Awards reception, venerability, shoes
The awards ceremony for the Rona Jaffe award was held on September 27 at the Lotos Club in New York, not to be confused with the Lotos Club in Prague (“If you have enough money come and you will not be disappointed”). There was an open bar. The novelist Joan Silber gave an interesting speech about “venerability,” and then I think somebody played the saxophone.
I was really happy to meet the other five emerging women writers: Sarah Braunstein, Alma García, Robin Ekiss, Jennifer Grotz, and Holly Goddard Jones. Here is a picture of us (with Joan Silber), all wearing black, as befits the somber brides of Literature. 
The shoes I wore to this event (not pictured) were purchased in Boston on the day after Slobodan Milošević was elected President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Now Milošević is dead, and Yugoslavia no longer exists, but I still wear those shoes.
Guests at the reception included my first editor, the emerging male writer Keith Gessen of n+1 magazine, who was wearing a used suit (and carrying a copy of Middlemarch). Keith was also invited to the Rona Jaffe awards last year, but was turned away at the door for wearing jeans and a blazer, and swore to avenge himself on the Rona Jaffe reception by dressing with dazzling splendor the next time he was invited. (“‘A nous deux maintenant!’ I cried, and went to dine at the Hot Bagel Cafe…”) Well he looked really sharp in his gray suit. I wouldn’t have known it was used, if he hadn’t told me. Probably, it wasn’t as old as my shoes.
Speaking of venerability, writers, shoes, and the venerability of writers and shoes, Tolstoy in his old age famously believed that everyone should make his own shoes, and began taking shoe-making lessons from a Moscow cobbler. 
Apparently, the shoes produced by Tolstoy after these lessons were not very high-quality. Tolstoy made a pair of shoes for the lyric poet Afanasy Fet, and also for his son-in-law, Mikhail Sukhotin, who kept them on a shelf next to Tolstoy’s 12-volume Collected Works, with a card reading: Volume XIII. You can see the shoes made by Tolstoy at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. When I went there, the guide was telling everyone that Tolstoy got really mad at Afanasy Fet for making fun of his boots and keeping them on a shelf. He said that their friendship never recovered from the strain.
Tags: clothes, events, Keith Gessen, n+1, Tolstoy, venerability "Joan Silber"