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Lois Whitman-Hess
Miami Life Editor
The Three Tomatoes, #16

https://www.thethreetomatoes.com/miami-life-beautiful-people-secret-garden-gablestage-government-cut

Ever hear of Governor’s Cut? Well Eliot Hess captured it in this photo of the Miami skyline. Want to hang with the beautiful people? Check out Joia Beach Club, one of the new hotspots that makes you feel like you entered the world of the rich and famous. If you ever wished you had a secret garden, I have just the place for you. We bought tickets to see the limited run of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” at GableStage, the theater at the Biltmore Hotel. I am super excited to see it. 

Where The Beautiful People Hangout  

If you are in the mood to completely change your environment on Sundays when you are off from your daily responsibilities, I would like to suggest the Joia Beach Club. So many of my friends say it’s where Miami meets St. Tropez. The Sunday brunch is an extravagant daytime experience unlike any other in Miami. It’s fun to see JLo, The Kardashian’s, the Williams sisters, Madonna, Cher, Heidi Klum, Leonardo DiCaprio, sitting at a nearby table. 

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Your New Secret Garden

My friends introduced me to Glass & Vine at the beginning of the pandemic and it quickly became my go to place to safely socialize and dine. The big attraction is that it’s totally casual and relaxed. The tables are spread out amongst the trees and bushes, so the entire place definitely looks more like a park than a restaurant. 

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“The Year of Magical Thinking” at GableStage’s 

I am super excited to see Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” at GableStage, the theater at the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables. The play is only being performed through June 26. I understand from the reviews, that the performance with actress Sara Morsey as Didion, is a one-of-a-kind experience. 

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What Is Government Cut? 

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Every time someone looks out my window, they ask me about the body of water below. “What is that?” I say, “Government Cut.” They say, “Government what?” It’s really an easy explanation and I decided to detail it now because Eliot took the most magnificent photos of the Miami skyline which also includes Government Cut.

Government Cut is a manmade shipping channel between Miami Beach and Fisher Island, which allows better access to the Port of Miami in Miami, Florida. Before the cut was established, a single peninsula of dry land stretched from what is now Miami Beach to what is now Fisher Island, and boats destined for the port at the mouth of the Miami River had to pass around Cape Florida, to the south of Key Biscayne.

Opened in 1905, the cut across the peninsula that is now Miami Beach was authorized by the U.S. government (hence the name), in order to provide a direct route from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the seaport on Biscayne Bay to the west, without having to detoursouthward. The cut across the mangroves and beach at the southern end of the peninsula created Fisher Island, which except for the extreme northeast corner, is part of unincorporated Miami-Dade County, Florida. The now-famous South Beach is to the north of the cut.

BY RADHIKA SETH

June 8, 2022

When Madonna first announced that she would be helming a big-screen adaptation of her life story, the news prompted countless questions. What period of her illustrious, four-decade-long career would the film focus on? Would it feature new music? And, most importantly, who could possibly play the pioneering Queen of Pop navigating her formative years? Now, according to Variety, we finally have an answer to the latter: Julia Garner.

On June 7, the publication reported that the actor—who starred in four seasons of Ozark, earned rave reviews with The Assistant, and gave a barnstorming performance as the beguiling titular scammer in Inventing Anna—had been offered the highly coveted part. This comes after a months-long search during which a host of established names, fresh faces, and musicians were reportedly considered. Per The Hollywood Reporter, these included Little Women’s Florence Pugh, Euphoria’s Alexa Demie, and Australian indie darling Odessa Young, as well as singers Bebe Rexha and Sky Ferreira. The auditions that some advanced to were described as “grueling” by sources with knowledge of the project, who added that they involved singing, acting and intense, sometimes 11-hours-long sessions with Madonna and her choreographer.

Supporting roles have yet to be cast, though there’s a strong chance that Garner won’t be the only familiar face in the film. Back in January, Madonna sent the internet into a tailspin when she posted a photo of herself lounging on a sofa with the woman of the hour, Julia Fox, with the caption, “Went to dinner with Julia to talk about my movie.” Entertainment Weekly then reported that the bombshell was in talks to join the cast as Madonna’s best friend, the actor Debi Mazar.

