by Natasha Wolff | June 17, 2014 5:14 pm
In the canvas tote that is graciously given out to VIP attendees of The Jazz Age Lawn Party[1] on New York City’s Governors Island, there are two items of note: a crystal mini bottle of St-Germain[2], and a paperback copy of The Great Gatsby. Neither of these party favors comes as much of a surprise—the event is sponsored by the spirit brand and the modern point of reference for almost anything 1920s-related is the novel lauded by Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley as “the American masterwork.”
The Jazz Age Lawn Party is the brainchild of Michael Arenella of the Dreamland Orchestra. Arenella himself is truly an authentic purveyor of nostalgia. Nine years ago, he hosted the original prohibition-themed picnic for about 50 of his friends, providing the music and even making sandwiches for the guests himself. Since then, not only has he nurtured the Lawn Party to its current incarnation, but he has also established himself as a professional host, performer and creator of Jazz Age events all over the world. “Ever since I was a child, I just had an affinity with the past—the music, the culture, the dancing, the cars—and I also was lucky enough to be born with a gift for music,” he told DuJour. “All of those things just sort of combined, and, as the years went by, it evolved and metamorphosed into what you see right here.” Now, for two weekends out of the summer, 4,000 guests board the ferries to Governors Island, arriving at the leafy islet in suspenders, straw boat hats, flapper frocks and swinging ropes of pearls.
There is certainly something to be said for the ambiance of the operation. As you walk along the tree-lined pathways, the notes of a Gershwin riff grow louder and partygoers near you skip a little, spinning their paper parasols with giddy anticipation. When you step out onto the picketed lawn filled with vendors and picnickers decked out to the dapper nines[3], the Dreamland Follies dancing barefoot across the stage, it does—for a brief, mirage-like moment—feel as if you’ve been ferried to the past.
And then, it passes. Inevitably, you find yourself ducking under someone holding up their iPad to record the dancers doing the Charleston, you play hopscotch between the picnic blankets of selfie-takers and then you juggle the five iPhones belonging to your own group to make sure you all get some good shots for Instagram while your feather headpieces are still intact.
NEXT: A modern-day visitation of The Great Gatsby
This is to be expected, of course, and because I participated in the self-cataloguing as much as the next flapper, I have no place to file a complaint. Still, I couldn’t help but consider the vista from beneath that great literary parasol that shaded my perception of the whole spectacle: The Great Gatsby.
The novel has experienced a revival of late thanks to the big budget Baz Luhrmann film adaptation last year, but the American epic never really recedes from our social periphery. Perhaps the mark of a true classic is that every generation feels that its message applies to their time. Whatever the case, I think that its core directive speaks to us now in a unique way.
The Great Gatsby captures the fragility of a nation on the precipice of modernity; it calls to light the shallowness of decadence. But more than any of that, it captures the destructiveness of living out a fantasy. Jay Gatsby believed that if he remade himself, choosing to ignore and bury all the parts of himself he believed Daisy would reject, that she would love him again. He believed that he could craft his own identity—curate it, cultivate it, build it into a dazzling mansion filled with glittering parties and crisp shirts—and that if he did, he could reclaim the love he’d been waiting for. Moreover, because he believed so desperately in his own delusions, he was willing to grant everyone else their self-deceptions. Narrator Nick Carraway says Gatsby “understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that he had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
Nearly a century later, the instinct and capacity to project our ideal “fantasy” personas to a throng of casual acquaintances has never been more a part of our lives. At a party created for the sole purpose of escaping to the past, the escapism we seek first is the fantasy of our current images, as distilled through our social media filters. We put them up to be seen by all the other Gatsbys, who will willingly believe our lives are filled with glittering parties and crisp shirts—if we’ll just agree to believe the same thing about theirs.
And the sad thing is that more often than we realize, we do. And every time we check our phones to count the “likes” on a post, we are tallying the evidence that we have offered the world “precisely the impression of us that, at our best, we hoped to convey.” The trouble is that the picture you took down because it only got one “like” might have been the truest image of yourself—but you will bury it because no one else found it interesting enough to like.
San Francisco’s $64 Million Jazz Club[4]
Not Your Average Garden Party[5]
Inside the Plaza’s 1920’s Fitzgerald Suite[6]
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