Fear and Loathing at BravoCon

Two essays, recommendations, a poll & writing advice

We were somewhere around Flatbush Avenue Extension on the edge of the Manhattan Bridge when the cold brew coffee began to take hold.

Every now and then when life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Brooklyn to the Jacob Javits Center.

I did that on two October weekends in a row. One weekend, I went to New York Comic Con, which is like San Diego Comic Con but much smaller, and soaked in a barrel of scrappy East Coast old school comix fandom. It’s not as glamorous as San Diego, and everyone agrees the venue is claustrophobic, but it’s a good time.

Then the next weekend, I went to another convention, where I was an anthropologist on Venus, or some planet-like pop-up exclusive experience bathed in pink and purple, resplendent with fresh balayage on long tresses attached to excited bodies flown in from towns small and large all across America.

I went to something called BravoCon, which is a convention of Bravo fans and “over 100 Bravolebs!” as per the marketing website.

Why? I love my brother. I love his wife. And she loves Bravo shows.

I have seen one season of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, various clips from the New Jersey iteration of the franchise, and some episodes of a show called Southern Charm. This is a show about sunburned white people in Charleston, S.C. doing things like drinking beer and sewing and playing golf. I think there are some cast members who are not white, but mostly it is red-faced white people and their alcohol and pillows.

I watched the aforementioned programs while hanging out with my brother and sister-in-law after she gave birth to my first giant-headed nephew, in the summer of 2017, and after she gave birth to a second large-noggin’d lad, on the first day of 2021. They have both grown into their heads and are enchanting, adorable little people who wear excellent clothes and love Elmo and Halloween. But they did not get here without effort on my sister-in-law’s part.

A woman goes through that kind of thing, you gotta say yes when she asks if you’ll go see Andy Cohen answer questions from a crowd of 2,000 mainly cis white heterosexual women and gays.

I’m sober and knew I would not order alcoholic beverages at the Bravo-themed bars. So I got jacked up on cold brew coffee, put on a mask, and took a Lyft to meet my destiny on the western edge of Manhattan Island.

I’ll tell you this - I didn’t just have one cold brew coffee. I had two. As the Lyft barreled across the Manhattan Bridge en route to a swift trip across Chinatown, I reflected there was every reason to believe I was heading for trouble, that I’d pushed my luck a bit far. I mean, I really had to pee.

There was a bus parked outside the Javits featuring something called the Below Deck Experience. Loud music was blaring. I assumed the inside of the bus was decorated like a yacht and you got a $25 blowjob or salty fingerblast from Captain Ahab or an anthropomorphic sea barnacle, but I can’t be sure. I teetered on the edge of dissociation.

“This place is getting to me,” I whispered to no one. “I think I’m getting the Fear.” No, this is not a good town for 24-hour cold brew coffee with “focus-enhancing additives.” Reality itself is too twisted. I ate a street cart pretzel, met my sister-in-law and went in to take a piss.

It was a good indoor mall with many hungover attendees who’d gone hard on the first two days of the convention. Yeah, I spent some money.

But in a world of thieves, the only final sin is paying $420 for a one-day VIP pass to a convention where you don’t know shit about shit.

I told my brother I’d pay him back in installments. He’s not gonna drive in from Jersey to shake me down.

And if he did, I’d scream, “I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end!” while beating the shit out of him with a sparkly life-size mannequin, something I once saw in Andy Cohen’s own office at Bravo while pitching a show that I mercifully did not sell. (Andy wasn’t there, we just used his office.)

A gold mine like Bravo breeds its own army, like any other gold mine. Among the fandom, as on the shows, circa-2002 Park Avenue blonde highlights tend to accumulate in fast layers around the heads of natural brunettes with money … and big money, at BravoCon, is synonymous with the extra special VIP passes that allow you to drink in smaller rooms with various Bravolebrities.

My sister in law had a few plastic goblets of Champagne. I enjoyed a few bottled waters. We went to a panel of wives with big houses, and they talked about the importance of family. We left that panel early because we got bored. We also went to an Ask Andy Q&A event where several audience members presented Andy Cohen with various queries related to the game Fuck, Marry, Kill, and a few others wanted his autograph (one so he could get a tattoo of Andy’s signature), and a woman wanted him to know she had a baby girl called Cohen, and Andy said if you thought he got drunk on last New Year’s Eve CNN show, wait til you see this year’s, and everyone screamed, and a woman named Dorinda said a thing and everyone screamed, and it was really nice to be around so many joyful women, honestly.

