9:42 p.m. | I’m standing outside Russian Samovar, whose storefront is reflecting the lights of the marquee on the still-closed August Wilson Theatre across the street. While I wait for Caroline, I chat with others in line — mostly straight boys wearing black and smoking cigs — including a Wall Street software developer who lives in Murray Hill and hates his job. “I’m just making the rich man richer,” he says, before telling me that he’d like to give it all up to take on “squid fishing.”

9:50 p.m. | Caroline arrives in a high-pitched frenzy, wearing space buns, a sheer beige dress, and earrings made of little lettered beads that spell out anxiety (“because I’m sick in the head”). She’s holding her portrait canvases over her chest to hide her semi-exposed boobs. “Only for the party,” she says, meaning she’ll let the nips out when we get inside. In line, she introduces me to the popular TikToker Serena Shahidi, known as @glamdemon2004, looking glam in a chartreuse dress, and Caroline tells me the New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz just wrote about Serena. I ask Serena what that was like, and Caroline butts in: “I FaceTime her [Lorenz] like once a week.”

10 p.m. | After maneuvering our way to the front door, we walk up a steep stairwell to find a relatively small dance floor with a bar and a DJ stand. The next room is a dark salon adorned with candelabras, pewter vases, old paintings, and long, wooden tables. “Cambridge vibes,” Caroline (a Cambridge grad) says. At the far end is a balcony overlooking the street. She tells me plenty of notables will be coming tonight, promising Cat Marnell and cast members from Gossip Girl and Euphoria. Caroline is searching frantically for a spot to set up her portrait station. “I’m gonna tell my kids one day I painted naked at parties,” she says, laughing.

10:14 p.m. | At the bar, Caroline orders me a tequila-soda and, for her, an Aperol Spritz, her favorite drink right now. She’s actually ordered two of each, planning to hide one of the drinks for later in case the bar gets backed up. When she notices a friend walking in, she leaves me with her credit card. “Don’t scam me,” she jokes. In the meantime, I chat with another of her friends, a blonde bombshell who tells me her scent is a mix of Le Labo Santal 33 and Louis Vuitton perfume. She’s a Tisch student writing a book about “an ex that wasn’t so nice,” and Caroline has been helping her with it. “The best scammer I ever met,” she says of Caroline in all seriousness.

11 p.m. | The tiny space continues to fill with hordes of very white, very young, very online people, as the line down the block has grown into a pulsating mob. “It’s like everyone on the internet decided to have a party together,” a guy at the bar observes. On the balcony, partygoers taunt those waiting below (“You should pee on them,” someone jokes when I say I need to use the restroom), and people begin lighting up their cigarettes inside. Every few minutes, I hear someone murmur how much this place reminds them of China Chalet, the now-shuttered restaurant that closed at night to allow young kids grimy and shiny to get trashed and smoke indoors. Caroline runs up and down the stairs trying to help friends get inside. When I catch her and ask about the party so far, she says, “The irony is: We’re bringing Dimes Square to Times Square!” The DJ’s musical choices — “American Boy” and “Toxic” — are either bad or ironically bad.

11:45 p.m. | I can’t find Caroline. I check the dance floor, the balcony, and the restroom. I walk down a different staircase and through a heavy brown fur curtain, but on the other side all I find is the still-open, rather quiet Russian Samovar restaurant. I’m about to give up looking for her when my roommate, who’d been in the crowd outside, texts me that she saw Caroline sitting on the sidewalk in front of an Irish pub down the street painting portraits for friends who brought flowers. Suddenly, the old-school downtown movie director Abel Ferrara, apparently a “friend of the pod” and tonight’s special guest, appears on the dance floor under a spotlight to sing a tune and strum an acoustic guitar. Everyone loses it as if he’s an A-list celebrity and then, when he finishes, they happily start dancing again to the shitty music. This time, Fall Out Boy.

12:08 a.m. | I meet a cute group of college-age gays and girls on the balcony taking a smoke break outside rather than in. I complain about the bar line, and they tell me there’s a storage room full of booze in the back. They found it at a party here last week. Sure enough, we walk through a door at the back of the dance floor, past an employee, around some boxes and ladders, and straight into a dingy room full of wine, beer, and liquor. I pour whiskey into a plastic cup, and we make a quick exit. Back on the dance floor I run into Gutes — one of the two Drunken Canal founders — who’s wearing a funereal black dress and pearls. Before Caroline, I’d asked her to be this week’s are u coming? pal, but then she backed out. I ask her if she ever thought their quarantine newspaper would attract the attention it has. “I told Claire,” her co-founder, “buckle up, bitch.” As a Parade employee sitting close by tells me, “It’s so microinfluencer I’m like ugh.”