The production timeline is being kept under wraps and little is known about the current iteration of the script, penned by Madonna and playwright Erin Cressida Wilson, but The Hollywood Reporter’s sources stated that it culminates with the icon’s 1990 Blond Ambitionworld tour, which had a seismic impact on music, fashion, and pop culture. 

Speaking about the film on The Tonight Show in October 2021, Madonna said that she wanted to take the reins as both a writer and director because previous attempts to dramatize her rise had been so misguided. “The reason I’m doing it is because a bunch of people have tried to write movies about me, but they’re always men,” she said. “I read that Universal was doing a script… they wanted my blessing, and I read it. It was the most hideous, superficial crap I’ve ever read. This [has] happened a couple of times. So, finally, I just threw down the gauntlet.”

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OPINION

Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?

I’m curious about your opinion—-LWH

By Yuval Levin

Mr. Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a contributing Opinion writer.

America’s top political leaders are remarkably old. Our president will turn 80 this year. His predecessor, who is contemplating running again, is about to turn 76. The speaker of the House is 82. The Republican leader in the Senate is 80, and his Democratic counterpart is a comparatively sprightly 71.

This is very unusual. And it’s not because this cohort has just gotten its turn at the wheel, but because it has held power for an exceptionally long time. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, whose presidencies spanned more than a quarter-century, were all born roughly within two months of one another in the summer of 1946. Nancy Pelosi has been the Democratic leader in the House for almost 20 years. Mitch McConnell has led Senate Republicans for about 15 years. Our politics has been largely in the hands of people born in the 1940s or early ’50s for a generation.

We should wish them all many more healthy years and be grateful for their long service. But we should also recognize the costs of their grip not only on American self-government but even on the country’s self-conception.

It’s often said that Americans now lack a unifying narrative. But maybe we actually have such a narrative, only it’s organized around the life arc of the older baby boomers, and it just isn’t serving us well anymore.

Consider what the country’s modern history looks like from the vantage point of an American born near the beginning of the postwar baby boom. Say you were born the same year as Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush and Mr. Trump, in 1946. Your earliest memories begin around 1950, and you recall the ’50s through the eyes of a child as a simple time of stability and wholesome values. You were a teenager in the early ’60s, and view that time through a lens of youthful idealism, rebellion and growing cultural self-confidence.

By the late 1960s and into the ’70s, as a 20-something entering the adult world, you found that confidence shaken. Idealism gave way to some cynicism about the potential for change, everything felt unsettled and the future seemed ominous and ambiguous. But by the 1980s, when you were in your 30s and early 40s, things had started settling down. Your work had some direction, you were building a family and concerns about mortgage payments largely replaced an ambition to transform the world.

By the 1990s, in your 40s and early 50s, you were comfortable and confident. It was finally your generation’s chance to take charge, and it looked to be working out.

As the 21st century dawned, you were still near the peak of your powers and earnings, but gradually peering over the hill toward old age. You soon found the 2000s filled with unexpected dangers and unfamiliar forces. The world was becoming less and less your own.

You reached retirement age in the 2010s amid growing uncertainty and instability. The culture was increasingly bewildering, and the economy seemed awfully insecure. The extraordinary blend of circumstances that defined the world of your youth seemed likely to be denied to your grandchildren. By now, it all feels that it’s spinning out of control. Is the chaotic, transformed country around you still the glittering land of your youth?

This portrait of changing attitudes is, of course, stylized for effect. But it offers the broad contours of how people often look at their world in different stages of life, yet also of how many Americans (and, crucially, not just the boomers) tend to understand our country’s postwar evolution. We see our history, and so ourselves, through the eyes of Americans now reaching their 80s.

As history, this narrative leaves a lot to be desired. But as a kind of pocket sociology of our time, it is utterly dominant. Almost every story we now tell ourselves about our country fits into some portion of the early-boomer life arc. And our politics is implicitly directed toward recapturing some part of the magic of the mid-20th-century America of boomer youth.

