What to do besides going to an election night party

Election Day is next week, and for a certain kind of person, it’s their Super Bowl, with all the attendant pomp and circumstance and TV-centered partying that entails. No offense (some offense) but even in a normal presidential election, a party centered around watching election returns is my own personal version Hell. And I should know, because I’ve covered these kinds of parties. 

You should do your civic duty and vote, but having done that, keep in mind that neurotically watching every drip and drab of election news for a whole night doesn’t actually have an impact on whether vengeful reactionaries return to the White House. If you weren’t scarred enough already from 2016, just remember that results will not (and should not!) be finalized on election night itself. You need something to do to keep yourself from looking at your phone all night though, and the bad news is a lot of venues are either taking Election Night off or specifically doing election parties. Well, we’re to help you avoid all that mess with a few ideas on how to spend your Election Tuesday like it’s just another Tuesday.

Have a laugh
We can’t promise you that all of the comedians on the bill at The Last Drop will avoid the election, but the Union Hall basement is as good a place as any to try to escape the siren’s call of your phone, and the show featuring Nataly Aukar, Vannessa Jackson, Britt Miggs and Olivia Levine isn’t billed as an election spooktacular. So at the very least, you’re likely to avoid someone doing a whole bit pretending to be Harry Enten, or even worse, watching him gesticulate at a map on a giant screen. Also for post-show hangs, Union Hall doesn’t have a TV anywhere in the bar.

See a long movie
You know where you can’t look at your phone? The movies. If you’re one of those people who does look at their phone at the movies, do me a favor and send me your address, I just want to have a conversation. Anyway, at the Village East, you can see the two hour and eighteen minute epic Megalopolis, which has its own stuff about politics going on, but it’s less about the real world and more about what if an extremely stoned Francis Ford Coppola told you about his real weird dream about Robert Moses. Also Aubrey Plaza is Wow Platinum. There’s a show at 6:45 p.m. and another at 9:50 p.m., either one will take your attention away from the moment polls close.

Alternatively, you can take advantage of Alamo Drafthouse’s $9 Tuesday ticket deals. Anora, Conclave, Emilia Perez, Smile 2, The Substance and Singham Again all clock in at at least 120 minutes and all have evening shows where, as per Alamo rules, you will have your thumbs broken if you so much as reach for your phone to check on an election update.

Stargaze
Speaking of stars, you can take our pal Ryan Schwach’s advice and find a dark corner of the city and gaze up at the wonders of the cosmos, where the light from long-dead stars that once shined on civilizations that also destroyed themselves with reactionary politics is now visible from Earth. Your night vision gets better the longer you avoid looking at the glaring lights of your phone too. 

If you’re using an app on your phone to identify constellations, remember to turn off your push alerts and silence your text notifications from your friends. Or better yet find a corner of the city with no cell service, like Fort Tilden, and just guess at what you’re seeing up there.

Go directly to Christmas 
I’m generally not one for seasonal creep (might be a Jewish thing, idk) but hey, why not replace the most teeth grinding time of the year with the most wonderful time of the year? The Bryant Park Christmas village is already open even though we haven’t even buried the corpse of Halloween, so you can wander around window shopping until 8 p.m., ice skate until 10 p.m. or hang out in the bar and food hall until 10 p.m. Don’t blame us if you drunkenly check your phone though. 

Run. Like actually run
Despite my newfound love of boxing (Brad Lander, I remain ready to fight you, you coward), I, personally, do not care for running. But if you need something to occupy your mind for a little while, you could do worse than a three-mile group run along the Brooklyn waterfront starting at Brooklyn Bridge Park. As you run past the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, you can take some solace in the fact that America has long existed as a place that can construct incredible things and inspire incredible respect at the same exact time that it was a toilet of racism, xenophobia and insane rich person behavior.

Get spooked
Speaking of 19th-century New York City icons, Edgar Allan Poe belongs to Baltimore I guess, but he did some great work right here in the Big Apple. Pay tribute to the man who brought us the Treehouse of Horror segment of The Raven by listening to John Kevin Jones perform some of Poe’s most famous work like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” during Killing An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe at the Merchant’s House Museum in the East Village, just blocks from where he lived in the city. 

Take a bunch of acid and go see David Gilmour at MSG
Listen, maybe you don’t want to eat LSD and walk into the kinda psychically cursed Madison Square Garden on election night to see if Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour stays away from the election or tosses some insults at Donald Trump. But Tim suggested this one so it’s clearly a risk he would take, and I don’t find Tim to be that untrustworthy. 

Go to Burp Castle, where you’re supposed to talk in a whisper
Beyond the fact that you’re not supposed to talk very loudly at this monastery-themed fancy beer bar in the East Village, you can get really into the vibe of the place by pretending you don’t have a spacephone connecting you to the screaming thoughts of strangers across the country who are going to spend the night posting grainy videos of what they insist is voter fraud. You are a simple monk devoted to thoughts of the Lord and high-ABV beer, at least on this night.

Go find the cave in central park and live there forever
There’s a cave in Central Park in the Ramble, though as Atlas Obscura explains, it was actually discovered during construction instead of being designed and built by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Anyway, perhaps you want to spend a night hiding in it, and you are more than welcome to try. However, it’s not a large cave, so someone may have beaten you to it already, or someone may have claimed it quite a while ago. If that’s the case, you have learned a valuable lesson: it’s more difficult than you think to simply walk away from society forever. Sorry! You live here with us. Might as well pay for a news subscription while you’re here.