Have We Overdosed on FUN?

Dinners, parties, cocktails, repeat. It was so thrilling to go back to normal" that we may have overdone it a bit. Are you sick of us yet?

- BOB MORRIS

One punishingly rainy October evening, at the Fashion Group International’s Night of Stars awards dinner, Prabal Gurung addressed several hundred stylish guests in the ballroom of Casa Cipriani. Deepak Chopra, Dionne Warwick, Iman, and Huma Abedin were among them. “I thought about not showing up tonight and saying I had Covid,” the designer said. (It might have been a better option, considering that midway into his heartfelt acceptance speech someone in the sound booth cut his microphone and turned up the music to play him off.) 

Ah, the hazards of leaving the couch, as we all seem to be doing with alarming frequency these days. If half of life, as the saying goes, is about showing up, then it would seem we’re overcommitted to the idea right now. It’s suddenly yes and yes and yes to any and all invitations. You can, of course, risk catching the latest variant, but perhaps the biggest risk of our collective decision to go back to living our lives is overexposure—and not to viruses.

Exhibit A: Eric Adams, New York’s out-and-about mayor, who is too often spotted at downtown’s hot private club Zero Bond. “People thought this city was a 9-to-5 city,” the New York Post reported him saying at a party to kick off Fashion Week in September. “And all of a sudden January 2022 comes about and the mayor comes in and says he’s the nightlife mayor.”

It didn’t take long for the eyebrows to rise and knives to come out. “He should stay in and do his job,” says Kendall Werts, a founder of the talent agency the Jeffries. “When you’re truly powerful the people should come to you.”