“It was my birthday party,” said Willa, last name redacted, host of last weekend’s now- infamous “Bushwick lesbian rooftop party.” And to clarify, no the party wasn’t in Bushwick, it was technically in East Williamsburg.
At least once a month, it seems like a hot ticket item or event in Bushwick becomes a trending or viral moment on the internet, mostly for laughs. The neighborhood’s place as a lasting center of the city’s alternative culture has made it a great punchline, time and time again. So, if you’re on ‘X’, formerly known as Twitter, or just an overall Bushwick humor enthusiast, you might’ve heard the phrase ‘Clairo Shade’ ruminating around. Perhaps you’ve seen it recently in brat green letters on a cake with pink frosting followed by the words “a twink fell through the skylight.”
Posted by ‘Jaques’ (username: “flamencolambada”) and starting with a single viral sentence (“So obsessed with the chaos of this rooftop party in Brooklyn”) on Monday, the tweet has already gathered over 80,000 likes, turning details of this party into a memeable bit. The thread collected hilarious screenshots of party attendees and dissected further the timeline of the party in question. One of the screenshots was a post from Willa herself (username: “poIarseltzer”) where she captioned a photo of her birthday cake with “whole party lowkey felt like clairo shade.” Clairo, the referenced lo-fi singer-songwriter, would eventually respond herself to Willa’s post with a simple “:/”
As Willa tells it, the rooftop party started like any party in Brooklyn: drinks, a DJ, and obscure hysterical games.
“There were some planned events, called ‘The Willa-lympics’; there was a shotgun contest [too]” she says. Any other games planned for the night were cut short, however, when the skylight broke, to the alarm of the downstairs neighbors.
Willa says the rooftop has two skylights on each side of the roof, and people needed to walk around them in order to reach the party.
“I kept getting random people during the party coming up to me and being like ‘the girls downstairs are really mad because they can hear the skylight cracking,’” she says.
Willa didn’t notice anything suspicious with the skylights, but as a preemptive measure, she had circled some chairs so people would know to avoid running into them. “That ended up backfiring, because what happened was the chairs made it like less visible,” said Willa
Garrett Charles (username: “garrettcharles”) had been there and says “I swear, all of this shit happened within, like, a total of like, 15 minutes.”
Around midnight, another party attendee, now identified on X as “ratboyratboyrat” accidentally broke the skylight with his leg after tripping into a chair. 43 stitches and several unserious tweets later, a new meme of the summer was born.
“She had just blown out the candles, and then within like two minutes, it was the ‘boom crash’ twink through the window,” says Charles.
While many have identified the skylight faller as a ‘twink’, Willa wants to set the record straight. “He’s not a twink. He’s bisexual trade. He’s been fighting for his title on Twitter.”
And what about the cake? It was made and decorated by Willa’s sister Eden; the writing was a spur of the minute decision.
“She’s like, ‘if you don’t respond, I’m gonna write that you’re a little bit older than you are.’ So I was like, “can you just write ‘Clairo shade’? That’s really the whole story. I was just trying to think of something that would be kind of funny and odd and topical to put on a cake,” says Willa.
After the skylight fell, Willa finished the rest of her night at the Rosemont, as any Brooklynite might do on their birthday. She’s still recounting the aftermath on Twitter, including the $800 she now owes her building’s management company, to repair the skylight.
It was fun, she says, but is definitely a “one and done after what happened.”
Top photo taken from the Twitter user poIarseltzer.
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