October 28, 2017
Allston, Massachusetts
I was 23 years old
Went to the dollar store, hoping to find a single sheet of, say, violently-orange poster board so I could craft my traffic tickets for tonight’s Halloween costume. Had to settle for a pack of manila envelopes instead. Boogied back to the apartment and got down to work. Cut them up into rectangles, Sharpie’d on some text, and affixed them to my tank top and tutu with a stapler borrowed from Dalena. Clasped on the finishing touch of my “Brian” nameplate and voila: I was Sarah Jessica Parking Ticket.
Shannon Rudd got to our place right around the time I finished up my costume. Admittedly, I was already feeling a little off—our plans weren’t set in stone and, as much as I wanted to do house parties instead of bars, I really am done with Emmanuel parties. I have to be. But still—that’s exactly what we’d do. The evening started off fine. Shannon Dudley worked that day at T’s and was staying in but she was still floating in and out of our conversation. Rudd got Whole Heart on her way here and she was eating that. We caught up on this and that. She decided on being a Cheetah Girl so lots of prints, fake eyelashes, press-on nails. Danced to SZA and took some shots before heading out with our spiked bottles of Polar seltzer.
I’d texted Molly and she was at a party with a whole bunch of mutual friends but Shannon wanted to go to Lyndon’s place in Brookline first. Figuring both parties would be going on for hours to come, I didn’t think twice. The cops were already breaking up the party as soon as we got there. Lyndon was out on the sidewalk and we went over to him to chat. He’d drawn some cat whiskers on his face and was wearing a tin foil halo. He was “good pussy.”
Ran into the eternally sweet and almost unbelievably supportive Megan Lambert outside, along with John, who Shannon has had an on-and-off start-and-stop thing all summer. He gave me a sip straight from his bottle of whiskey which reminded me I will never like whiskey. Everyone was en route to The Draft so off we walked. John and Shannon dragging their feet, an entire block behind me and Megan, who was telling me all about her senior thesis. If I didn’t loathe Kicking and Screaming as much as I did, I’d be comparing myself to Baumbach’s “post”-graduates right now.
Got to The Draft, you guessed it, a minute after last call. Obviously mistaking me for someone else, a stranger who “recognized” me came out of the bar to tell the bouncer to let us in. Bizarre but—it worked! I didn’t get a drink, of course. And Shannon was clearly in the middle of something. But the plan was for her to stay at our place. I told her to call me once she was headed back and I’d come down to let her in. And so I walked home, alone, in a tutu.
February 2, 2022
Brooklyn, New York
I am 28 years old
Never once clocking her navel-gazing prudishness before it was explicitly pointed out to me, I feel confident declaring, and almost quantifiably, that I am indeed a Carrie. Or, at the very least, can be. These last couple years, inculcated deeper and deeper into my own cult of domesticity, have rendered me into something of a Charlotte. Sincere, coupled, rigid. A shiksa gone Semitic. An evolution from one hyper-exaggerated trope of Guiliani-era Womanhood to another that I’m more than okay with, especially as I write this from inside a brownstone, typing on a laptop at my desk situated right in front of a window that begs me to coo aloud, “Seasons change…so do cities…people come into your life…and people go.” And all those who have come and gone from my life will know that this Carrie Bradshavian costume was, of course, the second in a series. The follow-up installment to Halloween 2016’s inaugural wordplay get-up, parking tickets swapped for a child’s T-rex costume barely fitting around my midriff while tutu and nameplate ensured I’d be accurately understood as Sarah Jurassic Parker. And at this altogether abject station of life, my non-budget demanded said tutu was also child size, which is just to say I was wearing a wreath, a tulle wreath shooting straight out from my hips, showcasing vast expanses of my boxer-briefed ass to any and all attending these very heterosexual bars and house parties. What some might call a “Samantha” kind of brazenness. But, as Carrie as I am, I’m not quite that deluded.
