Yes, G. E. Smith previewed Guild Hall’s first annual guitar masters festival, to take place in July, but that was not the only music at this year’s winter celebration of Guild Hall. Honored for her career in the visual arts, Audrey Flack, brought her History of Art band to The Rainbow Room to perform her tribute to Jackson Pollock on banjo and spoons. Her feminist take on the iconic painter dovetails with the current Me Too movement, and as she is quick to tell you, “he came on but nothing happened. He was way too drunk.”
Threading the evening was comedy writer Iris Smyles who regaled the crowd, including her date Frederic Tuten, documentarian Susan Lacy who has just completed her film on Jane Fonda, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, so good on HBO’s Girls, but also GH’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie. Smyles had a fantasy of Tom Wolfe suggesting among many things, that it was she who told him to wear white suits, the better to bleach out stains. She also wrote an erudite poem for Alec Baldwin evoking Chaucer by way of introducing him to present the honoree for the performing arts, Harris Yulin is our Fredric March, an actor who never has a false moment, said Baldwin, who was impressed that Yulin’s film debut was in Norman Mailer’s Maidstone. I, of course, was more taken with the fact that Yulin had performed a nightclub show with William Burroughs at the Club Montparnasse in Paris in the ‘60’s. And GH Executive Director Andrea Grover introduced Sheri Sandler presenting her with a special award for philanthropy.
As in years past, the dinner featured a menu created by Florence Fabricant: roasted cauliflower, roasted black cod with miso glaze, and apple tart tatin and black forest cake to finish. President of the GH Academy of the Arts and the evening’s host, Eric Fishl, took a cue from the Oscars the night before, asking, as Frances McDormand had, for all the women in the room to stand up. And we did.
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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