That moment — when many Americans trusted their leaders and went to church, when idealistic protests seemed to drive significant social change, when you didn’t need a college degree to get a union factory job that would let you support a family in the suburbs on one income — exerts an inexorable pull on our political imagination now. The parties blame each other for how far America has fallen from that standard, and politicians (old and young, left and right) implicitly promise a return to some facet of it.

That time was not imaginary. But it was not so simple either, particularly for people at the margins of the powerful mainstream consensus of the age. And it was a singular period made possible by an unrepeatable set of circumstances in the wake of the Second World War. We do ourselves no favors when we treat it as the American norm, when we ignore its costs and challenges, or when we cling to its glamour by keeping the people who lived that story in power as they age.

Our model of social change is still rooted in midcentury clichés. Younger Americans imagine that starting a family and owning a home was much easier for previous generations than it really was. They buy the broad outlines of the boomers’ nostalgia and take it to mean they are inheriting a desiccated society.

Confronting injustice, they almost unthinkingly re-enact the outward forms and symbols of college protests of the 1960s, generally to no effect. Our implicit definition of social cohesion takes for granted that midcentury moment, when America had not only been through a long stretch of intense mobilization in war and depression but was also less culturally diverse than at pretty much any time before or since.

Above all, though, our boomer sense of ourselves keeps us from orienting our society toward the future, and contributes to a broadly shared sense of despair about our country that is neither justified nor constructive. Our politics should prioritize planning for greater national strength in the medium term, but we can hardly expect quarreling octogenarians to have that future clearly in mind.

And yet, the solution is not youth politics either. In a new book on leadership, the former presidential adviser David Gergen is admirably frank in acknowledging that those born in the 1940s, like himself, should make room for new leaders. But he looks for them among the youngest Americans. “Millions of baby boomers and alumni of the Silent Generation are starting to leave the stage, to be replaced by millennials and Gen Zers,” he writes.

Maybe I take this personally, having just turned 45, but Mr. Gergen blithely skips over Americans born in the 1960s and ’70s. Maybe he can’t quite fathom middle-aged leadership. Yet middle-aged leadership may be exactly what we now require.

Many American institutions seem locked in battles between well-meaning but increasingly uncomprehending leaders in their 70s and a rising generation, in their 20s and early 30s, bent on culture war and politicization and seemingly unconcerned with institutional responsibilities. Our politics has the same problem — simultaneously overflowing with the vices of the young and the old, and so often falling into debates between people who behave as though the world will end tomorrow and those who think it started yesterday. The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable.

There are some politicians of that middle generation — some members of Congress and governors, even our vice president. Yet they have not broken through as defining cultural figures and political forces. They have not made this moment their own, or found a way to loosen the grip of the postwar generation on the nation’s political imagination.

A middle-aged mentality traditionally has its own vices. It can lack urgency, and at its worst it can be maddeningly immune to both hope and fear, which are essential spurs to action. But if our lot is always to choose among vices, wouldn’t the temperate sins of midlife serve us well just now?

Generational analyses are unavoidably sweeping and crude, and no one is simply a product of a birth cohort. But in our frenzied era, it’s worth looking for potential sources of stability and considering not only what we have too much of in America and should want to demolish and be rid of but also what we do not have enough of and should want to build up.

We plainly lack grounded, levelheaded, future-oriented leaders. And like it or not, that means we need a more middle-aged politics and culture.

Yuval Levin, a contributing Opinion writer, is the editor of National Affairs and the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”

Jerry’s Ink

Jerry Della Femina posts this essay on Facebook every year. He keeps posting it because he keeps finding offenders.

Jerry Della Femina (born 1936) is an American advertising executive and restaurateur. Starting from a poor Italian background in Brooklyn, he eventually became chairman of Della Femina Travisano & Partners, an agency which he founded with Ron Travisano in the 1960s. Over the next two decades they grew the company into a major advertising house that was billing $250 million per year and had 300 employees and offices in both New York and Los Angeles. Della Femina is known for his larger-than-life personality and colorful language, and was referred to as a “‘Madman’ of Madison Avenue”. In 1970, he wrote a book about the advertising industry, humorously titled, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War. The book became a best-seller, described by The Guardian as “one of the defining books about advertising”, and eventually inspired the television series Mad Men.