Sarah Jurassic Parker came on the heels of what felt, even as it was happening, like a most meaningful re-watch of Sex and the City. It was summer, I just graduated from college, I’d soon lose my virginity during a weekend trip to—naturally—New York City (which, might I add, was planned with the express purpose of losing my virginity). I was working two jobs and saying goodbye to a lot of friends and all the while figuring out how and where and what I’d continue to write. And there in the background was Sex and the City, broadcasting chronologically from my Macbook, propped on a stool right against my bedroom door so it’d stay connected to the wifi. I, for better or worse, grew up with the show, tuning in nightly to squeaky clean reruns on E! for most of my middle and high school years, watching every season I don’t know how many times but well before I was contemplating the notion of having any sex in any city. Snippets of Carrie’s columns and every line of the “don’t you go to Paris with him” fight had long been committed to memory. Nothing about the show could take me by surprise. But, that summer, I swear I was watching it for the first time. Long familiar, of course, with all the antics and outfits but not with how moving it was, how moving it always had been. Bracing myself for that jarring jazz of the end credits, just as I always had, but feeling less and less surprised that this blaring brass section had become the soundtrack to falling tears.
Obviously, I’m watching And Just Like That…. It’s a sincerely holy hour of the week for me and Austin. Austin who recently told a friend, “They could send these ladies to Mars and it would still be my favorite show to watch.” I agree completely. Mostly because the New York City of And Just Like That… has a way of already feeling like Mars, something about all the green screens or the frame rate or Miranda’s wigs making this next chapter feel sometimes surreal, sometimes, well, martian. Whether it was Manhattan or the film stock that was grittier, who knows, but there’s a digital kind of sheen to the reboot that can make the show look like the fantastical utopia its critics always claimed it to be. But then—Sarah Jessica Parker enters the shot. Watching that first episode, I could not shut up, totally helpless to the urge to say, over and over again, “God. She is beautiful.” Mostly because she is—her whispery physique cutting such a pretty shape as she does that high heeled, heavenly metropolitan jog down the street while her hair, her perfect, perfect hair, blooms Botticelli. I could watch her all day. That said, and pardon the “Free to Be…You and Me” here, but what brings the occasionally-lacking soul to And Just Like That… isn’t Sarah Jessica Parker’s looks, it’s Sarah Jessica Parker.
She is, from my informed albeit outsider’s perspective, exactly the kind of person I want to be, that I’m already trying to be. A New Yorker who loves New York. A reader. A 73 Questions participant. Small town by nature, worldly in spirit. Ceaselessly energetic but grounded by a shtetl kind of soulfulness. The way she writes—and she is a writer, relegated, for now, to Instagram captions—about her mother or her siblings or her children on their first and last days of school, it’s enough to break a heart. And then there’s her voice. Realistically, it’s where I’ll need to draw the line, as far as this model of aspiration goes, but I adore it nevertheless. It has something so plaintive to it, most evident when she’s reaching the conclusions of Carrie’s columns at the end of each episode of yore. Her usual bunny rabbit exuberance giving way to this creaking minor key. Alas, like the best minds of this generation, Carrie has been lost to podcasts, her columns a thing of the 20th century past. I miss Sarah Jessica’s narration so much and yet—I still find myself crying at this show. Upset not so much by these actresses getting older as knowing that I was one age when I watched this show, and so were they, but now we’re not. If New York City remains the fifth lady of Sex and the City, perhaps that palpably vacant fourth chair at the diner has been filled by the heaving, sighing passage of time. What we always comfortably knew giving way to a future that feels more nightmare than cosmopolitan fantasy. The friends I have, the boyfriend I love, the apartment I live in, the very seasons of my life so subject to frightful change now that I see it happening to Carrie Bradshaw. But I’m no novice. Grief in one episode can, by the next, look a lot like joy and a broken heart one week can be soothed the following by the constant company of New York City. Feeling one way, I can change my costume, like the Carrie I am, and hope to feel another…just like that.
This was great. We need to get this to SJP somehow. XO