Latest news with #cotillion
New York Times
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Where Kids Put Down Their Phones and Pick Up the Correct Fork
Visuals by Eli Durst Text by Dina Gachman One Austin mother bribed her daughter with acrylic nails. Another promised her child a few shopping trips if she'd just give it a chance. Enticing a modern-day tween to attend cotillion classes, something that sounds as outdated as calling a refrigerator an icebox or using finger bowls to cleanse the hands before petit fours are served, requires a little finesse. The fifth and final class of the Southwest Austin Cotillion season had a dinner and dance at the Hyatt Regency in Austin, in April. Clusters of boys in crumpled suits and sneakers avoided gaggles of girls in shiny minidresses until someone announced that it was time for the 'ladies and gentlemen' to line up and head inside the ballroom, girls on one side, boys on the other. The word cotillion comes from group dances that became popular in 18th-century France and England. The tradition spread to America, and one of the longest-running cotillion programs in the country, the Martine Cotillions, started teaching classes in Chicago in 1857. During the Gilded Age in New York, a cotillion dance like the Patriarch's Ball at Delmonico's marked the start of the 'social season.' More formal affairs persist at some country clubs in Dallas or Atlanta, but in places like Austin or Des Moines or Denver, where the national organization JDW Cotillions is based, the experience is less about ushering in the social season and more about teaching middle schoolers things like eye contact, table manners, and how to do the cha-cha or the waltz. 'Something switched along the way,' said Cella Morales, the executive director at JDW who was M.C. the night of the Hyatt event. According to Morales, the goal of cotillion shifted 'from social expectation and adherence to that of social opportunity and confidence.' Compared to classes and events and some locations in the South today, 'Austin is significantly more relaxed,' Morales said. JDW partners with local cotillions across the country, like the one in southwest Austin, to bring in teachers and share their curriculum. Even though the expectations and rules aren't as rigid as they were 100 years ago, JDW sessions have a strict no electronics policy during the classes and the balls. 'My goal is to give kids tools to get out of their heads and off their phones, whether they're at a supermarket or a social event,' Morales said. At the Hyatt, the participants practiced holding their utensils 'like a surgeon holds a scalpel,' as Morales instructed them to do from the podium. Caleb Soileau, a sixth grader, admitted that, thanks to cotillion, he'd gotten two compliments from servers at restaurants who noticed the way he folded his napkin and placed his knife and fork just so to indicate he was finished with his meal. When asked what he was looking forward to at the dance that evening, though, he said that he was 'excited about leaving.' Tweens from each grade, sixth through eighth, took turns pairing up to demonstrate the dances they'd learned. In between tentative jitterbug or waltz steps (not to Chopin but to George Strait's 'You Look So Good in Love'), the kids rotated partners. As relaxed as some modern cotillion classes may be, they still sometimes rely on traditional gender roles, like 'gentlemen leading the ladies to their seats,' or only allowing boys to dance with girls. If there weren't enough boys to go around, a girl had to stand alone, and wait. Cody and Deborah Fisher, a married couple of former educators, started a small local company, Austin Cotillion, around 2016. 'As the pandemic persisted, we saw more and more kids struggling with loneliness, depression and social anxiety,' Ms. Fisher said. The couple wanted to give kids in their community the chance to learn social skills and build confidence. The Fishers' classes aren't traditional. They incorporate magic or games to keep drifting minds engaged. They also do not enforce strict gender codes. 'Our cotillion is for everybody,' Mr. Fisher said. 'We don't check birth certificates.' JDW's Morales said they try to modernize their classes as well. For example, boys don't always have to be the ones leading the dances. 'We urge girls to lead sometimes,' she said. 'They will grow up to be C.E.O.'s and lawyers and businesswomen, so they need to learn confidence.' At the Hyatt event, butter was smeared onto dinner rolls and groups of friends mugged in front of a selfie station framed by an arch of pastel balloons. During the free dance, girls jumped up and down to Dua Lipa's 'Dance the Night' and boys tackled each other as their parents held up phones and recorded the mayhem from the sidelines. These kids will probably not grow up to send calligraphed thank you notes written on embossed family letterhead, but they might send an eloquent thank you text or look someone in the eyes during a conversation instead of staring at their phone. At the end of the night, Melissa Pardue watched her seventh-grade daughter, Greer, from the side of the dance floor. Pardue attended a more formal cotillion as a girl in Dallas, but said this version is 'not so stuffy.' 'People think it's a rich person's thing but it's like 200 bucks,' Pardue said. 'It's not a big country club experience. During an awkward season of their lives, this teaches kids skills that will help them when they're older.' Mae McAleer, a sixth grader who used to roll her eyes every time her mom tried to teach her some manners, wore a bright blue dress and giggled with her friends. 'It's been pretty good,' she said of the cotillion experience. And then she confessed something that few middle schoolers would ever dare to admit. 'My mom was right.' Produced by Jolie Ruben and Josephine Sedgwick.
