You knew New Yorkers weren’t going to let a global pandemic break up the party.
To stop the spread of the coronavirus, city dwellers have been told to do the most un-New York thing of all: Stay home. Most of us have taken it seriously, putting a hard stop on social life to protect the city’s most vulnerable. But, ever resourceful, we’ve quickly developed new frontiers in social life for a socially distant world — turning on our phone cameras for virtual happy hours, cleaning our apartments for e-dates and enjoying the opera from our sofas.
The city that never sleeps is now the city that never stops streaming.
“It allowed us to step away from the conversation about corona, which is obviously so all-encompassing, and talk about regular life, which felt really good,” says Chelsea Jane Sillars, 31, a producer for photographer Annie Leibovitz. This week, she says, her friends moved their twice-monthly dinner parties to the suddenly indispensable video-conferencing tool Zoom.
Sillars says she put her laptop on her kitchen island in her Greenpoint apartment while preparing bok choy and tofu, all the while video-conferencing with eight friends.
“We needed to connect,” says Sillars, whose pals plan to video-conference every Tuesday for as long as they need to. “This moment where we’re all eating a meal together makes it feel a little less scary.”
Here’s how many other New Yorkers are keeping sane and connected in disconcerting times.
Party On
St. Patrick’s Day was effectively canned this year when the parade was canceled. But that inspired Jordan Van Brink to revive an old tradition. For years, the 34-year-old publicist and friends would bar-hop around Manhattan’s Irish pubs, with one friend packing green food dye to make their beers festive.
Van Brink moved to Hollywood, California, two years ago, but since no one was leaving the house this year anyway, he had an idea: He and his husband threw on some green T-shirts, cracked a few beers, called up his friends back in New York on Google Hangouts and laughed with the gang like old times. They checked their cabinets and found the magic ingredient: green food dye.
“We made sure to make our beers green all night,” says Van Brink. “Our mental health was improved drastically afterwards.”
Cooper Union student Andrey Akhmetov, 21, attended a more elaborate virtual party on Tuesday: a surprise for a classmate’s birthday. He and friends started a Zoom room and waited inside like a regular surprise party. When the birthday guy opened the door — that is, when he logged on — he was tickled to see 15 friendly faces waiting.
“One person brought their own cakes with candles and had the birthday guy blow [into] the microphone,” Akhmetov says, at which point the friend with the cakes blew out the candles himself.
Last Sunday, Michelle Young, the founder of the site Untapped New York, had brunch with friends — 18 of them, on a Google Hangouts screen, with faces from across the city and as far away as Singapore.
They’ve all been friends for 15 years, and, as she ate her breakfast salad while catching up, they made plans to do this every Sunday “until this is over.”
The brunch is good for her mental health she says, though it’s no replacement for walking along the city streets and ducking into a restaurant or bar.
“That sense of serendipity that I get from moving around New York City is gone,” she says. “It’s that randomness of discovery that I miss out on.”
Nights at the Opera
Starting last Monday, the Metropolitan Opera began streaming a different “Live in HD” performance from its archives for free. It was the perfect opportunity for Max Parke, a 33-year-old software engineer, and his girlfriend to finally check out highbrow art, while still in their underwear. But they went the other direction.
“If you’re going to the opera, you have to dress up,” Parke says. He pulled a bow tie, suit and dress shoes out of his closet, and his girlfriend donned a sleek black dress.
They started a video chat with three other friends, who also dressed up, and they all got onto the opera stream. A bottle of Champagne later, they were hooked.
“When going out is OK again,” Parke says, “we are going to the opera together.”
An Easy First Date
Liz, a 35-year-old who works in education technology and is based in Carroll Gardens, is still trying to find a quarantine buddy. She recently matched with a guy on the app Bumble, and set a date for this week. Then the city shut down. He suggested keeping the date and doing a video chat instead.
For the first time all week, Liz, who’d rather not mess things up by revealing her last name, put on makeup.
“I went through all the motions of getting ready for a date,” she says. They tried their best to stay away from the coronavirus talk, chatting about their families and city life instead.
“We made a joke about how easy it would be to hang up just to end the date,” she says.
Liz is willing to break quarantine for a real-world meet-up, to an extent.
“I know he likes to ride bikes, I would be totally into that,” she says, “I will ride 6 feet behind you.”
Game On
Emma Alterman started out last week with the idea of moving her regular game night to online. She might end up saving lives.
Alterman, an education policy researcher, wanted to keep her monthly tradition going as the city shut down, and she realized the card-based guessing game Codenames was easy to play over Zoom. Ten friends joined in, most with drinks in hand, and played the game and joked about their lives.
“When we hung up I honestly felt like I’d been hanging out with my friends all night because that’s what we had done,” Alterman, 30, says.
Then a friend who works for the Baltimore city government heard about it. A few days later, Baltimore released a public service ad based on her hangout. It reads: “Not all heroes wear capes. Some host virtual game nights. Stay home to save a life.”
Netflix and Quarantine
Cinephiles have been flocking to apps like Netflix Party, a Google Chrome extension that lets users watch the same shows together in real time.
Mitchell Geller and friends haven’t missed their monthly apartment movie nights in almost three years. Geller, who’s 30 and works in advertising, fired up Zoom, which also lets you share a Netflix screen, and dialed in seven friends to watch the new Mark Wahlberg movie “Spenser Confidential,” a perfectly distracting flick, he says.
“Everything we’ve been doing just to try to maintain a sense of normalcy,” the Upper West Sider says.
Let There Be Music
Normalcy is what busker Jesse Cohen is aiming to provide: his Americana-influenced music is regular entertainment for commuters at the Seventh Avenue B/Q station in Brooklyn. He’s now doing daily livestreams on Instagram to soothe fans, even if they’re only commuting back and forth to the fridge.
“A lot of people have anxiety,” Cohen, 41, says. “Music unties that.”