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Doree: I feel like last night was sort of a quintessential weird New York night. I had so much fun.

Marisa: Me too. I was sick all weekend And then I was like, "Oh, I'll just go out and have one glass of wine. Maybe two!" And then I ended up having like six and getting home at 3 AM.

Doree: And next thing you know you're at a party in the West Village you can't talk about.

Doree: I was totally having a Lucky magazine day-to-night clothing crisis.

Marisa: We both had real sartorial challenges. Should we discuss our outfits?

Doree: You looked hot!

Marisa: Okay, so I had on a Maria Cornejo dress and tights (NOTE: not slutty ones, unfortunately) and old Mayle wedges.

Doree: No, I was wearing the slutty tights last night (NOTE: not Parisian, unfortunately).

Marisa: They were super-slutty.

Doree: Straight from the lingerie section at H&M. They were also too big and kept bunching up. But no matter! I was also wearing this dress with zippers on it that I randomly purchased in Philly.

Marisa: I love that dress so much. Everyone loves that dress.

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Marisa: Where do we even begin?

Doree: I think it needs to be said that somewhere there is a party planner who might be losing his/her job.

Marisa: Oh really? I was going to start with the collective loss of our Patrick McMullan v-cards, but go on.

Doree: Well. They scheduled it on the night of the National Magazine Awards, which meant that every big deal editor in town wasn't going to come-as well as most of the media reporters.

Marisa: There was also an US Weekly event! So the cast of Jersey Shore was also prob busy.

Doree: Yes! Well and more to the point for their audience, there was also a Granta event.

Marisa: Actually I feel like that was a theme: insouciance.

Doree: Except that they then held the party in like the biggest party space downtown, with the exception perhaps of Cipriani Wall Street. It felt huge and empty.

Marisa: I love that you know that.

Doree: Even though there were probably 200 people there. They should have had it at, like, Housing Works.

Marisa: On the plus side, it was really easy to score an hors d'oeuvre and a champagne refill.

Doree: That is true. It was not hard at all to get to the bar.

Marisa: Thessaly and I were bodying those croquettes.

Doree: Oh, the serrano ham ones. Yeah one of the servers was trying to get you guys to take extras. There were TOO MANY hors d'oeuvres!

Marisa: I thought those prawns were awkwardly large. Like, you could not flirt and eat those.

Doree: They were.

Marisa: But then... with whom does one flirt at the LRB party? I mean, real talk.

Doree: There was that guy who just wanted to talk about the Jenny Diski essay on having crabs.

Marisa: I guess that's where the media reporters and ASME people could have come in handy?

Doree: Yes.

Marisa: You mean "pubic lice." I had to be all, "is that the same thing as crabs?" Since there were not media reporters there, I had to ask the hard questions

Doree: Let's peruse that essay.

Marisa: That guy was also wearing a mint green corduroy blazer, which was kind of a hot look for an LRB party.

Doree: "The pubic lice multiplied to a plethora and became imaginatively licensed to inhabit my entire body."

Marisa: How did they come about? Thrift store underwear? I went through a scandalous phase in high school where I bought thrift store lingerie all the time and my mother always told me I was going to get crabs. I never did, FYI.

Doree: No, she got them from a slutty boyfriend. But. Spoiler alert?

Marisa: I'm ready.

Doree: It turns out she actually has "delusory parasitosis." Meaning: most of the time she thought she had lice she was actually just crazy.

Marisa: That's a THING?

Doree: Yup. It sounds intense and horrible.

Marisa: Like hysterical blindness? She had hysterical crabs?

Doree: "People can be deluded about all manner of things, but the belief that insects have invaded the body and cannot be seen or effectively dealt with suggests a particular horror of something other – a living, deliberate other – far too close to our known selves."

Marisa: If I had hysterical crabs, I would totally write an essay about it, too. But my essay would prob be in somewhere way more lowbrow than the LRB. I mean, let's be honest. So kudos to her.

Doree: TMZ?

Doree: If we're sticking with the three letter acronyms.

