He has been described as a magician and “being of light.” As Salvador Dalí’s kindred spirit and protégé. As the Andy Warhol of the West Coast. The artist Steven Arnold ought to be a household name. The exhibition “Cocktails in Heaven” at Del Vaz Projects in Santa Monica, which opened this week with a party co-hosted by Karen Hillenburg and Christine Messineo of Frieze, is a hopeful step in this direction.

On Monday night, the gallery transformed into a replica of Arnold’s legendary home and studio in Los Angeles, known as Zanzabar, which has been compared to Warhol’s Factory for the luminaries it attracted (Timothy Leary, Debbie Harry, Ellen Burstyn) and the creative synergy it inspired. Throughout the ’80s and into the early ’90s, Zanzabar was host to queer gatherings and parties, as well as surrealist photoshoots with exquisite paper-cut set designs that Arnold entirely made from hand. “My house is a temple for me. It’s a religious space, it’s where the creativity happens,” he says in the 2019 documentary made on him, “Heavenly Bodies.” Arnold died at the age of 51 in 1994, from AIDS-related complications, and left behind a mind-bending body of work that is now housed by ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

Steven Arnold “Cocktails in Heaven” exhibition at Del Vaz Projects. First row: Jay Ezra Nayssan of Del Vaz Projects, performance director Tyler Matthew Oyer, exhibition design and artistic director Orrin Whalen, Donna Marcus Duke of Del Vaz Projects, Channing Moore of Del Vaz Projects, chef Gerardo Gonzalez; Second row: Bria Purdy, Anna Bane and Sabine Paris of Del Vaz Projects.

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At Del Vaz, characters from Arnold’s ethereal photographs and films came to life in performances directed by artist Tyler Matthew Oyer: At the door, two French waiters, dressed in Mozart wigs and original coats hand-painted by Arnold, checked off guest names from an 8-foot scroll. Inside, performers dressed as the sun and moon — their mostly nude bodies spray-painted gold and silver — languorously laid over a banquet table abundant with crudités, conjuring a scene from Arnold’s most famous film, “Luminous Procuress,” which was projected on the wall. In the courtyard, a bodybuilder posed as a live version of Michelangelo’s “David” sculpture. It was an ode to the joyous, maximalist world that Arnold meticulously and affectionately built in both life and art — because for him there was no distinction, art was life.

Steven Arnold, “Angel of Night,” 1982, featuring model Juan Fernandez.

(Courtesy Del Vaz Projects © ONE)

Steven Arnold, “Untitled,” 1974

(Courtesy Del Vaz Projects © ONE)

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Steven Arnold, “Intersection of Dreams,” 1985

(Courtesy Del Vaz Projects © ONE)

Every detail of the party came from something found in Arnold’s archive. The artistic director of the exhibition, Orrin Whalen, planted a few of Arnold’s actual belongings in the warm room where his photographs and drawings hung: his ornate metal bracelet rested on a seashell, and replicas of his red leopard print business cards fanned open on the front table. “Cocktails in Heaven” is also the title of Arnold’s unpublished memoir and became the source material for the party’s chef, Gerardo Gonzalez, who scanned for passages where the artist mentioned his favorite foods — mainly hors d’oeuvres and copious glasses of Vermouth.

Guests on Monday included fashion and art world luminaries, including artists Ron Athey and Joey Terrill, designer Zana Bayne, former Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin, and jewelry designer Sophie Buhai, who mingled under the dangling grapevines and in a tent where upside-down paper umbrellas suspended from the ceiling. The dress code was “Complete Fantasy Conglomerata Divina Magnificata,” and the crowd did their part wearing feathered hats, leopard-print tops, golden sequinned dresses and polka-dotted face paint. It was only fitting to pay homage to Arnold this way, a fashion icon in his own right who was once voted the best dressed man of Los Angeles by L.A. Weekly.

