With the president-elect's increasingly abysmal cabinet appointments and increasingly horrifying twitter spats (thanks, Alec Baldwin), BKTX still feels like throwing up and screaming every time we check the news. We're still angry and we're planning to stay angry for pretty much the next four years, but how do you stay angry without totally falling into a black hole of fear, despair, and hand wringing? We decided the best way for us to make a small change and not lose what's left of our minds was to throw a rage party.
We invited a ton of friends to come to our apartment and rage with us over dinner. The best food to facilitate raging is yummy comforting food, so we made this eggplant parmesan, this caesar salad, garlic bread, and chocolate chip cookies. We also stopped by Trader Joe's wine store, where we picked up 12 bottles of wine for $50 to temper/fuel the steam coming out of our ears — the deal was, we asked everyone who came to bring whatever cash they had to donate to a nonprofit of our choice. We chose ACLU Nationwide, because 'tis the season to protect civil liberties (and they promise to fight back against the incoming administration's threats to civil liberties, which will affect all of us).
We suggested bringing $50, but we didn't check, we just asked people to put whatever they could into a cowboy hat in our kitchen. We ended up making $425 for the ACLU, not to mention getting a lot of much-needed hugs and seeing our friends happy to get together and support a good cause. At the end of the night, someone made a joke that we were like Dumbledore's Army, a scrawny group of people getting together to do whatever we can to fight the bad scary things happening around us.
We're planning on continuing this event as a series every few months to benefit more nonprofits we care a lot about — next, we want to do a benefit for Planned Parenthood. If you live in New York and want to be included, please send us an email at bktxbktx@gmail.com.