By Jerry Della Femina

I publish this column every year as a public service to make sure your friends and relatives will think twice before they send you an invitation that will screw you out of a precious summer weekend.

I ask this question every year.

Why do they do it? Why do our friends and relatives destroy the summer for us? Why can’t they get married in February? Why do they choose the middle of summer to have birthdays, anniversaries, Bar Mitzvahs, family, college, high school and even nursery school reunions.

That’s not all. Frankly, some of them are thoughtless enough to die in June, July and August, and there goes another summer weekend.

I promise that if it’s possible, when it’s time for me to go, I will go on life support until some rainy Friday morning in January so that my mourners can bury me early in the morning and still enjoy a three-day weekend. That’s the kind of generous guy I am.

Now I know you’re wondering what I’m ranting about, since you’re on top of the world because it looks like another endless summer ahead. Let’s just see how endless it really is.

Memorial Day has come and gone.

The 4th of July is only 34 days away. Then you blink and it’s Labor Day. That’s why every day of summer is so precious to us.

If you work Monday to Friday like me, that leaves you with around 14 summer Saturdays and Sundays, plus three (make that two) long holiday weekends.

So from the minute you’re reading this, summer weekends are a total of about 30 days.

Now you know that at least 9 or 10 of these days will be cold, rainy days where no matter how hard you try to avoid it you’ll end up arguing with your spouse.

All a man has to say is, “No, I don’t think it’s romantic to freeze my behind off walking in the rain on the beach. Why don’t we stay in bed and fool around?” and that’s when the pouting starts.

So write off 10 miserable days to weather and you’re left with around 20 days.

Sound like a lot?

I bet everyone reading this already has one lost weekend coming up when your Aunt Matilda is celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary and she and your Uncle Benny would be broken-hearted if you don’t show up on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to their house in Brooklyn or the Bronx or Westchester or wherever the hell they live.

So, now you’re down to 19 days. If you’re young enough to have children, that means you’re stuck with a trip to some summer camp with an Indian…er…er…Native American name in Maine or Massachusetts, in the middle of what always turns out to be the sunniest, most beautiful weather weekend of the summer.

This is where you are sentenced to spend the weekend admiring neatly made bunk beds and ceramic ashtrays (which in these politically correct days are called candy dishes). Show me a camp that is wise enough to schedule parents’ visiting days on a Monday and Tuesday and I will show you a camp that deserves the exorbitant amount of money they get to guard your kids for the summer. An amount of money, I might add, that is more than it took, a few short years ago, to cover the tuition that would get a child through four years of an Ivy League college.

If your children are grown it’s even worse. They have children and all their children are having birthday parties in town in July, where you will find yourself overcome by heat while you’re surrounded by 20 sticky five-year-olds playing musical chairs.

What frosts me is the weather. Did you ever notice that every one of the weekends you have to go to a family event is beautiful? The sun is shining. The sky is blue. And you are stuck in some disgusting catering hall, or, worse, drinking warm white wine out of a plastic cup in some relative’s backyard in White Plains.

Which brings me to summer weddings in New York City. They must be banned.

There are some facts that people who drag their friends away from the beach for their wedding must be made aware of. Jerry Seinfeld, an East Hampton resident, had a message for all the newly engaged couples: “Nobody wants to go to your wedding! We are not excited like you are.” Mr. Seinfeld is so so right. The only people who must attend a summer wedding are the bride and groom, their respective parents, the best man and the maid of honor and maybe a priest or a rabbi. All the other guests are hostages who may be smiling but inside they are seething because they have had one of their precious summer weekends screwed up.

I remind every dewy-eyed couple in my family that in the summer it’s bad luck to get married any place west of Westhampton. I remind them of the famous Della Femina curse, which is still going strong. I have, in my life, attended four weddings that took place on a summer holiday weekend (three Memorial Day, one Labor Day) and must report, in all honesty, only one of these couples is still married.

Pass the word – the marriages of people who screw up my holiday weekends are doomed.

Who Zippers Your Dress?

