More than seven hundred people came to the black-tie gala for the Studio Museum in Harlem last October. It was gala season, a time when, on an almost nightly basis, cultural institutions around the city congratulate themselves and raise money doing it, and this one draws the liveliest, the best-dressed, and by far the most diverse crowd of celebrants.
Thelma Golden, the museum's director, seemed to be everywhere at once as she moved around the room welcoming Spike Lee, Nicole Ari Parker, Questlove, Julie Mehretu, David Byrne, and many more. Golden, who is fifty-eight and five feet tall, with close-cropped hair and surprisingly large eyes, was wearing a long, sparkly dress. In this world, at least, she is one of those people who, like Elvis and Oprah, do not require a last name. "Thelma is the consummate New Yorker," her friend Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation and the evening's honoree, told me. "She can talk to anybody, and she's hilarious in a New York way precise, unpredictable, irreverent, keen, clickety-clack." The music, by a band called Hudson Horns, was so loud that it drowned conversation. You mouthed a greeting and pretended to hear the answer, or, better, you got up and danced with the person nearest you in the space between the dinner tables. Golden never danced for more than a minute. She would see someone new to embrace, or to take by the arm to meet someone else-weaving us all into her social tapestry. "Thelma doesn't have children, but she is supremely maternal," her lifelong friend Alexandra Llewellyn Clancy had told me. "She takes care of everyone." The Hudson Horns finally left the platform, and, after brief remarks by the Studio Museum's board chairman, Raymond J.
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On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