Marisa: Are there any other three letter acronym publications? That might be my only choice.

Doree: Just TV stations. NBC, CBS, ABC, etc. ETC!

Marisa: GMA. I would do a first-person piece for GMA.

Doree: SNL.

Marisa: LOL.

Doree: OK so ANYWAY. I also had a conversation with someone from the New Yorker who had also received an email that morning asking if she wanted to bring any additional guests. She added 4 people to the list.

Marisa: Emo! A friend told me this morning that he had rsvp'd but had just gotten back into town and decided not to go. That isn't very revelatory. But perhaps indicative.
Like, no one was all, "must-attend."

Doree: I think it was poorly scheduled. If it had been on Monday night it would have been packed. Though they wouldn't have been able to get any of their editors over here, so it would've been a wash.

Marisa: Oh right, the volcano. I keep forgetting about the volcano.

Doree: Yeah.

Marisa: What did we think of the fashion? People looked pretty...publishing. I think I had on the sluttiest tights, so that's a win.

Doree: Those tights are a revelation.

Marisa: Paris!

Doree: Land of revelatory tights.

Marisa: Come with me to Paris and we can buy slutty tights. We can pitch an essay about the experience to the LRB!

Doree: That's a great idea.

Marisa: But it will end up running somewhere more lowbrow.

Doree: So going along with my theory that it was empty but not really (party planning 101: always get a space that's slightly too small), there were actually some interesting people there!

Marisa: I am fascinated by the beautiful woman in the sari. She is probably really important and I've spent too much time thinking about Courtney Love to know who she is: Nermeen Shaikh: "Nermeen Shaikh studied politics at Cambridge University in England and Queen's University in Canada. She has worked at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad and the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. She is on the editorial board of the journal Development (based in Rome) and has recently published The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power (Columbia UP, 2007). She lives in New York City."

Doree: Academic.

Marisa: So here's my question. Are we kind of losers for having gone to the party when there were maybe more important parties, or was it then cool to go to this party? PS I am in junior high, obvs.

Doree: I had fun. Which party would you have wanted to go to? The national magazine awards are a snooze.

Marisa: I can't even be bothered to think about the Granta party. Like, I'm bored before i even think about it.

Doree: I was told that the Granta party was even more sparsely attended. More sparsely?

Marisa: Sure.

Doree: Even less well attended? More sparsely or less well. Neither of those sounds good.

Marisa: Sparslier?

Doree: Sure. I think there was a party overdose last night. There must be a German word for that.

Marisa: It's spring in New York, there's a lot going on. I'm sorry that sounded really Candace Bushnell for a sec.

Doree: Whose April newsletter I received yesterday. She has made a "Carrie Diaries" mix! Of music that Carrie would have listened to on her walkman. German word: uberfestenmassig.

Marisa: That's the same newsletter that made us decide that I should have one and really ostentatiously drop names in all caps. 'I was at the LRB party the other night with DOREE SHAFRIR, a writer who is also one of my best friends and was wearing RACHEL COMEY boots."

Doree: I pretended that wasn't happening. You may have noticed.

Marisa: There was some blind-item worthy gossip but maybe we should keep it to ourselves. Maybe it will make people want to invite us to their parties.

Doree: I think there are a couple things we can discuss. Like: WHICH ubiquitous publishing partygoer was absent last night because of a terrible case of shingles?

Marisa: What are shingles? I realize I don't really know.

Doree: They're like adult chicken pox. It's not an STD, if that was your concern.

Marisa: I get it confused with rickets. I don't know what rickets are, either! Is that the disease you get from not enough sunlight?

Doree: Maybe? And scurvy you get from not eating enough vegetables.

Marisa: Right, pirates and stuff.

Doree: Ahoy.

