Famous People #77: Happy birthday to a great old website
Kaitlyn: I didn’t take any photos at The Verge’s 10th birthday party—held last Friday in an elegant office building in Soho—but I did take one photo that night, of, as you can see, a blood-spattered skeleton dressed as a healthcare worker, which someone hung up in the middle of my apartment building foyer while I was out. You could say it’s in poor taste or you could say New York helluva town.
This has no tonal relationship to the event and please forgive the image quality. At the time, I was working with a first generation iPhone SE. I was actually forbidden from taking pictures of anyone’s faces at the tech blogger event of the year, arguably the decade, because my camera specs were so awful. Out of respect for my friends and in honor of the website that introduced me to Lizzie and Ashley and to what the acronym “ISP” means, I have since upgraded to an iPhone 7.
Lizzie: It’s really the end of an era for Kaitlyn’s SE, which I believe she’s had since we all worked together, so it was fitting she was able to give it one last big night out at a Verge-themed event where everyone told her it was time to let go. This big night out actually began with a request for an invite: we weren’t on any list for VIP alumni apparently, so instead we had to ask Ashley to ask if we could please be invited. For free, obviously. Like any good guests, we aimed for appropriate but interesting outfits, and tried to show up late.
When we realized the Q train had spat us out on Canal with just enough time to arrive in the middle of one of the evening’s main events, we opted to stop for a drink first so that we wouldn’t be interrupting anything. We got to Spring Studios around 8, I think.
Kaitlyn: The party was very elaborate, so it was on two floors. There were more staircases than made architectural sense to me, and there were many different designated areas with wildly disparate music volume levels and varying rules about whether the drinks in the space were free or very expensive or NOT ALLOWED. At first, we darted around somewhat frantically, feeling like party crashers and searching for Ashley, who claimed to be hanging out in some kind of secret lounge. We kept running into people we hadn’t seen in months or years, whom we like so much and wanted to hear everything about, all the while feeling torn and emotional because Ashley was waiting for us and didn’t know how desperately we were trying to find her. We saw Kwame—he got married! We saw Amelia—she has a baby we haven’t met! We saw Lori—she was thinking about going to see the Robert Caro archives! When Ashley finally located us by an elevator, she was wearing a gorgeous emerald green suit that made her look like Maggie Gyllenhaal attending the premiere of a close friend’s directorial debut. She was like, I can’t use the GIF-making booth because it’s a green screen, then she showed us a GIF of her disembodied head and laughed at it so hard.
Lizzie: I feel like it’s hard to overstate how disorienting the layout of this building is. Imagine dozens of boxes stacked like a mid-play Jenga board, and you can go inside each box if you climb a flight of slippery metal stairs, and inside each box is at least one person you know, but haven’t seen in 2, maybe 3 years, and you ask them, How has it been? and they tell you, and you tell them, and it feels familiar but everyone has different hair than they used to.
There was also a DJ, arcade games, flashing lights, something called “pizza cupcakes,” Liquid Death sparkling water, and a lot of people with lanyards who, like us, were attending the birthday party of a website.
Kaitlyn: I know what you’re thinking about this party—sounds like a media party. Well, you’re right, and we were handed tote bags at the door, but I promise you would have enjoyed it. Lizzie had some great-looking pierogi! I don’t think anyone was doing any networking at all—or we weren’t, and so we didn’t care—and the canned wine spritzer you could have for free was pretty good. It was even better than the pink rum-based cocktail called the “PC,” which I ordered at the cash bar, resulting in one of those New York helluva town moments where you think the bartender said a price that turns out to be $10 lower than the price he actually said and hand him the wrong amount of money, causing a situation in which you stare into each other’s eyes for 20 seconds in blank confusion. “It wasn’t the worst mistake I’ve made in my life,” I kept telling people, in an effort to be mysterious (?) and appear unembarrassed. There were a few speeches and all were short and sweet.
Lizzie: After the official party ended, and paying fans of theverge.com and its assorted IP were escorted out, the insiders gathered in a very well-lit area to continue hobnobbing. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that people flew in for this party, like got on a plane from someone else, to be at this media event, and they were determined to make the night last! Luckily there were a lot of people to talk to, and a lot of people to look at, but nothing too spicy unless you count things James Kennedy has said on Vanderpump Rules.
Kaitlyn: There was an enormous leather sectional sofa near the bar, which I loved. I spent as much time there as possible because it’s easier to gossip if you’re sitting down. Also because Lizzie and Ashley and Loren and I used to be known around Vox Media for hanging out all day long on the dirty orange couches in the middle of the office—it was really our thing. “Couch crew,” some coworkers called us. We were notorious, not for being mean and exclusionary I don’t think, but probably for distracting each other from our jobs and definitely for hogging 100 percent of the available casual seating at all times. We would sit and sit on those couches eating pistachios and chocolate from the huge glass snack bins in the kitchen and once a week we would marvel over how costly such large quantities of candy and nuts must have been. We of course felt that we were worthy of the extravagance.
Nothing has changed!
Lizzie: Or, you could say everything has changed, since I heard there were more than two handfuls of new hires, and there was more than one available couch at this event, and the giant scoop-it-yourself tube of pistachios never made it over to the new office.
Kaitlyn: When The Verge turned five years old, we all shared this cake in the conference room, not joking:
I didn’t see any desserts at all at this year’s party… but I’m glad that the birthday celebrations are escalating in drama and expense. Cheers! Cent’anni!