Everyone who is over 50 and is widowed should listen to this. We welcome your reactions. Susan Warner, a widow herself, will answer you. Send comments to loisw@hwhpr.com.

In this podcast ….

Silver Lining. Very few people who are widowed would ever admit that they can experience a newfound independence in their solo life. Susan Warner talks about this repressed emotion because everyone needs to understand it’s quite normal to suddenly realize, “You answer to no one and you may be able to enjoy it. There is nothing to feel guilty about. This is all part of the healing process.”

Susan quickly points out that she would do anything to bring back her husband and live the life she had before, but she knows that’s not going to happen. So now, she leads a life on her own terms. “I have loved and I have lost. I will do what I want, when I want, with whom I want.”

This episode is profound for both widowed and divorced people of any age. Susan leads you through a myriad of emotions that have a silver lining for those who want an independent, fuller, and self-reliant next chapter.

Listen to Susan’s podcast here – https://susanswarner.com/podcast/episode-6-who-zippers-your-dress/

And on popular podcast sites:

Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/40b861c5-ffe5-4154-9100-546ee878dd74

Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/susan-is-suddenly-single/id1614156310

Google Podcasts – https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9zdXNhbnN3YXJuZXIuY29tL2ZlZWQvcG9kY2FzdA

PocketCasts – https://pca.st/pan920jg

Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/1E9r3nWgusLU2gTMhRMtky

Audible – https://www.audible.com/pd/B09VFZZLHX

Hyperallergic is a leading voice in contemporary perspectives on art, culture, and more. The online publication was founded by the husband-and-husband team, Veken Gueyikian and Hrag Vartanian, in 2009 as a forum for playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art in society. With over one million visitors monthly, Hyperallergic combines round-the-clock art world news coverage with insightful commentary.

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Missing Picasso Resurfaces at Home of Former Philippines First Lady

Imelda Marcos and her husband were accused of plundering billions of dollars from the country.

by Elaine Velue May 22, 2022 Print

In photos of Bongbong Marcos, Jr.’s visit to Imelda Marcos last week, Picasso’s “Woman Reclining VI” can be seen hanging above the sofa on the left. (screenshot of a news broadcast from TV Patrol)

After winning the presidential election in the Philippines last week, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. made a publicized visit to the home of his mother, Imelda Marcos. In the background of their meeting, a supposedly seized Pablo Picasso painting made a surprise appearance. 

The 92-year-old ex-first lady of the Philippines is perhaps best known for her shoes, nearly 3,000 pairs of them, which were broadcast to the world when civilians stormed the presidential palace in 1986 and ousted her family from power. Her late husband, Ferdinand Marcos, Sr., had reigned as dictator since 1965, during which time he eliminated free speech, abolished congress, and enacted martial law for half his term. Marcos arbitrarily jailed tens of thousands of people and killed, tortured, and “forcibly disappeared” thousands more. The family fled to Hawaii and returned to the Philippines in 1991.

The family also stole an estimated $10 billionfrom the Filipino people, which they used to fund a famously opulent lifestyle — dozens of mansions, expensive cars, yachts, planes, helicopters, jewelry (worth at least $21 million), and of course Imelda’s designer shoe collection. As the country sank into recession, the family also bought millions of dollars worth of art, including Picasso’s “Reclining Woman VI.” The painting was supposed to have been seized in 2014.

The family has hidden its money, and art, so well that even after decades of trying, getting it back has proved nearly impossible. In 2018, Imelda Marcos was convicted of corruptionand sentenced to prison, but she never served her sentence, and only around $4 billion of the family’s fortune has been recovered.

In 2013, Imelda’s former assistant tried to sell four Impressionist paintings and was convicted of criminal tax fraud and conspiracy in New York. A year later, Filipino authorities seized 15 paintings from the Marcoses’ home in San Juan, including Picasso’s painting. 

And then in 2019, the ex-first lady was caught on film with the painting in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Kingmaker, but the sighting didn’t make much of a stir.

It is unknown whether the Picasso turned over in 2014 was a fake, or whether the one currently on display is. (Imelda has been known to acquire fake paintings.)