Washington Post
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Megan Abbott and the lure of private worlds
NEW YORK — The first time the crime writer Megan Abbott set foot in a country club, she was about 13. A friend who had money had invited her to a cotillion. Abbott's left-wing parents — who didn't have money, not like that — bought her a white dress and kept their disapproval to themselves. She remembers looking up the word 'cotillion.' How smooth the other girls' hair looked. Going to the ladies' room and seeing perfumes laid out on a tray, and an attendant standing by, and not understanding any of it. 'And I thought, 'Well, I don't ever want to do this again,'' Abbott recently told me. 'It was a very useful moment for me. I realized not only did I not belong but that it wasn't for me — I had no desire to belong there.' Much of her fiction has circled around understanding that desire in others: What draws people to these insular subcultures, and what, exactly, will they do to stay? Abbott likes writing hothouse environments — 'to a fault sometimes,' she allowed. Her settings have a lush psychological and cultural specificity that's untethered from other markers of reality. The ballet studio, the research lab, elite youth sports: You can practically smell the sweat of these places, but you wouldn't be able to point to them on a map. Her new book swerves from that approach: 'El Dorado Drive,' out June 24, takes place in her hometown, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a suburb just northeast of Detroit. It tells the story of the three Bishop sisters, who are among the suburb's many families of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, brought low alongside the auto industry. Then an old frenemy invites them to join 'the Wheel' — a way to start bringing in cash, tax- (and husband-) free. Women helping women, goes the pitch, and I don't mean by sharing Valium. All they have to do is pay in with a one-time gift of five grand — and, of course, recruit more new members. The sisters climb the Wheel quickly. As pressure mounts, exploding into violence, they soon learn how precarious it is at the top. I met Abbott on a drizzly May afternoon in Times Square. She had staked out a table in the back of Jimmy's Corner, an old-school boxing bar where she's greeted by name. (It's a good place for a New Yorker to know, she said, because you always end up in Midtown one way or another — in her case, because she'd just come from a screening at MoMA hosted by the stylish independent production company A24, which is adapting 'El Dorado Drive' for TV.) She had the round and inquisitive eyes, the thin arched brows, of a silent-film star. Skull earrings dangled from her ears. Writing the new novel felt 'weirdly nostalgic,' she said, over a Corona. Like the Bishops, Abbott grew up in Grosse Pointe during Detroit's rapid decline. 'It was like the fall of Rome — slowly and all at once,' she said. 'Everybody's parents remembered this glory era.' Unusually for the time, her family often went into the city: Her parents worked in the political science department of Wayne State University and would take their kids to the movies or a museum. Detroit felt both exciting and forlorn — a place where streetlights, once they went out, never got fixed. Off the page, Abbott's never been a huge joiner: no sports, no secret societies, no sororal urges in general. But she was always driven and ambitious — a competitive person who hates competition, even avoiding board games. (She does take part in a jigsaw puzzle group: 'I'm gonna get a big chunk of that puzzle.') She chalks up her competitive streak to her older brother's long shadow — always the perfect student, and an athlete to boot. For a year in college, she lived with him and his buddies. 'I loved it,' she laughed. 'I didn't have to deal with any of the girl stuff.' Abbott graduated knowing only that she wanted to write and to move to New York, a city she'd fallen in love with through film. Attending grad school at New York University, she got both the city and the writing. While procrastinating on her dissertation about hard-boiled fiction, she wrote 'Die a Little,' a period noir narrated by an ordinary woman who, somewhat like Abbott, was a teacher with a much-admired older brother working in law enforcement. (Abbott's brother is a longtime attorney at the Macomb County prosecutor's office in Michigan.) Published in 2005, the novel won Abbott instant accolades from the mystery world. 