Present Joys

Here, some of the #9youngones wait for the subway at 2am. Eight hours in a dinner suit is nothing to sneeze at.

Photo booth shenanigans with Mamo at the Young Ones awards party.

When the Ogilvy tour finished, it was already after 5pm and we were way up in Hell’s Kitchen; after a long walk and a long subway ride, we made it back to the hotel with just enough time to throw on our dinner clothes. We met back up with Mamo, who seemed to have had a very nice personal day in the city. He’d bought us milk and cupcakes, so we ate those in the hotel lobby then took Uber cars to the Young Ones ceremony in the Garment District. The awards show itself was pretty fun. The room seemed crowded, and we had to deal with a lot of people to get any hors d’oeuvres or drinks, but we had a nice time anyway, and shouted a whole lot when Karl, Graham, and Theresa went onstage to receive their awards. The best part of the awards show was probably a super-cool photo booth they had there, which printed keepsake photos on-the-spot as well as generating animated gifs of the shots. How fun! We went through again and again.

After the official afterparty ended unceremoniously at 9:30pm, the nine young ones kept things moving on our own. We took the subway back to our hotel to freshen up, then we walked over to Madison Square Park to have dinner at Shake Shack—the first time I’d had an actual meal all day (unless you count the morning bagel)! It was a really sweet time for all ten of us to sit together at a table in the middle of Madison Square Park, bathed in the glow of a bulb light canopy.

After dinner, Jen and I went to go have some nice drinks in the W Hotel while everybody else went to a more casual joint. We all met up a little later, around midnight, and took cabs to a seedy-looking karaoke bar where we got a private room. We sang, among other things, songs by the Spice Girls, Rick Astley, Hall & Oates, Dolly Parton, and Nelly. The only song I really sang into a microphone was Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” with Anna, but the entire experience was surreal and unbeatable. Though several people had expressed interest in karaoke, I don’t think we would have gone through with it if it hadn’t been for Mr. Mohr. I’m very thankful we ended up doing it! What a wonderful, weird experience…

After the karaoke fun, we headed back to the hotel, and kept the party going with a little pyjama party in Graham, Karl, and Theresa’s room. By the time I got to bed, it was 3:30am, and I was brimming with tired contentedness.

Everybody was up by 9am on tuesday morning; we had continental breakfast (read: bagels and coffee) in the hotel lobby, said goodbye to Mamo, and headed off for One Show-organized “agency tours”. Over the course of the day, we visited four Manhattan agencies:

• Strawberry Frog, a small agency in a Madison Avenue penthouse. Though the agency people were pleasant, the visit was very poorly organized and we didn’t really see much of the work space, except for a conference room. Besides the nine CCAD young ones, there was about fifteen other students, who ended up being at all four of the studio visits we did. They were nice people, but some of their personalities were a little grating, especially after hours of walking around the city. Anyway… back to tuesday…
• We toured Deutsch Inc. next, at noon. The space had a beautiful view of the Hudson and the Statue of Liberty. We went on a very quick tour, but spent most of our time in a conference room hearing from a designer and a copywriter. After Deutsch, we dithered around trying to figure out lunch plans; when nothing seemed to materialize, we took the subway to SoHo for our next tour.
• Code and Theory, the next one, was the coolest tour of the day—a mostly-digital agency with amazing offices on Broadway, filled with nice hardwood floors and Persian rugs and lots of art books. We wandered around their space for a bit and then listened to a content strategist explain a very attractive recent project. It was tons of fun.
• From there, we took an extremely long trip through Times Square to visit Ogilvy, which was, sadly, the worst tour of the day. Most of the time was wasted showing us Ogilvy’s impressive on-site gym and video production facilities, which we didn’t really care about. There was a top-notch rooftop patio, though, and it was nice to experience that. By the time we got up there, we were all pretty checked out of the tour thing.