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We had spent that spring and summer hanging out. I was sort of single for most of it, which is the best way to be in the summer. We saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and drove to Atlantic City afterwards; we got pulled over on our way out at 3 in the morning and my friend flirted with the police officer and didn't get a ticket. I was in a band with her boyfriend and a couple other guys. Everyone needs a girl in the band but I wasn't quite winsome enough, or musical enough. I had played piano as a kid; how hard could it be to play keyboards in an indie-rock band? It was hard. They bought me Piano for Dummies for my birthday. I wrote a song about life on the moon and quit the band. We had a studio, a massive loft space in Kensington in a former factory building that cost $1000 a month. I said maybe I'd go there to write. I went there to hang out. I had the landlord build a darkroom and then never developed any pictures. We had a party and grilled s'mores outside and afterward went to Hollertronix, the dance party that was thrown every few weeks or so in the in the basement of a place officially called the Ukrainian-American Citizens Association, which everyone just called the UACA or the Ukie Hall. There was another place, the RUBA Hall, which was officially the Russian Ukrainian Boating Association, that also had parties. No one did much boating there.

Hollertronix parties were sweaty, messy, dirty affairs. They were the best parties in Philadelphia. You went to them to get drunk and dance all night. The DJs-Diplo and Low Budget-were kings. On Halloween there was a special edition of Hollertronix and there were rumors that M.I.A., who was dating Diplo, was going to show up and perform. Diplo had met M.I.A. when she was producing her first album, Arular. Diplo had remixed the songs on Arular from his apartment in North Philadelphia and turned it into a mixtape called Piracy Funds Terrorism, whose tracks had leaked online.

There was a debate about where to go on Halloween. One of our friends was having a party, but a lot of our friends were also going to Hollertronix. I was dressed up like Punky Brewster. This was not so much of a stretch; when I was 8, everyone said I looked just like her. (She later had her breasts reduced. I did not.) My boyfriend was dressed as Superman, in a costume that in retrospect erred too much on the side of male ballet dancer. Moe and our other friend Jessica were dressed up as Grunge, or maybe The '90s.

I can't remember why, but we decided to go to the friends' party. Probably because it was closer and we wouldn't have to wait in line to get in.

Everyone said the Halloween Hollertronix was the best one ever. M.I.A. threw copies of Piracy Funds Terrorism into the crowd. It was insane; amazing; off the chain. The party we went to was boring and we left early. Even though I saw M.I.A. perform at the UACA a few months later, she had already gotten famous. It wasn't the same.

Moe moved out to live with her boyfriend, then moved back in when they broke up. Jessica and I moved to New York. I stopped going to dance parties.

Doree Shafrir is a writer living in Brooklyn.

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UPDATE: OOH! And also Richard Lawson! It's like nostalgia or something! Something GOOD!

ALSO: It should be made clear that Doree is only returning as a two-day-a-week contributor. A two-day-a-week contributor, okay? It is apparently very important that we clarify: Doree Shafrir back at Gawker as a two-day-a-week contributor. We hear those days are Thursday and Friday, but whatever days they are, it will only be two of them.

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On Hanukkah, Jews are supposed to cook food fried in oil to commemorate the eight days that the Maccabees' lamp stayed lit with very little oil, as Sarah Palin has so helpfully reminded us. The latke is the most widespread of the fried foods that Jews tend to cook, though doughnuts are also popular. (FYI, Dunkin' Donuts are not all kosher! Check with your rabbi.) Other options: fried Snickers bars, fried dough, tempura broccoli.

But we're not here to make tempura broccoli! (Though if we were, I would tell you that you can get Panko crumbs at the Red Hook Fairway on this random shelf near the olive bar. You're welcome!) We're here to make LATKES! So first, it helps if your mom, like mine, made you a cookbook a few years ago featuring all of the time-worn Shafrir family recipes, handed down lovingly through the generations. Such as my grandmother's famous flank steak recipe: Marinate one flank steak overnight/all day in half a bottle of Wishbone Italian dressing in a nonmetallic container, broil/barbecue on each side for approximately 5-10 minutes, and slice thinly against the grain. Now that's home cooking.