It was also exciting to see our modern P.T. Barnum in action, live onstage. I came away understanding why my sister-in-law has had a crush on Andy Cohen for her entire adult life and, possibly, much of her adolescent life too. She’s younger than me, and these shows have been on TV since she was in middle school.

I’m not saying I have a crush on Andy Cohen, but if he decides to wife up for some unexplained reason, and he decides to marry my sister-in-law, I’m going to have to just tell my brother we need to accept this as a gift. Andy Cohen is very handsome and funny, and he has a particular charm that translates from the small screen to the big screen to the Javits Center jumbo monitors, and I don’t know if he did theatre in high school or studied broadcasting or whatever, but it’s clear he’s the real star of the show.

Part of the magic is the way he makes it appear that he’s just a facilitator, and that while he may technically have supervisory duties over some of the shows, not to mention a great deal of control, it’s all just sort of unfolding naturally.

Somebody asked Andy Cohen about one of the former Housewives doing a racism, and some of the people in the audience were audibly glad she brought it up, and he managed to answer the question without answering the question (but still answering the question) in a way that I have seen only politicians and certain polished professors do.

Andy Cohen was asked about a former teen Bravo superfan, and he spoke of him kindly and said the lad is now a grown-up who is very active in Republican politics, and many people in the crowd booed, and I looked up one of the vendors from whom I’d purchased a souvenir and realized they were hardcore MAGA, and of course I knew the crowd was a mix of red and blue voters, and it was then that I reflected that while the crowd was not entirely white, I was surely in white America’s throbbing, cocktail-lubricated heart. And wasn’t I one of them, too?

I was indeed.

I’d say something about the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, etc., but Andy Cohen isn’t the devil. He exists in a long American tradition of showmen, carnival barkers, hosts, pop culture suns. The Housewives revolve around him in a cacophonous, shrieking, Botox-d, beautiful orbit. But we are all part of the universe too, he seems to say. We are all on the outer reaches, tiny stars who might, if we’re lucky, get to ask a question in front of lots of other tiny stars at a big convention on a Sunday in New York City.

I think the last time I was around so many happy women in one place was when we went to the last night of Beyoncé’s Formation World Tour in October 2016. Six years ago, fuck.

There were people of all genders there in the stadium, of course, and every color, creed, and nationality seemed to be represented. Back then my sister-in-law didn’t have any kids, and she and my brother had been married for just six months. I wasn’t sober yet. I got an icy headache from a three-foot-tall margarita Slushie, and recovered quickly. Kendrick Lamar performed, and DMX (RIP), and Remy Ma, and Ja Rule, and so many other people. It was perfect.

BravoCon was not that but it was something. And my sister-in-law works in public school special education, and she has two little kids, and she’s fun, and she deserves to be at her own Woodstock ‘69, which I came to realize was BravoCon, although in her personal spiritual cosmology (and mine), a Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter concert is actual Heaven.

We left to meet my mom and eat an early dinner at a bar that served deep-fried Snickers wrapped in won ton dough. The game was on. It was a really nice meal.

BravoCon in 2022 was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Just kidding, it definitely did not, in the long run or the short run, but no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant (capitalism).

I went to BravoCon because I love my sister-in-law. I left BravoCon with fake eyelashes, a sense of deeper bonding with my sister-in-law, and a cold that has since evolved into bronchitis.

Now my drug of choice is Throat Coat tea.

I sip it and savor the memory of wandering into a pop-up experience sponsored by Lay’s™, where I accepted a free Lay’s™ edition of Melissa Gorga’s sprinkle cookies. I was told she was famous, and a Housewife™ of note.

The cookies were delicious. They were full of potato chip bits and covered in edible gold dust, like America.

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Recommendations

I subscribe to The Small Bow, a newsletter about recovery. Editor A.J. Daulerio recently included this quote, and I thought I’d share it with you. I can’t say if it resonates because I just watched half of a fancy home video tour from a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, or because I needed to read this particular quote on this particular day.

“The meaning of life lies in two major areas; your personal perfection and service to other people. You can serve while you are moving toward perfection and you can move toward perfection while serving other people.” – Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom

In another favorite of mine, The Audacity, Roxane Gay recently suggested this interview with actress Danielle Brooks. I hope to see Ms. Brooks in The Piano Lesson once I’ve recovered from bronchitis. If not, maybe PBS will do one of those Great Performances and I can cough at home and watch.

