THURSDAY morning they filed toward P.S. 234 on Greenwich Street one last time, the precious progeny of TriBeCa and their escorts: dads in suits with Deloitte bags over their shoulders, meticulously untucked dads, smartly tailored moms.
At 8:37, the school bell tolled three times. The children, clutching bouquets for teacher and cameras to capture the giddy-wistful faces of friends, disappeared behind the wrought-iron fence with little sailboats on it.
Most of the parents scattered. But one scruffy cluster of 40ish men appeared to be calling roll: the screenwriter, the photographer, the sculptor, the journalist-novelist, all present.
In no time they had corralled a table at their hangout of the moment, City Hall, a cavernously clubby steakhouse on Duane Street. As they settled into their seats, the screenwriter, David Bar Katz, mimed pulling down his shorts and said, “O.K., guys, now for the traditional last-day-of-school nude coffee.”
The lot of the caregiver dad is often depicted as difficult and lonely — shut out by cliquish moms and nannies on the playground, financially emasculated by his breadwinner wife, generally cut off from the forces that sustain a man.
The dads of the nameless P.S. 234 breakfast club are different. To be sure, they differ from the average stay-at-home dad in many ways. Their homemaking burdens are lightened by nannies and cleaning ladies. They work, though not in offices like their high-powered wives, who are executives and editors in chief and museum directors.
BUT the main way they seem different is that they have one another. For the last four years, since the day the fashion-consultant dad asked the lawyer-who-wants-to-be-a-writer dad out to a diner, they have been making the rounds of TriBeCa’s better breakfast spots, a rotating lineup of seven or eight guys, whiling away the morning hours with hash browns and wide-ranging banter that somehow seldom strays far from the locker room.
“It’s like ‘Sex and the City’ with coffee instead of cosmos,” Mr. Katz said.
The group’s self-proclaimed founder, Roark Dunn, a consultant in the fashion industry, said he was inspired by the moms he saw pairing up after morning drop-off. “I was envious,” he said, “so I said to Josh, ‘Why don’t you and I go out?’ Then Josh started bringing David and David started bringing Chris.”
Some guys were slow to grasp the concept. “Josh used to ask me if I wanted to get coffee, and I was like, ‘Not really,’ ” said Karl Taro Greenfeld, the journalist-novelist. “I didn’t know he was inviting me to a ‘Thing.’ ”
At first, Mr. Katz said, the wives tended toward jealousy and suspicion. “There was a lot of ‘I wish I had time to have coffee with my friends for two hours,’ ” he said. “They were like: ‘What do you guys talk about? Do you talk about us? Do you talk about sex?’ ”
But the dads have no compunction about taking a leisurely break from diapering and spending some of the family’s hard-earned money in the process. “All these fathers are actually really good fathers,” said Mr. Katz, who recently oversaw the birth of his fourth son (and made it to breakfast with the guys 14 hours later). “We do more parenting than our type-A wives and feel we’re justified.”
And so the wives seem to have mostly come around. “It’s very nice — it feeds Josh’s soul,” said Amy Katz, no relation to Mr. Katz but married to Joshua Leitner, the lawyer and aspiring writer. Still, she added, “If it makes him less productive, that makes me resentful, and it has the potential to veer in that direction.”
The get-togethers seem to feed the men’s souls in different ways. For Mr. Katz, they fill a void that often opens up for men after they start families. “This wouldn’t exist with us if there wasn’t this need that in a sense is repressed,” he said. “People are conditioned to feel that it’s sophomoric: now that you’re a grown-up, you’re supposed to spend time with your family, not your friends.”
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