In defense of the skunk at the garden party

On the Met Gala and the many ways to show up as a guest

(Getty Images // CSA Images)

I was recently at a friend’s house for dinner. As we were eating, my host, Philip Gourevitch, told us a story about his Russian grandmother. A young family friend had come to visit her in New York, where she served him tea. He began enthusiastically describing a romanticized book about the Bolshevik Revolution. She, a Menshevik, had lived through it at his age and had watched the revolution destroy its own, Philip explained. She listened attentively, then said, in her rich Russian accent: “It makes me want to vomit.” The young man assumed she had misunderstood. He repeated himself with even greater enthusiasm. She nodded and said, “Yes. It makes me want to vomit.”

Somehow, we fell into a conversation about how rare a comment like that seems to happen today, in good company, in real life.

It reminded me of an incident I had read about that week, in which the playwright Jeremy O. Harris confronted Sam Altman at a black-tie event. At the Vanity Fair Oscars party Harris approached Altman – a fellow guest and the CEO of OpenAI – and said: “I don’t know how you can comfortably look at yourself in the mirror, knowing you just gave your technology over to a department that called themselves the Department of War, and which just killed 175.” According to Dowd, Harris “animatedly lit into Altman for 10 or 15 minutes.” When Maureen Dowd called Harris up to get his side of the story, he said, “I think willfully allowing dangerous technology to be onboarded by society is, in and of itself, evil.”

Jeremy O. Harris at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party (Getty Images)

Whether he did it perfectly or not, Harris chose to use his guesting power to speak directly to someone with enormous power over humanity right now – someone often buffered from criticism in social spaces. Harris pushed against the invisible social contract that if you’re invited, you stay quiet. He used his invitation not just to belong, but to intervene. (And, he may or may not be invited back.) He wasn’t preserving his social capital. He chose to spend it.

Hosting is an act of creation. Gathering is about connection. It is also about power. Who you bring together, under what auspices, and who you place alongside one another are all acts of creation. And perhaps none is more direct than the decision of who to invite.

If the host wields power at a gathering, every guest also holds some. But as guests, our toolkit collapses into two blunt instruments: polite silence or burning the house down. We lack the language and the imagination for what lies in between.

Perhaps we ought to name it.

In honor of the American saying, “the skunk at the garden party,” maybe we call it skunk guesting. Or gadfly guesting. Or generative guesting. Done well, it’s generative. In The Art of Gathering, I call this “good controversy.” I write:

“Good controversy is the kind of contention that helps people look more closely at what they care about, when there is danger but also real benefit in doing so. To embrace good controversy is to embrace the idea that harmony is not necessarily the highest, and certainly not the only, value in a gathering. Good controversy helps us re-examine what we hold dear: our values, priorities, nonnegotiables. Good controversy is generative rather than preservationist. …It helps communities move forward in their thinking. It helps us grow.”

It’s the choice to use your temporary belonging — your seat at the table, your proximity, your invitation — not just to enjoy the room, but to shape it. To widen the geography of conversation. To interrupt, when necessary, in service of a larger value.

I’m thinking about this, as you might be aware, because tonight is the 76th Met Gala. I’m always intrigued by this gathering, partly because it’s so over the top, and partly because its chair, Anna Wintour, understands power and is a sophisticated gatherer. (To encourage conversation and presence, she bans guests from taking photos or posting on social media inside the party. Also banned: chives, onions, and garlic.) She knows that every choice shapes behavior. And whatever you think of the Met Gala, as I keep saying in our Group Life Labs, we can learn from everywhere. So here we go.

For gatherings like the Met Gala, the guest list is a proxy for cultural relevance. A coveted invitation temporarily puts you on the same plane as others in the room. For one night, before the carriage turns back into a pumpkin, you share a fleeting kind of equality and proximity – commenting on a handbag, wiping ketchup off a lapel, washing hands in the bathroom.

And yet, we assume there are only two moves: attend and say nothing, or refuse to attend at all. We treat absence as the only possible moral signal, and presence as compliance. In doing so, we leave so many forms of creative engagement on the table.

You and I may not be getting invitations to the Met Gala any time soon. But we each have our own versions of a group, community, or event we are part of, where we’re not OK with everything that is happening, yet we are still part of it. A family reunion where a cousin is being mistreated. A meeting where a decision no one believes in moves forward. A moment among friends when someone with more social power takes a jab, and the room goes quiet. Every community has moments when voice is a distinct possibility to employ, with its own risks and rewards.