For latkes, you'll need the following: 4 Idaho potatoes, 1/2 small onion, 3 large eggs, 1 teaspoon salt, 2-3 tablespoons flour, and 1/4 teaspoon baking powder. This should make at least 20 smallish latkes. Now let's do some math. A 5-pound bag of potatoes (so, like, 15 potatoes probably) at FreshDirect is $2.49, so that's approximately 17 cents per potato, so that's 68 cents worth of potatoes. A two-pound bag of onions, which is approximately 7 onions, is 99 cents, so 14 cents per onion, and since you're only using half, that's 7 cents. A dozen large eggs costs $1.99, so we're looking at approximately 17 cents per egg, so that's 51 cents' worth of eggs. I'm just going to ASSUME that you have salt, flour, and baking powder around. If you don't, okay, let's add another 50 cents on there. Oh and then of course you need oil, which my mom doesn't have in her list of ingredients. I would not use peanut oil because it gets too hot. I like vegetable oil. You can also use canola oil. Don't use olive oil, even though I suppose that's the most technically historically accurate thing to use, because then your latkes will taste gross. So a 24-ounce bottle of Wesson vegetable oil is $3.99, and you'll probably use-let's be generous here-maybe half the bottle (no one said these were healthy!), so we're talking like 2 bucks worth of oil. That is, if you don't already have oil around, which you might.

So your 20 latkes will cost $3.76 if you don't have oil or flour or baking powder or salt. That's the MAXIMUM they will cost. That's 19 cents a latke.

And you're still going to order them from Russ & Daughters? You must not be Jewish.

(Ba-dum-dum!)

So now, the fun part! Well, actually, this part kind of sucks, because I am a purist and I believe that you should grate the potatoes and onions by hand. This is by no means required. Some people like to use the shredding blade for their food processor. I personally believe that latkes require some sweat equity, and so I hand-grate. You'll want a box grater. Grate the potatoes and squeeze out the water. This is very important, or your latkes will be too soggy. If you have cheesecloth for this step, use it. Then grate the onions. You can mix them together now.

You should be wearing an apron, by the way. Shit's about to get messy.

Separate the eggs. Put the whites into a large mixing bowl and beat them until they're stiff. I use a hand mixer. If you use a whisk you'll be there for days. Once you've done that, you can start heating the oil. Not too much oil-you're not deep-frying-but not, like, that little soupçon of oil that you sprinkle onto the pan when you're sauteing a piece of fish. You know? You want those latkes nice and crispy.

So the oil is heating. You want that oil HOT. Now, mix together the potatoes, onion, and egg yolks. Then you fold in the egg whites and add the salt, flour, and baking powder. It WILL look gloopy. Don't be scared! However, if the mixture is really soupy you can add a LITTLE bit more flour, but not too much. You know how crabcakes sometimes have way too much filler and not enough crab? Same idea.

Once your oil is hot hot hot, drop the mixture by tablespoons into the hot oil.

OMG I can't believe I almost forgot something really important-you want to use a CAST-IRON pan. If you use a nonstick pan I will fucking kill you. Cast-iron is the only way to go. I mean, you really shouldn't be using nonstick pans anyway, because they give you cancer, but here, especially, you want to be using a cast-iron pan. Very, very important.

Okay. Whew. So you're dropping the mixture into the pan (the CAST-IRON one) and you want to be really careful about not crowding the pan. Just fry a few at a time. We're not in a rush here! It's Hanukkah. If people are getting antsy, throw a dreidel at them and tell them to shut the fuck up. Or just give them another glass of wine-I guess that would be the quote-unquote "nice" thing to do.

Remember how I said drop the mixture by tablespoons? You're not making monstrous oversized American IHOP-style pancakes here. These are supposed to be small. You are supposed to eat several of them, and they are more delicious if they are small.

Cook them for a minute or so on each side. You'll know when they're done. While they're cooking you should also set up a plate with a couple paper towels on it and have some extra paper towels hanging around, to drain them. When they're done, put them on the plate and pat them lightly with the paper towels. Call over your impatient guests and serve them. They can help themselves to applesauce and sour cream from the fridge.

Happy Hanukkah!

Previous recipes from The Awl Cookbook

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