It was a Palladino night, indeed. “If I get into a fight, I’ll let you know,” Amy Sherman-Palladino told me on Tuesday evening, giggling beside her longtime creative partner and husband, Daniel Palladino, when I asked them to keep me posted on any drama that might unfold. Together, they eyed the crowd, who sipped pink cocktails and white wine on the rooftop of Fouquet’s, a hotel in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, for Air Mail and Amazon’s celebration of Étoile, the latest series written, produced, and directed by the Palladinos.
It wasn’t just the couple’s quick-fire repartee—familiar to anyone who’s watched Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—that made this a Palladino night. Nor was it Sherman-Palladino’s eccentric style, though that was on display in the form of fluffy black cat ears poking out of her hair. More than anything, what made it a Palladino night were the guests, an idiosyncratic mix only this couple could conjure: part Hollywood, part literati; part uptown, part downtown; old guard as well as new.
In one quiet corner sat the actors Tovah Feldshuh, Jackie Hoffman, and Carol Kane. The models Coco Mitchell and Vanessa Moody mingled with the filmmaker Jonah Feingold, the fashion designer Rachel Antonoff, the painter Will Cotton, and the Some Kind of Wonderful actor Eric Stoltz. From AIR MAIL, contributors Amy Fine Collins and Daphne Merkin chatted with Deputy Editor Chris Garrett and Co-Editor Alessandra Stanley, who hosted a talk with the Palladinos following a screening of Étoile’s first episode.
The series—starring Gilmore Girls’ Yanic Truesdale, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Luke Kirby, and the French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, daughter of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg—follows two world-class ballet companies, one in New York and the other in Paris, that swap their top talent in an effort to revive mainstream interest in an art form threatened by budget cuts and an aging audience.
“Dancers are weird, ” Sherman-Palladino, a former dancer herself, said after the screening, describing them as cultish and a little mad for devoting their lives to an extreme sport with little financial return. Amid dwindling support for the arts in the United States, the couple underscored its vital importance, insisting there has never been a more urgent moment to celebrate artists. “It’s not really about dance,” said Sherman-Palladino. “It’s about dancers.”
Jeanne Malle is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
