A new decade is upon us. It’s almost 2020, and it’s time to make a choice. You’ve had more than a year to think about it. You’ve weighed the options, you’ve written out the pros and cons, you’ve polled your friends and taken the temperature of the room. Now you have to pull the trigger. Tell us …
Which type of Gatsby party are you hosting?
Everyone is wrestling with the Gatsby question. Exactly why the tweet became so popular is something of a mystery — teens offered varying and unfulfilling explanations to HuffPost at the time — but when Karter Machen posed this question to Twitter in 2018, it took off. It currently stands at more than 77,000 retweets and 316,000 likes (which, oddly, is less than the respective 83,000 and 330,000 it had when HuffPost wrote about it).
Maybe it is the misreading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, which was certainly not an endorsement of the excess that Gatsby’s parties typified that captivates modern users. Maybe people just love an excuse to dress fancy and put on one of their many colored shirts. Karter theorized it went viral because he was making fun of bros, and because some people thought it was racist (“It truly blows my mind that people were accusing me of being racist and not liking minorities because I mention DRESSING up like the 1920s,” he told HuffPost).
Regardless, a nation waits with bated breath. Will you throw a classy affair, “real tuxedos and all … with everyone fully dressed like the era”? Or will you throw a bawdy, bastardized version, resplendent with “shirtless dudes with a bow tie.”
Will you be Leo from the Baz Luhrmann movie or will you be the Chris Farley Chippendales dancer?
Will you choose class or will you choose swag?
Will you make it a night to remember or a Hangover-esque bacchanal?
Will you drink cocktails or Natty Ice?
Will there be dazzling fireworks or a visit from the fire department?
Only you can make that choice. There are no wrong answers.
