A Ditch With Scissors Dinner

My dream print-magazine would be called something like Dish & Tabletop Fancier and it would be thick as 90s Vogue and inspirational—not aspirational—in the same way. My friends and I bought Vogue in the 90s as a ritual of sheer pleasure. We knew we were never going to buy anything in the magazine—the prices of everything in the magazine were comically, unthinkably out of reach…we could barely afford the magazine—so all the joy was in looking. You bought Vogue to marvel at the lavish creative ingenuity of the people who put it together; to admire their commitment to beauty; to gawk at the pretty girls; and to feel, I think, comforted by living in a society of such material bounty that all this effort was ephemeral and meant to just be thrown away. Next month there’s another Vogue, and it will be just as beautiful.