'Everyone could tell she was going to be a star from the first book on,' said fellow crime novelist Laura Lippman. 'Some writers, especially when they have real literary cred, like a PhD, can be condescending to genre — even when they're in it. Sometimes especially when they're in it. But she was never that. You just felt that her love for the classic stories was utterly sincere, but she also was determined to make it fresh.' Two more novels and an Edgar Award later, 'it felt like I could do this forever, but it also felt in some ways — not to be super artsy about it — I didn't have skin in the game,' Abbott said. She shifted from writing about genre tropes to writing about adolescence, a time that seemed to Abbott — still seems — like the most dramatic and exciting phase of life. And who, after all, is more hard-boiled than a teenage girl? In 'Dare Me,' Abbott's breakout hit from 2012, one cheerleader, bent over the toilet, begs another 'to kick her in the gut so she can expel the rest, all that cookie dough and cool ranch, the smell making me roil. Emily, a girl made entirely of donut sticks, cheese powder, and haribo.' The narrator goes on: 'I kick, I do. She would do the same for me.' Thrillers are typically published in the summer; the true test of the page-turner is to be more alluring than the swimming pool. Abbott speaks, with winning candor, about how her stories always follow a simple three-act structure: temptation, followed by a reckoning (usually violent), followed by some form of payment or redemption. But atop this subfloor of plot, she builds worlds that feel murky, inviting, densely secretive. Her prose veers from sensuous to steely, delicious to revolting. You inhale it like freon-scented air. Abbott, who lives alone in the same Queens apartment she's had for decades, writes in four- to five-day sprints. She can be 'crazily ritualistic' in the thick of a manuscript: not talking to anyone, eating the same things for all her meals. She has totems — prayer candles, at one point a gold Furby — arranged on a shelf above her computer. A gymnast she talked to for her 2016 murder mystery, 'You Will Know Me,' told her: 'If something's working, don't do anything to change the routines. You don't know if some part of the routine is what's making it work.' Abbott understood the mindset: 'There can be no changes if I'm getting pages out.' She does take long walks, or will sneak out to a midday movie to jolt her senses. Horror is best, and a crowd that likes to scream. Often, in the infinite scroll and too-many-tabs of her research, an image will help jump-start her brain. For 'Dare Me,' it was the treadmark left on a squad mate's shoulder, nicknamed the 'cheer shoe hickey.' For 'El Dorado Drive,' it was YouTube videos of how to make 'money cakes,' dollar bills unfurling from inside the pastry. And though she's never written about Greek life, when she taught for a year at Ole Miss, she saw girls walking the campus in teeny shorts paired with giant sweatshirts. She couldn't figure out this look. Then a student finally let her in on it: The hoodies were trophies from boys they had hooked up with. 'And that was awesome to me,' Abbott said, her eyes gleaming. 'There's something so tribal about it — like conquering something.' Throughout Abbott's career, she's maintained an almost spooky feel for the zeitgeist. Novels like 'Dare Me' were the crest of a pop culture wave that treated the darker stirrings of adolescents with dead seriousness. More recently, there was 'Beware the Woman,' a Gothic pregnancy novel that seemed to channel the public's post-Dobbs anxieties. 'El Dorado Drive' explores the resentment and desperation left behind by the disappearance of American manufacturing. (Amazingly, on the heels of President Donald Trump's recent comments about toys, it even flashes back to a scene of spoiled children casually destroying their expensive dolls.) 'I know it sounds like a really small thing — she pays attention to the culture,' Lippman said. 'And her tastes run from low to high. She's not a snob.' On any given week, Lippman shared, Abbott might be texting their group chat about the latest 'Real Housewives' or writing an essay for the Criterion Collection. Abbott herself can't quite explain it, can't trace the roots of her obsessions. Perhaps, she suggests, group psychology is the code she always wants to crack but is never quite sure she does. 'I always want to go to a place I haven't gone. The old fascinations will find their way in, but if it feels too comfortable, what am I doing it for?' She smiles. 'The fear is what keeps you going.'