This is also via Roxane: the Washington Post is hiring a news and features writer to cover books! I think you need to be located in the D.C. area for this one, understandably.

In case you’re interested in the real story of The Watcher, a very New Jersey tale, here’s the 2018 article about it. As per the source: “The article, by Reeves Wiedeman, is the basis of an [sic] new Netflix limited series created by Ryan Murphy. Read an update on the case here.”

I am a yukgaejang convert. A man on a dating app recommended this Korean spicy beef and vegetable soup to me. I now believe this is the reason dating apps should exist: food recs for when you’re sick. This recipe was posted in 2007 and updated in 2021. I would just be a job creator and support your local Korean family-owned establishment and order this by the bucketload when you are sick.

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A Poll, Because Democracy

Right now, the free subscribers get an intro, recommendations, and the advice column each week (the extra essay is a fun freebie this week, because I’m bananas). Paid subscribers get all that plus an exclusive essay each week. (Have I mentioned that you buying a subscription to this newsletter would truly be an ideal birthday gift FOR ME?) What else shall I add to this thing?

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Writing Advice: Name What’s Around You

Each week, I’ll dispense some bit of advice here, in response to a reader or just because I feel like writing about a thing that week. If you have a writing question or a non-emergency personal query and feel you’d like a stranger’s thoughts on it, comment below or email saratoninnewsletter@gmail.com.

If you’re stuck at the moment with writing something, or feeling mired in creative sludge related to some other art form, here’s an exercise.

Take two minutes to write down or type out the name of as many objects as you can see. The goal is to list as many as possible within the two minutes. If you find yourself with leftover time and nothing left to name, you can always add a few details about each object.

I’ll start. I’m setting my timer and…as my Maltese extended family used to say before backyard BBQ games…ready, steady, go!

The pendant lamp, or maybe it’s called something else, on my desk

My desk from It’s Not Trash Designs, made from scrap wood

The calendar my mom kept when she was pregnant with me

My big wall television screen

My laptop

A 500 piece puzzle called Birds that some online friends sent to me from their shop

The white drapes that came with this apartment - I can’t identify the weave of the fabric, maybe I need to weatherproof my windows, oh no I’m off track

The Lakewood Organic Pure Cranberry Juice 32 oz glass bottle I use to measure out my drinking water

“How to Keep House While Drowning” by KC Davis

An old New Jersey commemorative mug from Starbucks in the ‘90s, which somebody kind (I can’t remember who at the moment) sent me because of something I said on the Internet, presumably related to New Jersey, or maybe it was another reason and came from a friend, fuck, get back on track

The ink portrait of my cat, Polly the Demon Queen, in a few different moods, sent to me by my friend and artistic collaborator Robert Hack (it’s framed and hangs on my wall). We did The Only Goat Girl and It Worked for Jonah together.

A foam roller that would be good for me to use

My printer

Wind chimes from my mom, originally hung at the condo I rented in New Jersey last late fall, winter and most of spring. It was in this beautiful condo community blanketed with snow (on snowy days) and there was something very special about the place. I wrote about how it was haunted by a lesbian gym teacher.

Aaand we’re done!

I hope that was of help to you. Subscribers can always feel free to add comments below - I’d love to know one object that didn’t make your list, because you ran out of time.

I’ve got this lovely end table by It’s Not Trash, and it’s in the corner here. I’ve got four pieces by that wonderful tiny company, all made from scrap wood. It makes me feel good to look at these things and think about where they came from.

This week’s essay for paid subscribers is about keeping house, making a home, what we keep and what we leave behind. That sort of thing. I’d love it if you’d join as a paid subscriber, but if not, thank you so much for reading this newsletter. Please share it with a friend who might like it. I wish you the best.

Love,

Sara

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This Week’s Essay: Playing Home

I’m not good at identifying things: faces, shapes, routes on a map. Words are where I feel secure, and I’d rather read the dictionary for an hour than sit with an interior decorator who asks me to envision how different pink paint swatches might look on my bedroom wall.

If I’m well-rested, I may be able to picture it for just a moment, but then it’ll dissolve, like the face of my mother when I try to call up its intricacies. If I can’t mentally hold the image of someone I dearly love whom I’ve known all my life, I certainly can’t hang onto an idea of a color, a layout, a design.

And yet, I have an apartment, and I want to make it a home, one in which I might even have a tiny dinner party one day. Imagine that! (I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, because I don’t have many friends here, but I do want them.)