12:45 a.m. | Having finally returned from her painting sesh — fancying herself a real Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — Caroline asks me, “Should we go get some drugs?” On the balcony, we each take a bite, hers larger than mine, of an acid gummy from her handsome man friend, and she takes pictures with the people surrounding her, covering her nipples whenever it’s a flash photo. (“People should have to pay to see that. That should be on my OnlyFans.”) She chats about her Natalie Beach drama with a young guest. “I totally believe you’re so nice and so amazing,” the girl says. “The only reason I survived the Cut is because I’m a nice, bomb-ass person,” Caroline replies, before offering me one of the calla lilies she’s holding because her cat Matisse is allergic to them. “If there’s a callo-will, there’s a Calloway,” she says, giggling.

1:11 a.m. | All night, Caroline has been talking about Cat Marnell. She claims they’re close friends even though they’ve never met in person, and she tells me it’s going to be a true New York City event if that happens tonight — something I should be glad I’m here to witness and write about. She brings up Cat several more times, including once while talking about her former Adderall addiction. In an attempt to make a group of listeners understand how serious it was, she says, “Cat Marnell and I had the same literary agent, and he dropped me because I was sick.” Eventually, she gets a text that says, “Hi it’s cat and ellis we’re inside,” but neither of us ever sees them. Later, Caroline found out on Instagram that Cat stopped by while she was painting outside. When a beefy guy in a Hawaiian shirt greets me with a kiss on the mouth and whispers in my ear, “I’m bi, but you’re worth it. Do you think you’ve been good enough for it?,” Caroline comes to my side and asks if I’m okay or if I’d like her to have him kicked out.

1:53 a.m. | Stashing her bouquets in the corner of the party where we’ve hidden more drinks, Caroline remembers she left her paints at the Irish pub. When we go to retrieve them, it’s closed and also raining, so we take a moment to talk while sitting on the sidewalk under an awning. She apologizes for so overtly telling everyone my pronouns at the beginning of the night, which I find sweet. “The party only lasts one night, but the joy of having hosted it? That’s eternal,” she says, talking about how she feels responsible for people having fun. “When the history books are written about this period in the ’20s, I think it’s important to balance your work with honestly being present at moments like this. Because I think this will be sort of the Studio 64 … 54 of … that will be to the ’60s … the ’70s as tonight is to the ’20s, and I want to be a part of it.”

2:25 a.m. | In the judgment of another guest I meet while Caroline keeps buzzing around collecting IG handles, this party is merely “plenty of people with nothing to do, lots of money, and their brains atrophied.” Meanwhile, the crowd is thinning out, and Caroline stops to tell me she feels nothing from her acid gummy.

2:59 a.m. | Caroline mentions it’s time for an Irish exit before doing the exact opposite and asking several people whether she can do anything for them before she goes. I hop in an Uber with a boy from the party, who, after spending some time around Caroline this evening, declares, “No one in her circle is willing to break her bubble. She’s just talked about.” When I get home, she sends me a selfie with her cat to say she made it safely back to her own place. And the next day, she writes on Instagram: “One of the best nights of my life. Please send me any pics you have of me. I didn’t get any and I want to remember it forever.”

CALL ME
I had a bizarrely good date this week, then I spent the following 24 hours wondering how to send a next-day message — one that says you want to do it again (do you say that?) but not too earnestly. So I texted seven hot, smart, dating, New York singles I know and asked their advice. When do you send it? What do you say? Here’s what they recommended:  

• “When correctly executed, you want to create a sort of Pavlovian relationship. Hit ’em as the summer nostalgia hits in the pink dusk of July. You’ll be forever tied to summer, fun, and, somehow, always seemingly reaching out to them when they are thinking about you …The real trouble is I’ve only ever been good at texting people I don’t really like; when I like them, all I wanna do is talk to them right away. But that’s a me problem.” —Seana

• “I can be overeager, so recently I’ve been trying to wait more than a day lol. When you come across something that connects to a topic you talked or joked about, send it to them. Then a few days later, suggest a specific day to get together again.” —Ben

• “Say, ‘Hey I hope this [DATE] is treating you well. Personally, I’ve had the dumbest grin on my face all day, must’ve been something to do with [COMPLIMENT]. Anyway, I’d love to see you again, how’s [DATE, TIME, PLACE]?’” —Austin

