Sublime

Nineteen twenty-three was one of Broadway’s brightest years. John Barrymore played Hamlet just a few blocks away from where his sister Ethel was appearing in Romeo and Juliet. Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author also opened. Most critics cited Galsworthy’s Loyalties as the best play of the season.

In 2020, Avital Balwit had won a Rhodes Scholarship and turned it down, first to run Carrick Flynn’s congressional campaign and then to give away FTX’s money. Leopold Aschenbrenner, who had entered Columbia University at the age of fifteen and graduated four years later as class valedictorian, had just declined a spot at Yale Law School to work for

Mystery, he also had a reputation for befriending younger students just so they’d take him to parties. I invited Ross to his first event the following week. Monica, a struggling but well-connected actress I’d sarged, had invited me to her birthday party at Belly, a tapas bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. I thought it would be a good scene full of beau