“Personally I know that what we seized was a fake,” the former head of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the body that conducted the 2014 raid, Andres Bautista told Filipino news outlet Rappler last week.

The Marcos family returned to the Philippines in 1991, and Imelda was elected into the House of Representatives in the late 1990s. As the memory of her late husband’s dictatorship waned, she began to once again flaunt her wealth — saying things like “there is more money the government is not yet aware of” and “we own practically everything in the Philippines.” The brazen display of the Picasso suggests that she’s doing it again, now with the confidence of her family’s return to presidential power.

President-elect Bongbong Marcos does not acknowledge his father’s human rights abuses. In his campaign, he spread misinformation on social media to contort his family’s history and fuel nostalgia for the dictatorial regime. Sara Duterte was voted in as his Vice President. She is the daughter of outgoing president Rodrigo Duterte, who although popular, has repeatedly violated human rights, and his “war on drugs” has killed tens of thousands of Filipinos.

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“Brazen” Couple Tries to Walk Out of Manhattan Gallery With a Basquiat

The suspects attempted to take a Basquiat artwork valued at $45,000 from Taglialatella Galleries but instead made off with a half-empty bottle of whiskey.

by Valentina Di LisciaMay 26, 2022Print

The suspects in the theft captured walking down a street near the gallery (image courtesy NYPD)

A couple visited a New York gallery and casually attempted to walk out with an original artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

On Saturday, May 14, a man and a woman entered Taglialatella Galleries in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and proceeded to take a Basquiat screenprint off the wall. They were intercepted by a gallery worker on their way out.

“It was pretty brazen. We’ve had stuff stolen from the gallery before but nothing quite this obvious,” Taglialatella Galleries owner Brian Swarts told Hyperallergic. “Luckily my staff is quite attentive and courageous and one of the brave young women who work here literally pulled the piece from the guy’s hand.”Basquiat’s “Dog Leg Study” (1982/2019) in the gallery office (photo courtesy Taglialatella Galleries)

Measuring about three and a half feet wide framed, “Dog Leg Study” (1982/2019) was hanging in Swarts’s office, which also functions as a private viewing room for clients. Security camera footage showed the unidentified thieves making their way past the gallery’s public exhibition space and into the empty office, where they appeared to assess the artwork’s value by taking a photo and looking up details on their phone. 

They then lifted the piece off the wall and walked toward the gallery exit, also taking with them “about a third of a bottle of Maker’s Mark,” Swarts said. 

“Dog Leg Study” is valued at $45,000. In a news release, NYPD described the couple as having “an unknown European accent” and released surveillance footage showing the pair holding hands and walking down a street near the gallery. 

A spokesperson for the New York City Police Department (NYPD) told Hyperallergic that there have been no arrests and the investigation remains ongoing. 

It wasn’t the first time the gallery grappled with a robbery attempt. Last year, someone tried to purloin a Kaws figurine that was on display. “That’s typically what people try to steal, small sculptures or pieces they can put in a hoodie or a backpack,” Swarts continued. “But never a work that was framed like that.”

At the end of the day, though, Swarts said, “They made it out with a little bit of whiskey but nothing else. All is well.”

Thank you Bruce Mishkin for sharing your wisdom

We use it everyday— but do we really know it? Google its part of life but so much of it remains a mystery. Lying on the Beach’s Lois Whitman-Hess and Steve Greenberg go behind the Google curtain with Google expert and digital marketing expert Bruce Mishkin. You’ll never see Google the same way ever again.

L.A. Postcard

By the way Hannah Einbinder, Jean Smart’s, assistant comedy writer in the show, is the daughter of actress Laraine Newman—LWH

Paul W. Downs, one of the series’ creators, on what went into figuring out Jean Smart’s Deborah, the show’s hard-as-nails standup legend.

By Naomi Fry

May 23, 2022

Paul W. Downs, the writer, director, and actor, just had his first baby. “I have seven thousand pictures of him on my phone,” he said the other day, mid-browse, at T. L. Gurley Antiques, a shop in Pasadena. Scrolling fondly through shots of a round-cheeked infant, he said, “We’re really excited for when his eyes are open more, and he’s not either nursing or milk-drunk.”

