As the coronavirus pandemic continues to upend just about every aspect of daily life, essential supplies like toilet paper, pets and the will to go on are rapidly depleting. Now, as if this crisis couldn’t get any more dire, we might also be running low on gossip.
Town & Country recently caught up with some of New York City’s finest tongue-waggers to see how the gossip industry is faring in the age of coronavirus, and, much like every other industry, it seems things could be better.
With restaurants and bars closed, events canceled for the foreseeable future and no misadventures in club hopping to report on, gossip columnists are predictably starved for a scoop.
“What can you write? It’s an impossibility,” New York Post columnist and OG gossip girl Cindy Adams told T&C‘s Adam Rathe. “People I once ignored and avoided, I’m now thrilled to speak to. If they’re giving me something to write about, they’re great.”
But just because people are supposed to be staying in and avoiding the kind of social soirees that normally feed the gossip industry doesn’t necessarily mean that they are. “I’m sure there will still be powerful people having dinner parties,” one former Page Six reporter told Rathe, “but nobody savvy will admit to having attended.”
To some extent, quarantine conditions mean gossip is hotter than ever — in the age of social distancing, the mere act of congregating for an otherwise dull social gathering is a salacious story on its own. But the hush-hush nature of any in-person interaction makes that gossip increasingly difficult to come by.
“Gossip,” one writer told Rathe, “will return in the form of privileged people doing shitty things to benefit themselves at other people’s expense.”
And at the moment, the shittiest, most scandalous thing a person can do to end up on Page Six is simply leave their home. Who would’ve thought a global crisis could be so boring?
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