Town & Country March 2017

I really liked Vassar, but maybe I should have gone to Tulane. These are thoughts you have after you meet four different people at one cocktail party who explain that the reason they live in New Orleans is that they went to college there, and, well, it was just too hard to leave. And it’s a fantasy you let yourself indulge in after you have hosted an evening for David Netto’s François Catroux book at Sara Ruffin Costello’s 1860s house in the Garden District, where you eat shrimp étouffée off a ping-pong table in a dining room done up by Bryan Rafanelli (who, the week before, had finished decorating the White House for Christmas) and sit outside by the pool with a French 75 in the middle of winter getting…

SADIE STEIN On the eve of a new production of Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare’s memorable play about highsociety deception, Stein recalls a long list of famous scam artists in “IMPOSTORS AMONG US” (page 190). “Our almost unwilling attraction to the impostor is fascinating,” says the author, a contributing editor at the Paris Review. “Perhaps we can see parts of ourselves in both the mark and the criminal in all these stories.” RICHARD FARLEY “It has been with us since the times of Woodrow Wilson,” Farley says of the charitable deduction, a tax break that President Trump has threatened to all but eliminate. In “PARTY CRASH” (page 74), the Wall Street Wars author parses how the change would alter giving patterns and which charities might be most affected. JAMES…

Every November my husband’s horse racing interests take us to an event in sedate and suburban Pasadena. This year the trip was particularly welcome, as I had a mission I needed to accomplish while in California: obtain a prescription for medical marijuana. After we arrived, a quick Google search revealed several nearby clinics whose websites also provided anticipated waiting times at each (why can’t restaurants do this?). GPS directed me along a wide boulevard dotted with CVSs and car dealerships to an unassuming storefront in a generic strip mall. Inside, a lone young woman sat in front of a laptop, ready to do business. After a 40-second Skype interview with a doctor who was located, fittingly, in Malibu, I paid the $66 state administration fee and, as simple as that,…

ARTS & CULTURE Through April 23 Sunday in the Park with George Jake Gyllenhaal revives the title role at Broadway’s newly restored Hudson Theatre. March 17 Whitney Biennial The vast survey is in the new downtown museum this year. Let the Instagram wars begin. March 10–19 TEFAF Maastricht Old Masters, contemporary art, and fine jewelry, all under one roof in the Netherlands. March 29 The Al Thani Collection The Qatari royal family’s stunning jewelry collection is on view at the Grand Palais in Paris. March 9 The Glass Menagerie Sally Field plays a fading Southern belle in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s classic. March 21 Olga Picasso Paris’s Musée Picasso dedicates an exhibit to its namesake’s first wife, a ballerina. March 11–17 Aspen Institute The cost to attend the…

Carole and Carlos Ghosn’s party at the Grand Trianon at Versailles last fall was a formal celebration of two 2016 milestones: their civil wedding, which took place in May at the town hall of Paris’s 16th Arrondissement, and Carole’s 50th birthday in October. Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette served as inspiration for a night of dinner, dancing, and—in homage to the ill-fated queen’s supposed penchant for cake—an extravagant offering of colorful desserts. Hired actors entertained in 18thcentury costume, while designer Rabih Kayrouz, who made Carole’s dress, created the mise-en-scene, using an eclectic mix of Saint-Louis crystal, antique silver trays, and French porcelain. “We wanted it to feel as if we were inviting guests into our home—nothing too studied,” Carole says. Carlos, who is the CEO of Renault and Nissan, believes…

“I had imagined the Second World War as punishment specifically designed to deprive me of my father, had counted up my errors and, with an egocentricity which then approached autism and which afflicts me still in dreams and fevers and marriage, found myself guilty.” This is how Joan Didion describes her first visit, as a child in 1942, to the South. When she returned almost 30 years later, on a road trip with her husband through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, she took notes. “At the time,” she writes, “I had thought it might be a piece.” Those notes now constitute a new collection, South and West: From a Notebook (KNOPF, $21), out this month, which pairs that draft alongside one from another trip for an assigned article that never happened,…