Town & Country August 2017

1973 S A F E S P A C E S As today’s parents agonize over their children’s SAT scores, extracurricular activities, and overall enrichedness, it is tempting to look back at simpler times, when sending your offspring to a top college was… Oh, wait. In 1973, a few pages after an article subtitled “How to Get Your Son and Daughter into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton,” T&C ran a list of alternatives for those “who may not be attractive to—or attracted by—an Ivy League college.” All 50, we noted, “have selective admissions.” In other words, it has always been hard. Really hard.…

PEOPLE, PLACES, AND PARTIES As you sit in the bleachers, smelling burgers on the grill, watching fathers play catch with their kids, tasting the salty ocean air, and hearing the crack of the wooden bat, it’s hard not to feel that this is Americana in its purest form. You pinch yourself to make sure you’re not in a Norman Rockwell painting. You take out your phone to make sure you’re still in the 21st century. Every June hundreds of baseball players, scores of scouts, and thousands of fans descend upon 10 recreational and high school baseball fields on Cape Cod for 44 games (plus playoffs) over two months. The Cape Cod Baseball League (CAPECODBASEBALL.ORG) is the most prestigious amateur league in the country, attracting some of the best college players.…

AUGUST ARTS & CULTURE August 5 “Matisse in the Studio” His treasured objects from all over at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Through August 18 Jeff Koons Giant ballerinas and a balloon rabbit at Gagosian Beverly Hills. Through August 20 Robert Frank The Art Institute of Chicago pays homage to the photographer, who had his first solo exhibition there in 1961. August 27–September 4 Burning Man Radical self-expression with a five-figure price tag in the Nevada desert. August 14–20 Monterey Car Week Car collector paradise, on California’s picturesque central coast. Now playing The Beguiled Sofia Coppola won Best Director at Cannes for her Civil War tale, with Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman July 28 The Last Tycoon An Amazon series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel, set in 1930s…

Meg Carrigan and Nick Barnicle met at a Georgetown University baseball alumni dinner in 2014. He had been a catcher for the team, as had Meg’s father decades before; she was accompanying her dad that night. Their first date came a few days later, back in New York, where she’s a creative producer at Tory Burch and he’s a film producer. He proposed at her family’s farm in Virginia two summers later. For their October 2016 wedding the couple went back to where it began. A small ceremony for 15 family members at Georgetown’s Copley Crypt Chapel preceded lunch at DC’s power canteen Café Milano. The next day 120 guests, among them former Secretary of State John Kerry, Timothy Shriver, and Tom Brokaw (friends of the groom’s father, Morning Joe…

This fall Virginia Commonwealth University will open its Institute of Contemporary Art at one of Richmond’s busiest intersections. Designed by architect Steven Holl—who is also behind Princeton’s new Lewis Center for the Arts and the Kennedy Center’s expansion—the $41 million, 41,000-square-foot space has a perch that will make it a hinge between VCU and the rest of Richmond. “It’s a real fulcrum, where people can engage with the most pressing issues of our time through the eyes of contemporary artists,” says Stephanie Smith, the ICA’s chief curator. In recent years college museums have become a calling card for schools looking to boost their art world cachet, satisfy deep-pocketed alumni, and impress prospective students. Among the academies that have invested in their galleries are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Savannah College of Art and…

If I hear one more person say her project is “a love letter to New York,” I’ll vomit. No one could worship my city more than I do, so, as with a real marriage, I get to poke a little fun at it. My husband always halfjokes that if he ever made me choose between the suburbs and marriage or Manhattan and divorce, I’d pick the latter. Still, when you inhabit a particular milieu for 42 years you see both the magic and the reality, the romantic montage of Manhattan moments but also the Real Housewives. Even though I’m a citizen of the whole city, my show, Odd Mom Out (coming back for its third season on Bravo this summer), holds a satirical mirror to one specific treelined neighborhood: the…