Back in the before days, when we still could go to places, I rarely went to events—time was scarce, and most of the things I wanted to go to were far away, in other cities. The thinnest silver lining of this locked-down time is that institutions are trying new things, and all sorts of rare pleasures are suddenly much more accessible: I can listen to epic poems, watch ballets and plays, see beloved musicians play songs in their bathrobes and hear heartbreaking covers.
Tonight at 7:00, I am going to head to my couch with a glass of plonk and a plate of whatever I can rustle up out of the pantry (olives? dried apricots?) and listen to Francesca Wade and Ruth Franklin discuss Wade's new book, Square Haunting. It's about the lives of five women—Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L. Sayers, Hilda Doolittle, Eileen Power, and Jane Ellen Harrison—who all lived in London's Mecklenberg Square between the wars.
Virtual events call for virtual outfits. This, perhaps, is too prim and pretty and tastefully matchy-matchy for anything to do with free-spirited iconoclastic women, but dressing up at all right now is a low-key radical move. And I do wish I had a flower-strewn dress, navy slippers, and gemstone fly earrings to wear while pouring tea from a bone-china pot painted with leaping foxes and rabbits as I listen to stories about marvelous complicated people.
I think I'm going to pull out my grandmother's wedding crystal for that glass of wine.
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Dreamy Myos dress by Meadows / Clerkenwell bone china teapot and teacup from Brook Farm General Store / Mary Beryy's recipe for Victoria sandwich / fancy sherry / Bellocq Earl Grey tea / Victorian carved topaz fly earrings / Caron Callahan Ellie Mary Janes at Covet + Lou / Marcie McGoldrick Three Graces pendant at Alder + Co.
