Last Thursday, Cyndi Lauper’s leopard-print pajamas sold for $5,850. On Friday, she sang for a ballroom full of grown New Yorkers dressed as squid. It was, by any measure, the most Lauper forty-eight hours the city has had in years, and the second night is the one society is still talking about.
The occasion is Hulaween on Horror Reef: Monsters of the Deep, the annual costume gala of the New York Restoration Project, the parks-and-gardens conservancy Bette Midler founded in 1995 after deciding, as most New Yorkers only threaten to, that she had seen enough garbage in the city’s green spaces. The party moved this year to The Glasshouse at 660 Twelfth Avenue on Friday, Oct. 23, a week ahead of Halloween proper. The theme invited guests to “journey beneath the waves into an immersive realm of mysterious sea creatures,” which in practice promised a great many expensive tentacles and at least one hedge-fund manager prepared to spend the evening explaining that he was a coelacanth.
The bill
The entertainment, per NYRP, was Lauper, the Broadway belter Jessica Vosk, Sydney James Harcourt (of “Hamilton” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball”) and the bassist Will Lee with his band, the Root System. Mario Cantone emceed, as he has before; House of Yes, the Bushwick temple of aerial excess, was booked to supply “walking spectacles,” and the DJ Boyyyish to keep the floor moving once the auction paddles went down. The costume contest, the evening’s real blood sport, was judged by Isaac Mizrahi and Rachel Antonoff. Mizrahi has seen a great deal of sequins in his life; it would have taken more than a glue-gunned anglerfish to move him.
The co-chairs read like a casting director’s dream table: Candice Bergen, Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito, Jonah Hill, Julianne Moore, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristen Wiig. Whether all seven turned up in fins is between them and their publicists.
Lauper’s week
The timing is what made the night delicious. On Thursday evening, Oct. 22, Bonhams held “Cyndi Lauper: Suitcase of Memories, Part I,” a live sale at its new American flagship at 111 West 57th Street, which Lauper opened with remarks of her own, with a second, online sale closing on Friday, the very day she took the stage at the Glasshouse. On the block: the newspaper-skirt ensemble from the “True Colors” album cover (estimate $1,000 to $2,000), the red plaid dress she wore to the first MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City in 1984, Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen pieces, and, yes, the leopard pajamas from the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video, estimated at $500 to $700. Those estimates were, frankly, an insult to the pajamas, and the bidders agreed. According to Bonhams’ results, every lot sold, the two sales together brought in $625,448, more than double the pre-sale estimate, the newspaper skirt went for $45,500 after 23 bidders fought over it, the plaid dress for $5,200 and the pajamas for $5,850.
“To me, fashion is art, and these pieces represent that creative journey,” Lauper said in the auction house’s announcement, noting that the sale landed as “True Colors” turns 40. In a frank conversation with The Guardian on Wednesday, she remembered the pajamas as a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog purchase (“they’re flannel pyjamas, but come on – they’re leopard!”), lamented that “we’ve been corporatized – we kind of have braces on our brains,” and offered a take on the city’s political weather that was bound to play well in some corners of the Glasshouse and less well in others: “the good news is that, because of Mamdani, the billionaires might be moving out, giving us our city back.”
Her farewell tour, it should be said, was a farewell to touring, not to the stage. On Oct. 20 her publicists at Shore Fire Media announced that she will return to the Colosseum at Caesars Palace for two runs in 2027, “due to fan demand,” with public tickets going on sale Friday morning. Friday, in other words, was the day Lauper’s 1980s wardrobe finished selling, her 2027 Las Vegas seats started selling, and she sang at the Glasshouse for the trees.
That Mamdani line made for an interesting backdrop on Friday night, when she sang to a room underwritten, in part, by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Who’s paying for the reef
NYRP posts its sponsor list publicly, a courtesy more charities should extend to the curious. As of Oct. 20, the top “Gotham Growers” tier included Bloomberg Philanthropies; Bruce Bozzi and CAA‘s Bryan Lourd; Andy Cohen; Michael Kors and Lance Le Pere; Adam and Jordan Manekin Topper; Amy Goldman Fowler, Cary Fowler and Sara Goldman Arno; and Midler and her husband, Martin von Haselberg. A rung below sit Jurate Kazickas and Roger Altman, James and Margo Nederlander, Fred and Nancy Poses, and the board chair, Josh Sirefman, with Sarah Kim. Further down the list, the David Geffen Foundation, the Elton John Charitable Fund, Carole Bayer Sager and Bob Daly, and the real estate concerns RXR and Brookfield. It is, in short, the rare New York benefit where the pop royalty, the old Broadway money and the developers are all, for one night, wearing the same seaweed.
