Hello Again #9: Oh, Tony! I went to 3 parties in one night and I'm exhausted
I name drop a lot in this one
Hello yet again,
I went to three parties in one night on Sunday and I’m exhausted. Speaking of being exhausted, I’m going to move to a biweekly format for sustainability and so you all don’t get tired of me. And to make more time for screenwriting projects, which is probably what I’m procrastinating on by doing this anyway. Plus I need to give myself a week off to go to Fire Island. I need to be able to get railed in an outdoor shower without composing an essay in my head.
Upcoming shows!
I copied this format from Josh Gondelman. He politely puts it at the end, but I am rudely putting it here.
6/11 Folx Pride Show (NYC)
6/18 Emceeing Stonewall Foundation Vision Awards (NYC)
6/29 Patti Harrison’s DON’T ASK! (Brooklyn)
7/1 Taylor Garron Show (Brooklyn)
7/8 You Wanna Be On Top? Book Release (NYC)
7/12 & 7/13 Belly Laughs Festival (LA)
And you can still write in to Dear James for advice. I’m excited to get into those. Lots of qs already about the dyke to fag pipeline, which I know is so delicious, but would love more questions about specific situations ;)
Chances are, I’m exhausted because we keep living through unprecedented times, each more unprecedented than the last! In LA, people are protesting against ICE snatching people off the streets, while here in New York, we are celebrating the Tony’s. It’s an emotional mindfuck. What I wouldn’t give for some precedented times.
I say this to say, while you read about my raucous 12 hour afterparty bender, if I start sounding like a fun person to you, please remember that actually, I am haunted.
Anyway here’s the tea on the parties
There’s a thing that happens in June in New York where the unseasonable cold finally breaks, the sun stays out until 9, and everybody plans a party on the exact same day. And then you have to find an outfit that works for all the parties.
My gay sister and gaysian darling Dylan Adler and I combined forces and +1s to party hop on the Sunday of the Tony’s: from a Tribeca Film Festival screening, to the Oh, Mary! Tony’s party, and finally, Darren Criss’s Tony’s afterparty.
If I’m being real, I don’t go out a lot outside of comedy. I stay up very1 late, but I’m usually at home stoned watching Drag Race and/or playing Magic: The Gathering Arena (and that’s range). But every so often I am called to Go Hard.
My Sunday started at 5pm at the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of We Are Pat, a documentary by my friend Rowan Haber that reexamines the maddeningly androgynous 90s SNL character Pat (played by Julia Sweeney) through the lens of contemporary trans comedians, one of which was me. It’s a tender, funny, and dare I say nuanced confrontation of past selves and how they fit into the world as we know it today, with an extremely satisfying emotional payoff that took me by surprise. I’m only in like a minute of the doc, but that’s fine because, as I should have said at the makeshift roast at the We Are Pat afterparty, I don’t really identify with Pat because I’m hot.
Julia Sweeney is a delight, by the way. The doc made me totally fall in love with her, and then her effervescent, bubbling, easy laughing presence at the screening and party even more. At the party she gave a speech that forked off into her love of the sexual freedom of bonobos. Finally, a straight woman I can relate to.
Standing outside the party around 10pm, which was at Club Cumming (my favorite bar with “cumming” in the name), I suddenly remembered it was the Tony’s. With shaking hands, I googled “tonys 2025 winners” and saw that Cole Escola had won Best Actor and screamed, “THEY WON! THEY WON! THEY WON!” which caused many gay people to turn their heads and cheer. I love Cole and Cole’s art so much that I briefly shapeshifted into someone who cares about award shows.
Dylan met me at Club Cumming, and from there—after a pit stop at Tomkins Square Park so I could sit at a chess table and eat my classic Dig Inn bowl (farro bowl with steak, sweet potato, and cucumbers & tomatoes)—we hopped into a car up to Times Square. In the car, Dylan checked the Tony’s updates—Darren Criss had won too. We weren’t just going to Tony’s parties… we were going to winning Tony’s parties. Neither Dylan nor I, of course, had anything to do with Tony award winning shows Oh, Mary! or Maybe Happy Ending, but as an Asian I simply love to be near a win.
The Oh, Mary! party was at the Hard Rock Hotel, in a cavernous underground space bumping with gay music. I’m biased but to me it felt less like a Broadway party and more like a full circle celebration for the New York queer alt-comedy community. It was a party full of friends, united by a thought: It’s incredible to watch someone you’ve performed in literal basements with win the biggest award for an actor in theater. It’s unreal. And with We Are Pat still on my palate, it felt awesome to celebrate an actual nonbinary artist’s gender farce.
The energy was ripe for connection. I locked eyes with a Cool Asian all the way across the room, and we raised our drinks to each other. It turns out it was Cha See, Oh, Mary!’s brilliant lighting designer, and already a mutual on instagram. We struck up an immediate familial banter and pledged to work together. Eventually someone asked us “how we knew each other.” We said, talking over each other, “we just met. but we’re Asian, so we already know each other.”
SIDEBAR RANT: This has been said a million times, but that’s because it’s so true: There is no one more deserving of this win than Cole. They are a high genius. There is nobody like them. Cole is one of the few people where I will watch anything just because they’re in it. It’s a short list: Natalie Portman, Lady Gaga, and Cole Escola. My trifecta of camp tortured white women. My favorite and imo most underrated Cole project is their pandemic special, Help! I’m Stuck! which they wrote, shot, and edited, as far as I know, totally on their own in their apartment during the 2020 quarantine. If you haven’t seen it, please close this window and watch it right now. My favorite sketches from the special are "A Scene from the Middle of a Play That Doesn’t Exist” and this one where they play a straight guy auditioning for gay4pay porn. Cole could’ve won a Tony for these alone. They should make a Tony for Youtube specials.
Let me know your favorite sketch in the comments.
Speaking of gay4pay…
At 1am, Dylan and I headed to Darren Criss’s afterparty at an exclusif club by the Highline. Apparently Criss throws a Tony’s party every year, but it’s not every year he wins a Tony. This party had a different vibe: more subdued and markedly heterosexual.