DISPATCH: Fortunately, this exists. Unfortunately, you weren’t invited.
The Fortunately ladies are not planning on posting a flyer advertising their readings anytime soon.
The day of the reading, I slink into the vestibule of an apartment just off Gramercy Park fifteen minutes early and am greeted by four stunning young women flitting around in resplendent cocktail gowns. In the antechamber across from the door, a bartender arranges dozens of miniature glasses and straightens custom-printed menus. In the nearby dining room, a “tablescape expert” decides not to scatter figs on an elaborate gluten-free spread replete with halved pomegranates, branded matchboxes, and a heart-shaped cake.
Despite all indications to the contrary, this is not somebody’s birthday party; this is Fortunately, a new reading and drinks series hosted by a glamorous quartet of recent MFA grads.
Juliette Jeffers, a poet who was once introduced at a reading as “the most coquetteish girl of all time” and has been working at Interview magazine since graduating from NYU last year, welcomes me in with a hug and a twirl. (I should note that my good fortune at being in the room at all is an accident of birth: Juliette and I are dating brothers.)
According to Juliette, who sails through the many rooms of the apartment in a flowered dress she stole from her mother, the ladies of Fortunately hand-pick who they invite, intent on creating a “who’s-who kind of vibe.” This becomes immediately apparent as soon as the clock strikes seven: the first people in the door are the current Creative Director and Senior Fiction Editor at Guernica. (“I’m so glad to see so many people turn up to hear writers read,” William Pei Shih tells me, scanning the crowd as it becomes steadily thicker and better dressed.) The second person I speak to is Matt Starr, that Substack dude who hosts readings in unlikely places like S’barro’s and Burger King. From then on, all night long, people are asking me my last name.
Later, I will learn that even the tablescape expert has a claim to fame — she recently organized the table at Madeline Cash’s dinner celebrating the debut of her book Lost Lambs. (Her new business is called Tableset, for the tablescape-curious.)
Fifteen minutes or so after the party officially begins, the hallway clogs and it becomes impossible to walk from one room to another. Trapped, I order a gin and tonic from the open bar and the bartender apologizes because they forgot to add purple glitter to it. Writer Mariah Kreutter, who organizes her own reading series in a Crown Heights bar, is stuck next to me. “I almost didn’t come, but I’m really glad I did,” she tells me, “because how often do you get to be in an apartment like this?”
The apartment in question belongs to another Fortunately co-founder: Charlotte Fleming, who also recently graduated from NYU and is wearing an off-the-shoulder red minidress. In the living room, Charlotte tells me she lives here with her fiancé and another roommate. She met the third co-founder, Tania Veltchev, on vacation when they were children; many years later, Tania introduced her to Katie Dorfman, the fourth, and Juliette.
I ask Charlotte why on Earth she would offer up her apartment for this, and she says that when the other three girls asked to transition their monthly Funny Bar meetups into a reading series at her apartment, she just said yes — as if it was the easiest decision in the world. (After I stop asking questions, she disarms me further: “I would tell you anything,” she breathes with wide eyes.)
Soon, but not too soon — everything is done with elegant tact in this elegant space — the girls call the crowd to attention for the reading. Standing in the doorway, feeling tall and awkward because the other photographer is standing right in front of me, I ask writer Nico Maurokefalidis, whose debut novel is out next January, whether he had fun at the last installation of the reading series. “Yeah, but I was sort of the center of the show then,” he says. “We’ll see about this time.”
This time it is not all about Nico, likely to his chagrin. The theme of the night is lovers, in a nontraditional sense; accordingly, Matt Starr reads several poems about brothers who suck off hot dogs on power drills and a couple peeing their pants on purpose on the subway. The lineup leans poetic, but only slightly: three poets, two prose writers, an unexpected mix of young and old. Everyone is in agreement that tonight feels different from other readings. “I should come to Manhattan more often,” jokes poet Matt Rohrer, an NYU professor, who then proceeds to read something devastating.
To close, New Yorker staff writer Patricia Marx takes the stage wearing shiny black leather pants and gleaming emerald heels. She’s very short in real life and hasn’t decided what to read yet. “I thought there was a funny part here,” she says into the microphone, rifling through the pages of her own book, Him Her Him Again the End of Him. “I coulda sworn I put in something funny.”
It’s all very funny. Novelist Eskor David Johnson stands to the side of the stage and cackles loudly enough for all of us. There are at least sixty people crammed onto couches and sharing folding chairs; the audience spills out of the room and around the corner. On the stairs, a puppy sits, listening genteely for a full hour.
Afterwards, the cake. “It’s very Sex and the City,” Matt Starr tells me over a slice of gluten-free red velvet. “You’re in somebody’s, like... Can we call it a mansion?”
“No, it feels like a literary saloon,” responds his friend Juno Kelly, a lifestyle journalist in from London for the week.
“It’s like chewing the pudding,” Matt says, and I don’t know what he means exactly, but I think I get it.
Juno laughs and replies, “And we’re the swans.”
On the subway home, my friend and I gush. The readers were all so talented; we didn’t get bored even once; oh, God, and don’t forget about all the beautiful food, the open bar. Why can’t every reading be like this?
Of course, we know why not every reading is like this: not everyone has the Sex-and-the-City saloon available for it. Still, the idea of returning to those other readings — the non-Fortunate ones that take place in darkened back rooms of grungy bars where we must pay for well drinks and hover over the toilet seat when we pee — feels suddenly like more of an affront than before.
For now, according to Juliette, Fortunately doesn’t plan on changing its invitation strategy. “There’s so few things that actually are truly invite-only, you know?” she tells me a few days later over the phone. “We wanted something that felt like old New York. Like, you’re getting to go to this intimate space, and you don’t know what you’re walking into, and there’s a level of curation and elegance, and people feel cared for.”
In other words, anyone who hears about the readings ahead of time will continue to be welcomed with breathless earnesty, but the Fortunate ladies are not planning on posting a flyer advertising them anytime soon. That beautiful apartment is stuffed enough as-is.
Fortunately, I got invited. I hope you will someday, too.
 | A guest post by
|
yikes, this sounds awful!
Make Art Gentry-only Again