In his 1970 essay, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, the economist Albert Hirschman argued that when a product or organization declines, people have three responses: they leave (exit); they stay no matter what (loyalty); or they use their voice. The same is true of gatherings. When a room is losing its way, do you say something? And how do you increase the likelihood that it’s heard?

We oscillate between silence and exit. We need to broaden our range of options for how we let people guest.

Three years ago, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended the Met Gala in a white dress spray-painted with the words: “Tax the Rich.”

A brilliant and deft use of power and expansive notion of the many ways to GUEST (Getty Images)

Some criticized her for showing up at all. Others said she was being disrespectful to the event. I saw it differently. I wrote at the time that AOC was practicing the art of exquisite guesting. She worked within the norms of the event – fashion, spectacle, presence – to introduce tension that couldn’t be ignored. Her absence could not have created what her presence did. And every time someone debated her choice for weeks after, they repeated the message out loud: “Tax the Rich.”

In his interview with Dowd, Jeremy O. Harris said that maybe this Oscars Party confrontation was his “Eartha Kitt moment.”

In 1968, Eartha Kitt attended a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson on juvenile delinquency. Written on the invitation and the program were the words: “Why is there so much juvenile delinquency in the streets of America?”

About sixty women attended. Many offered polite suggestions and ideas for planting trees or improving neighborhoods. When it was her turn, Eartha Kitt redirected the room: “I think we’ve forgotten what the subject of this luncheon is all about,” she said. And then she shared what the American men she had met abroad who were dodging the war told her directly: “It’s a silly war… It’s an unwinnable war, and we don’t want to go.” She continued: “That’s why they smoke pot… because they just want to go to sleep until everything is all over.” She named what others would not.

Lady Bird Johnson, Katherine Peden, and Eartha Kitt at a White House Luncheon (Getty Images)

By the end of the lunch, her government car had disappeared. The papers reported she had made the First Lady cry. The CIA opened a dossier on her. There are social costs to speaking up.

There is no single “right” way to use your power in these rooms. New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is skipping the Met Gala this year. In part because every mayor before him has traditionally attended the Gala, his absence may itself register as a statement. (He is also the first mayor to scrap the gala on inauguration day in favor of a massive block party with an invitation to all New Yorkers.) But for most of us, absence simply cedes voice. There was a version of showing up for Mayor Mamdani that could have been creative, but it would have been a high-wire act, and perhaps not worth the risk.

An NYT news alert on my phone announcing that Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be skipping the Met Gala.

I want to expand our notion of all the ways one can guest. Being invited in is its own form of power. Protesters heighten the stakes. Others crash the gates. But, there’s also space for other forms of guesting. One of my mentors in conflict resolution, Randa Slim, used to call it those with “insider-outsider” power. You are on the inside, but for whatever reason, you also carry the lens of an outsider. These insider-outsiders often have the clout to say something or be listened to, but haven’t entirely drunk the Kool-Aid either.

I am not saying Harris has changed Altman’s mind. I am not saying he did it perfectly. There are many ways to engage a person, including with humor and wit and care. I am saying that these moments of social risk matter because they widen our moral and social imagination about how we might practice voice in the rooms of our lives.

In his book The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas describes what he calls “the orchestra principle” in movement building: not everyone plays the same instrument, and not everyone should. Some protest. Some persuade. Some disrupt from within. Some build alternatives outside. The oboe player doesn’t yell at the flute that they’re doing it wrong. The mistake is assuming there is only one legitimate role. The work is to widen the range of options available to each other.

Guesting works this way, too.

A few weeks ago, the Met Gala announced its new sponsors: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. To invite not just business leaders but also symbols of a certain economic order is to invite those values into the room. These gatherings are places where power is laundered into social currency.

And I am curious if any of this year’s spectacular guests, beaming in all their sequins, might also choose, in their own creative act, to practice skunk guesting. The power of gatherings is that these individuals with enormous power and authority are still also just people. If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t been there.

There is no single “right” way to use your power in these rooms. But when we default to either silence or exit, we leave so many creative tools of influence within community on the table.

As always,

Priya