Downs, at thirty-nine years old, is slight and dark-haired, with a face whose chiselled handsomeness recalls that of a nineteen-eighties soap star. He was wearing an open denim shirt over a white T-shirt. He and his wife, Lucia Aniello, are new partners in parenthood, but as writers they’ve been working together—Comedy Central’s “Broad City,” the Scarlett Johansson movie “Rough Night”—for a decade and a half. With the writer Jen Statsky, a friend, they co-created “Hacks,” which premièred last year and is now in its second season, streaming on HBO Max.

The series is a darkly comic exploration of the tumultuous relationship between Deborah (Jean Smart, in a star turn), a hard-as-nails standup legend, and Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a bratty young comedy writer. Downs plays Jimmy, a craven talent manager who brokers the collaboration between the two women. “Making a show is kind of like having a kid with someone,” Downs said. “This is going to sound bad, but it’s like the baby is our second child. When parents have a second kid, they’re almost . . . chiller?” He looked hopeful.

T. L. Gurley was crowded with curiosities, and Downs considered the wares: a large wooden squirrel, a sculpture of a Buddha strung with turquoise beads. The store had gained some attention after it was featured on “Hacks,” in a scene in which Ava goes on a wild-goose chase to find an ornate pepper shaker for Deborah, to match a saltshaker she already owns. “We knew we wanted Deborah to be a person who is a collector, who uses objects to tell herself, ‘I’m O.K.,’ ” Downs said. “Finding a pair for the shaker was symbolic, too, of her finding a creative love affair with this girl, which she hadn’t had in a long time.” He turned toward a suite of Staffordshire porcelain dogs. “This is a good face,” he said, of one brown-eared specimen. He and Aniello are regulars at the store. “We got a pair of consoles that were in Bud Abbott from Abbott and Costello’s house.”

Downs grew up in rural New Jersey. “My grandmother, even though she’s Italian, became a little obsessed with Americana, and ended up buying and selling antiques,” he said. “Then my parents had a stall in an antique mall.” His love of the past extended to comedy: “Even as a very young kid, I never watched cartoons. Instead, I watched Nick at Nite—Mary Tyler Moore, ‘I Love Lucy.’ ” After college, at Duke, he moved to New York, where he dabbled in standup, did improv, and began making comedy videos with Aniello. “We were friends for the first couple of years we knew each other,” he said. “And then love bloomed.”

In the years that followed, he, Aniello, and Statsky all worked on successful TV shows, but they wanted to make their own series. On a trip to Maine in 2016, they began kicking around an idea for a show focussed on an older female comedian. “We were talking about Phyllis Diller and, of course, Joan Rivers and Paula Poundstone, and how people our age often don’t appreciate their contributions to comedy—comedy is a thing that evolves, and someone can seem hacky even though earlier they were wildly influential.” He went on, “After that trip, I sent an e-mail to myself and Jen and Lucia with the subject ‘Show idea: young writer has a nightmare boss in older comedian but slowly gains respect for that person.’ ”

Tim Gurley, the shop’s gregarious owner, approached. “It was so Warholian,” he told Downs, of having his store in the show. “Five minutes of fame, fifteen . . . People I haven’t seen in years, especially from New York, reaching out.” He held up a brutalist bronze wind chime. “Isn’t it cool? It was designed by this guy Paolo Soleri, an architect, in the seventies. He studied with Frank Lloyd Wright!”

“You sold the landscape that was there,” Downs said, pointing at a wall.

“Yes. It was expensive,” Gurley said. “I’ll show you some stuff when you really get successful.” He lowered his voice in a conspiratorial, Hollywood-adjacent manner. “You signed for a three-show deal?”

“We’re concentrating on Season 2 of ‘Hacks,’ ” Downs said. He looked around. “If I had a store like this, I’d be, like, ‘I want to keep that.’ ”

“You have to know how to edit,” Gurley said.

“I have a good editor in Lucia,” Downs said. “She’s always, like, ‘Where will this go?’ ” He pointed at some Moroccan bowls. “How much are these?” ♦

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