a red bandana tied around his head like David Foster Wallace, but with tattoos up and down his arms and neck. The song binders all have little cartoon drawings of him on the front, hiking or fighting monsters. When someone picks a good song he says “I love this song! This is a great song!” He said “I love swearing!” after Maya did a version of “Love on the Brain” where she swapped the word “cunt” in over and over to make Stephanie laugh. He queued up “Happy Birthday” and everyone sang to Stephanie while she framed her face with her hands.
Maya won “Robyn Roulette,” which is a game where Jared the Karaoke DJ draws someone’s slip out of the queue at random and forcibly changes whatever their song choice originally was to “Dancing On My Own.” Actually he drew a couple of boys’ names first, but they had deliberately gone outside to smoke and avoid Robyn Roulette, like cowards. Or they were just doing the right thing — Maya’s performance was surreal, athletic, assisted by the gods. “I’m right over here, why can’t you see me?” she asked in a Liza Minelli voice while wrapping herself up in one of the thick black stage curtains. She was wearing body glitter all over her head, she bounced towards us and away from us, very agile in grey joggers and a pale pink muscle tank, working everyone into an absolute frenzy. Everyone jumped and jumped! Hands out, hands up, not a dry eye or under-boob in the place!
Oh, my, I thought, this is why people move to New York. I am not allowed to be outside after 9 PM for this exact reason — I always, always start to cry and think “this is why people move to New York.”
In three weeks I’m shuffling off to my own tiny apartment in a new neighborhood, off the Q just as Ashley requested, with my enormous cat and my grandmother’s gigantic bed frame, and my parents are very proud, they tell everyone that I support myself in New York as a writer. I like listening to them brag about me, but this is not my lived experience — technically my broker’s fee came from a fat check my old boss cut me for a podcast I would have done anyway, and as far as supporting myself in the broader sense goes, Stephanie has been my emergency contact for two years, ever since she tied a $200 Target futon into the trunk of my car using the only rope we had, which was my graduation cords. I was like, get this girl on my official roster, I need her! For the longest time I thought the show was called Sex in the City, which makes just as much sense as a title, you have to admit. I don’t even remember who corrected me, but lucky they did before I started writing about it constantly in this email newsletter.
It was sweaty in the room, and we’d eaten so much. Tamar and I went outside for just a moment to air out our hairlines and burp, which we did on a set of stone steps a few doors down. She asked if this is just a two-year thing, and I said, trying to brush it off, “We’ve already known each other more than two years,” but I picked up what she was putting down.
This is why people move to New York!