Good morning. It's Tuesday. Today we'll find out about a tarot reading that has to do with the famous Algonquin Round Table. We'll also get details on a defamation lawsuit filed by the Central Park Five against Donald Trump.
"The first thing I do in the morning," goes a line often attributed to Dorothy Parker, the quick-as-a-quip mainstay of the illustrious Algonquin Round Table, "is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue." Imagine the zingers she would come up with now. This afternoon, a tarot card reader will do a reading of the famous group — literary-world heavyweights from the 1920s like Parker; Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker; the playwright George Kaufman; and the novelist Edna Ferber, who called the round table group "the poison squad." Everybody who was anybody in the 1920s and '30s thought their conversation was unforgettably droll. The reading, at the Algonquin Hotel, the very place in Midtown where the group assembled, is just another a stunt in a city jammed with carefully staged attention-grabbers. Where else would television producers wrap a 270-foot-long inflatable dragon around a skyscraper's mast? Where else would someone spend 63 hours 42 minutes 15 seconds encased in a block of ice, as the magician David Blaine did in 2000? Somehow New York wouldn't be the same old silly town without such events. So, about the reading. It will feature a tarot deck with drawings by Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist who captured theater people and their performances in stylized images for much of the 20th century. He died in 2003 at age 99. The tarot deck was assembled by Emily McGill, who has a master's degree from Columbia University and said her thesis focused on "tarot's efficiency as a tool for self-reflection," and David Leopold, the creative director of the Al Hirschfeld Foundation. The foundation licenses Hirschfeld's works and collaborated with McGill on "The Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot," a tarot deck and guidebook. Leopold's explanation of what would happen at the reading was almost Parkeresque: "Emily's going to summon the spirits," he said, "and we're going to drink some spirits." Assembling the deck took work. McGill and Leopold matched Hirschfeld drawings of Broadway stars to the 78 cards in a tarot deck. For the magician, they used a Hirschfeld of Jim Dale as P.T. Barnum. For the high priestess, they chose an image of Diana Sands as Joan of Arc in the 1967 revival of "Saint Joan." They put Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer — Tony and Maria from the 1961 film version of "West Side Story" — on the lovers card. They put Hirschfeld himself on the one-headed "the world." "What better representation of possibility than the 'characterist' himself?" McGill wrote in the guidebook. "I feel like Mr. Hirschfeld is guiding my hand," McGill said. There is also a Hirschfeld of the Round Table group, drawn decades after the group broke up. Leopold said the image was the only one showing all of its luminaries. "There's no photograph of the Round Table," he said. "No one thought to take a picture. We live in an age when we take a picture of our lunches. They did not." McGill said the project began soon after she and Leopold were introduced by Julie Boardman, who is the executive producer and co-founder of the Museum of Broadway. Leopold had just helped with the installation of a barber chair that Hirschfeld never sat in (it was a spare, not the one in Hirschfeld's townhouse). "David was, 'What is this, tarot cards?'" she recalled. But she was persuasive. McGill said she wanted Pippin, the titular character from the 1972 musical directed by Bob Fosse, to be the fool card, representing "the hero's journey." But the only image of Pippin that Hirschfeld drew was "not very evocative of a journey," McGill said. They switched to a drawing from the 1997 revival of the musical "Candide." What would Hirschfeld say about all of this? "The first thing would be 'insane,'" Leopold said, "which for him was a seal of approval." WEATHER Expect sunny skies with temperatures peaking in the high 70s. At night, the sky will be mostly clear, and temperatures will near the high 50s. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING Alternate side parking and meters are in effect until Thursday (Shemini Atzeret). The latest New York news
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The five Black and Latino men who became known as the Central Park Five sued Donald Trump in federal court, saying that he had defamed them during his presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last month. The lawsuit — filed in federal court in Philadelphia, where the debate took place — said that Trump's remarks were part of a "continuing pattern" of false statements intended to "make the men suffer." The five were wrongly convicted as teenagers and later exonerated in the assault and rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989. Collectively, they spent decades in prison before they were cleared by DNA evidence and another person's confession. The five men, who now prefer to be known as the Exonerated Five, received $41 million in a civil settlement with New York City a decade ago. During the debate last month, Harris noted that soon after the attack, Trump took out a full-page newspaper advertisement calling for the death penalty in the case. She said the ad demonstrated the way in which Trump had long "attempted to use race to divide the American people." In response, Trump falsely said that the five men had pleaded guilty in the case and that someone had been killed during the attack. "They admitted — they said, they pled guilty," Trump said. "And I said, well, if they pled guilty, they badly hurt a person, killed a person, ultimately." Shanin Specter, a lawyer for the five men, said that Trump had "made it appear that they were guilty when in fact it's been demonstrated that they are not guilty." Specter continued: "It is devastating to be accused of these things all over again on national television to an audience of 67 million people." Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump's campaign, brushed aside the lawsuit, claiming that the men were seeking to "interfere" in the election on Harris's behalf. METROPOLITAN DIARY That Scent
Dear Diary: I was on my usual commute home from York Avenue to the Village. I had changed my schedule to later in the day and was finding the 6 p.m. hustle and bustle much more enjoyable than the 5 p.m. rush. As I switched from the 6 to catch the express, I detected a wonderful scent. I looked around to determine where it was coming from as the express pulled in. Luckily, the enjoyable smell, with notes of what seemed like vanilla, soft florals and maybe bergamot, followed me onto the train. Taking a deeper breath — not something one typically does on a packed subway train — I realized the source of the scent was a woman to my left. "Excuse me," I said to her as the train arrived at my stop. "You smell amazing. What perfume are you wearing?" She turned to me. "I don't wear perfume," she said with a cheeky smile, her face flushed. "It must be Negronis." — Leila Baadarani Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Hannah Fidelman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: Tarot reading honors literary heavyweights
October 22, 2024
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