• “Wait for him to text you. When he doesn’t, sulk for no more than 25 minutes, then hit him with something short and sweet around lunchtime, when he’s probably on his phone: ‘had a great time last night … would love 2 do it again sometime’ and maybe an emoji, something flirty and cute like maybe the smiling tongue out or the blushing kissy face (WITHOUT the heart).” —Michael

• “I’m usually just direct. (Playing coy is exhausting!) If I haven’t heard anything within a couple of days, I’ll send a version of: ‘hi! the other night was fun, we should do it again soon. are you free on ___?’ It’s simple, easy, and you figure out fast if they’re into you or not.” —Julia

• “If you want to see them again, let them know!! playing it ~cool~ is so annoying lol … everyone in this city is some level of neurotic and no one has time for their therapist to weigh in on what ur text means; lmao so cut to the chase and offer to meet them somewhere the following week — somewhere fun and casual where you can actually hear them talk.” —Alex

• “Wait until the next evening, between 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. Not too early, it runs no risk of appearing over-eager, and if the date truly did go well they’ll have been anticipating receiving your text as much as you’ve been anticipating sending it. Let romantic thoughts and fantasies jostled alive the night prior build throughout the next day, ‘cause with it so will excitement for the next date.” —Ian

PARTY LINES
If you’re down for a Wednesday party, head to queer-women-centric Misster tonight — a free dance party with a tarot-card reader — at the Woods (48 S. 4th St., Williamsburg). For something a bit straighter, try Kind Regards (152 Ludlow St.) tonight; the basement is open again. The Rosemont’s (63 Montrose Ave., Williamsburg) Thursday party is back. The Sultan Room (234 Starr St., Bushwick) has two parties this week: one with techno and the other with Italo-disco. On Friday, drop off your film to get developed and party hard at the same time at this “femme rap techno jungle set” in Bushwick. Or if you like hard techno, go to Trans-Pecos (16-09 Weirfield St., Ridgewood), where the party will be moving from the garden to inside. Judy, an amateur drag show and dance party, is happening at C’mon Everybody’s (325 Franklin Ave., Bed-Stuy) on Saturday night. Tickets are sold out, but I hear there will be a few available at the door. “It will be camp, it will be joyous, it will be life-giving,” the host promised me. On Sunday, don’t give up on the weekend yet and attend Hot Honey Sundays: a free, BYOB outdoor dance party by the river in Greenpoint. If you’d rather stay out late, go to the new Farewell Bar’s (143 Troutman St., Bushwick) queer and nonbinary party. And if you like to plan ahead, I hear very exciting things about this Baroque Ball happening on July 17. There will even be a dress code: black tie or baroque style.

WE SEE YOU 
If you’re into the idea of a science-fiction-themed bar (specifically, one inspired by the cantina from Star Wars) and like a spot where you can both dance and enjoy genuinely good cocktails, head to Jupiter Disco (1237 Flushing Ave., Bushwick). Arrive before midnight to get in for free, and try the A.M. Radio if you like Negronis. This Thursday night is a house and techno party that’s billed as “a bright spark of a function from the mind and heart of local DJ Echor.” If you’re weirded out by how straight it is inside, make the two-block walk to Heaven or Las Vegas (4 Irving Ave., Bushwick) instead.


ASK AN EXPERT
This week, my colleague Bridget Read wrote a story about the recent panic around fentanyl-laced cocaine in Brooklyn (surely you saw the infographics). I asked if people should be worried, and here’s what she had to say: 

“Evidence is mounting that accidental overdoses in New York related to all kind of substances are on the rise. But the Health Department has released limited evidence that there is a slight uptick in the amount of fentanyl present in New York’s cocaine supply. Overdoses related to cocaine and fentanyl have been increasing slowly for several years, but the current panic is kind of a missing-the-forest-for-the-trees situation. New Yorkers don’t need to be on the lookout for a ‘bad batch’ of a certain kind of drug; we need to realize that, in our current unregulated and illicit market, no drug is really 100 percent safe. We should all be more familiar with harm-reduction methods like naloxone and using test strips.”

Thirsty for more?
Subscribe to New York to support this newsletter.

If you enjoyed reading ‘are u coming?,’ smash that forward button and share it with a friend. Or, subscribe to The Cut newsletter, a daily digest for stylish minds covering news, fashion, and power.