Politics
At the Algonquin, a Reading Pays Homage to the Famous Round Table
At the hotel where literary celebrities gathered decades ago, tarot cards featuring Broadway stars will be unveiled.
Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about a tarot reading that has to do with the famous Algonquin Round Table. We’ll also get details on a defamation lawsuit filed by the Central Park Five against Donald Trump.
Credit…Al Hirschfeld Foundation
“The first thing I do in the morning,” goes a line often attributed to Dorothy Parker, the quick-as-a-quip mainstay of the illustrious Algonquin Round Table, “is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
Imagine the zingers she would come up with now.
This afternoon, a tarot card reader will do a reading of the famous group — literary-world heavyweights from the 1920s like Parker; Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker; the playwright George Kaufman; and the novelist Edna Ferber, who called the round table group “the poison squad.” Everybody who was anybody in the 1920s and ’30s thought their conversation was unforgettably droll.
The reading, at the Algonquin Hotel, the very place in Midtown where the group assembled, is just another a stunt in a city jammed with carefully staged attention-grabbers. Where else would television producers wrap a 270-foot-long inflatable dragon around a skyscraper’s mast? Where else would someone spend 63 hours 42 minutes 15 seconds encased in a block of ice, as the magician David Blaine did in 2000? Somehow New York wouldn’t be the same old silly town without such events.
So, about the reading. It will feature a tarot deck with drawings by Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist who captured theater people and their performances in stylized images for much of the 20th century. He died in 2003 at age 99.
