The New Yorker Holiday Party 2020
I’ve missed just a few New Yorker holiday parties over the years. Weather did in several (a memorable evening in the early 1990s when my wife and I headed down the Taconic Parkway, cruising along at 20 mph in a snowstorm…we turned back at the Bull’s Head Road exit, with nearly 100 miles to go, realizing the party would be over by the time we reached Manhattan). There was no excuse for missing this year’s holiday party. All it took was a few clicks on the home computer, and there you were, at the party, looking at multiple screens of New Yorker folks in their homes in front of their screens.
What was missing of course was the fabulous noisy buzz of walking into the throng of revelers at the magazine’s offices (and in earlier days at restaurants), …but this virtual party was in its own strange way just as buzzily exciting and moving, seeing the faces on the screen, colleagues all in the same boat (human beings all in the same boat fer Pete’s sake). As in other times, it was fun to spot cartoonists (hey, P.C. Vey’s here, so’s Maggie Larson — and there’s Felipe Galindo, and Harry Bliss!), to ID non-cartoonists (Look! There’s Calvin Trillin!).
Kudos to the people who put the whole shebang together, and to those who sang, and to Ian Frazier who read the Holiday Poem (a Roger Angell version), and to David Remnick who led everything off with graceful remarks about this time we’re in.
And now on to 2021.