They have reason to be generous. Last year’s edition, the 30th-anniversary party at Cipriani South Street, raised $2.9 million, a total NYRP confirmed to The City Politic through its publicist. Billboard reported that Billy Crystal revived his “Mr. Saturday Night” comic to roast a tearful Midler (“We’re here for the late Bette Midler… Talk about a restoration project!”). Midler, never one to leave a microphone unused, thanked Rudy Giuliani for his early help, “back when he was sane.” The same account noted a separate $1 million gift to NYRP from the late Mica Ertegun.
This year’s party raised more than $2 million for NYRP’s work on equitable access to green space, the organization said through its publicist, Melody Serafino of No. 29, after the gala. That is short of last year’s haul, though a 30th birthday at Cipriani is a hard act to follow.
The honorees, and the family business
This year’s Wind Beneath My Wings Award (the name is not subtle, and is not meant to be) went to two NYRP trustees, Sophie von Haselberg and Harry Guinness. Midler presented the honor to her daughter and son-in-law herself, NYRP said through its publicist; the award, the group said, “recognizes those who have helped keep New York Restoration Project aloft.” Von Haselberg is Midler’s only child, an actress and longtime board member; Guinness, who joined the board in January 2025, is a climate-finance man who founded New Leaf Climate Partners after a decade at Lion’s Head Global Partners, teaches sustainable investing at Columbia and, per his NYRP biography, “escapes upstate to brew cider every autumn.” The two married in a pandemic ceremony of eleven people in 2020; at Hulaween in 2021, von Haselberg told TODAY that “my mom did all the flowers,” and that her parents “are more obsessed with him than they are with me.”
“It’s wild to receive an award from an organization that’s been in my life since I was SEVEN,” von Haselberg said in a statement NYRP provided to The City Politic. “NYRP has shaped the way I think about nature in an urban setting—easy access to green space should be a fundamental right, even if we do choose to live in the (world’s greatest) concrete jungle.” The credit, she said, belongs elsewhere: “Harry and I may be receiving this award, but the people who deserve it most are the NYRP staff and volunteers in the field. They work in rain, sleet, snow and blazing heat, to build, restore and share parks, gardens and shorelines for communities across all 5 boroughs of New York City.”
An award to the founder’s daughter and son-in-law, at the founder’s party, could look like a family dinner with a ticket price. It is better understood as a succession plan in a costume. Midler turned 80 last December, and charities built around a single magnetic founder tend to face a hard question sooner or later. NYRP’s answer, at least on the dance floor, appears to be: keep it in the family and keep it fun. In 2021, von Haselberg told TODAY that Hulaween “really is what allows NYRP to thrive,” and that the work is “not the sexy stuff… It’s like building beds in gardens.”
The unglamorous part
Strip away the sequins and the headpieces and NYRP’s fall has been a quietly good one. On Oct. 5, with the Bronx Zoo, the group planted hybrid American chestnut saplings on zoo grounds, the first chestnuts there since the zoo’s own forester documented the blight that wiped the species out in 1904. Gothamist reported that NYRP’s “1,000 Chestnut Challenge” put more than 350 saplings into the five boroughs this year, with at least 500 more planned for next. The organization also tends a portfolio of community gardens, mostly in neighborhoods far from the Upper East Side.
That is the trick of Hulaween, and the reason it has outlasted so many grimmer galas: the people who can afford the tables are buying a costume party, and the people in the Bronx and Brooklyn are getting trees. Everyone goes home happy, and a few go home damp.
The riskiest costume on Twelfth Avenue on Friday night was Cyndi Lauper circa 1984, thrift-store petticoats and a fistful of bangles: anyone who wore it was competing with the woman herself on stage, and with an original wardrobe that had just sold uptown for more than double its estimate. Girls just want to have fun. Some of them also want a tax receipt.
Bonhams, Shore Fire Media, representatives for Jessica Vosk, Will Lee, Isaac Mizrahi and Rachel Antonoff, House of Yes and the Glasshouse did not respond to requests for comment.
Featured image: Cyndi Lauper at the 2023 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize concert, photograph by Elaina Finkelstein/Library of Congress, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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