Square up with your partner, knees bent. Now, step the left foot back. Plant that right foot. Kick the left foot forward, then step on it. Kick the right foot forward, then bring that knee up, kick that foot back, and plant it square.
That’s how you do the Charleston step.
On a 90-degree August Saturday in New York City, I’m dancing the Charleston with my wife in the open air. Step and kick, step and kick. It may as well be the “Shipoopi” bit from The Music Man, but we’re a little sexier than that here at the Jazz Age Lawn Party, celebrating its 10th year.
Michael Arenella and His Dreamland Orchestra tear through their second set of the day with a liveliness to rival the heat. The bandleader, resplendent in a white cotton suit and slicked hair, keeps turning the flames up higher, the sweat coming through his jacket.
Couples twirl and spin around us on the dance floor of wooden panels. Kicks, flicks, twists and turns. Suspenders, sequins, feathers, boaters, and deep red lipstick.
Basically, it was all the style and music of Boardwalk Empire, Peaky Blinders, The Untouchables and Hoodlum, without all the murder, nudity, polio and racial slurs.
Damn, it feels good to play a gangster.
For the most part, only the smartphones betray our little fantasy world of an afternoon.
The party itself was quite nice, taking up the Colonel’s Row green on Governors Island. The main stage stood about 4 feet high, with a dance floor of wooden panels spread out before it. VIP sections with small bleachers were ribboned off, with tufts of grass dispersed throughout the sandy ground.
A larger, wider lawn had more space for all of us in general admission with our blankets and folding chairs. Tents contained vendors of vintage-style clothing, hats and accessories. A collection of 1920s automobiles were roped off for self-serve photo ops. The food and beverage area featured St. Germain elderflower cocktails and Duvel ale.
My wife and I brought folding the finest in garden party goods: lawn chairs, a cooler full of bottled water, and super-delicious hoagies from the Italian market a town over from us.
My wife fretted a bit over not finding an sufficiently Jazz Age-y outfit, so instead she went with a very pretty garden dress with pink and white florals, with a fascinator fashioned from a yellow feather, and strappy silver sandals.
I took an average blue dress shirt with white pencil stripes and olive, flat-front dress pants. Add two-tone gradient tan oxfords, an off-white linen suit jacket, a cravat of vintage kimono fabric, and pin made of felt and a peacock feather. I topped it off with a vintage Panama straw hat from Dobbs featuring a black band and a pin shaped into a rose.
Many men were dressed similarly. “I really feel for the men out here today,” I heard a few times. But the fact was that I was wearing clothes made for the heat. Linen breathes and keeps air on the body, and the light color reflected sunlight and heat. My straw hat allowed for heat to escape my head, and the wide brim kept the sun out of my eyes.
My wife, our friends and I check out the vendors, and I’m nearly seduced into buying a really badass boater from Goorin Bros., but I’m tight with the money these days. No impulse buy for me. My wife, after sitting in the heat for a while, buys a hat and parasol.
We pose with the vintage cars and swap photo-taking with fellow revelers. It’s a good time.
Even sitting on the lawn and letting the music of the main and side stages drift to us is pleasant. Fancy dress, a sunny summer day and jazz in the air tend to bring out the best in people. Folks were there to people-watch, and to be seen themselves, in all their finery.
It was great to see the Jazz Age revivalists in their element. We talked to Michael Arenella for a bit as he strolled the grounds before his final set. He expressed nothing but gratitude about being able to make a living out of this dream.
Our friends, who told us about the Jazz Age Lawn Party a year ago, had that gleam in the eye, their necks craned in rapt attention.
They were, dare I say, geeking out!
And here I was, among them, with a new dimension of geekery being etched into my multisided die.
I guess my geek life was building for a long while to this moment of living out the Jazz Age.
From Philly to New York to Seattle and Connecticut, I’ve spent a decade being entertained by neo-burlesque that wrapped the Jazz Age in its sequins, pasties, feathers and gossamer as much as midcentury modern and punk rock.
I’m still not LARPer, but indulging in my wife’s renewed hobby of Renaissance faires added extra oomph to our hardcore Halloweening. We no longer have simple costumes, but actual clothes around which we can create entire characters and live out a really fun fantasy.
The past often isn’t much of a delightful place for black people. These opportunities to play with the past as fantasy allows for a space in which to enjoy the past as we’d like for it to be. And it also creates room to further explore more stories that go untold and unheralded, such as the good work at MedievalPOC to look at people of color in European art history.
I can waltz in the Jazz Age while also reading more about the Harlem Renaissance, Bessie Smith, and Tulsa’s Black Wall Street. I can fancy myself in W.E.B. DuBois’ Talented Tenth, Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism, Carter G. Woodson’s push for black history, or Anna Julia Cooper’s crusade for education amid the indignities of segregation.
I also deeply appreciated how diverse this event was, in both crowd and entertainment. Typically these kind of funky, creative events can be quite monochrome, and that one color often is quite pale.
Now, this doesn’t mean the people or events themselves aren’t welcoming or nice. But when you’re a racial minority and you walk into a place where nobody at all looks like you, it may not feel welcoming or kind. You just get tired of being the only face in the place. You get tired of being outnumbered or overpowered sometimes.
But this is New York City, baby. Everyone was at the Jazz Age Lawn Party.
I especially loved seeing my fellow black people there, brown and powerful in the sun – our dark skin and nappy hair so well evolved for it. Our features and looks made further resplendent by drinking deep in Afro-American culture’s focus on sartorial finery. You know, flyness.
In a society that confines us by the external, our appearances have mattered heavily by necessity. Dressing fly became an expression of self-love and pride in the face of racism and exclusion. That ethic continues today. Jidenna and his hit song “Classic Man” didn’t come out of nowhere. And that day, I saw a lot of Classic Men and Women.
So I can’t wait until next year’s Jazz Age Lawn Party. I’m close enough to New York, and I’ve been following performers such as Arenella and Dandy Wellington for a while now.
I finally took the leap.
More will come, and all to that syncopated rhythm.
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