The evening signaled that this is not the type of show that will deaden an artist behind glass vitrines. “We can summon artists’ spirits through gatherings,” says Jay Ezra Nayssan, founding director and chief curator of Del Vaz Projects, which is also Nayssan’s home. “This opening is an aspect of a project that should be equally important as the exhibition itself … Queer culture is carried not only through scholarship but through laughter, perfume, embrace and touch, through dinners and concerts — and whatever forms are waiting to be invented.”

Christine Messineo, director of Frieze Americas, and Jay Ezra Nayssan, founding director and chief curator of Del Vaz Projects.

William Escalera and Francisco George

Waseem Salahi, left, and Elisa Wouk Almino, Editor in chief of Image Magazine.

French waiters Stella Felice and Kabo check in the guests, wearing original coats hand-painted by Steve Arnold.

Joey Kuhn, left, and Jessica Simmons.

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Miles Greenberg and Vidar Logi.

Actor Charlie Besso, left, and director Luke Gilford.

Roman Smith as the live Michelangelo “David” statue.

Consider Valerie Cherish, the perennially desperate-to-be-seen, desperate-to-be-loved Hollywood C-lister played by Lisa Kudrow. Valerie, bless her, reenters our collective lives once every decade, like the census.

And like the census, her return always assumes the form of an appraisal, a ruthless and clear-eyed taking of stock. In The Comeback‘s original 2005 season, Valerie donned a cupcake costume and pratfalled her way through the rise of reality television, starring in both a corny sitcom and its making-of documentary. In 2014, a second season found Valerie headlining a prestige HBO series about that sitcom, auguring the fusillade of high-end, self-satisfied streaming dramedies that were about to pummel an unsuspecting populace into submission.

In this third season, she’s still out here hustling. Sure, she’s got an Emmy under her belt, and she’s been booked and busy, but there are signs of trouble — she and her husband (Damian Young) have downsized from their Brentwood mansion to a West Hollywood apartment. Her publicist-turned-manager (Dan Bucatinsky) seems even more checked out than baseline. She’s hired a social media consultant (Ella Stiller) and has even started (ominous chord, shudder) … a podcast.

As we meet her, she’s older, wiser but still essentially Valerie: Blithely optimistic, hungrily opportunistic. She’s still desperate for attention — but the precise nature of the attention she’s craving these days has subtly but significantly shifted. It’s no longer enough for Valerie to be seen; now, she wants — expects, demands, even — to be heard.

She remains ridiculous, thank God. And Kudrow once again imbues her with the physicality that has come to define Valerie’s essential self: She’s still going through life nodding like a bobblehead, still punctuating just about every sentence with a “right?” or a “yeah?” or a “y’know?,” because it’s a learned response. If the world refuses to affirm her in any way — and somehow it continues to find endlessly novel ways to do just that — then she’ll just affirm her own darn self, yeah? Right?

But something happens in the first episode of the new season that efficiently signals how much has changed for Valerie. The setup is classic The Comeback: She’s agreed to star as Roxie in Chicago on Broadway (after receiving assurances that her choreo will be the “dumbed down, Real Housewives version”). Rehearsal isn’t going great — her director and fellow dancers are mean, catty and dismissive (apart from one gay guy, whose words of praise Valerie seeks out like a homing missile — which checks out).

What happens next is quietly remarkable, given the Valerie Cherish we’ve come to love/cringe-in-sympathy-with over The Comeback‘s previous seasons. She doesn’t chirpily ignore their insults and blithely soldier on. She doesn’t try to excuse and minimize their bad behavior so she can take advantage of the opportunity they’re affording her. No, she calls them out, and she quits. (More accurately: She finds a ready, contractually viable excuse to quit — same difference, I’d argue.)

This isn’t the Valerie we used to know. When an opportunity to star in an AI-written sitcom arises, she doesn’t knock over furniture to lunge at the chance, as she would have before. She refuses (at first), she seeks assurances that actual writers will be involved (they will, sort of), and she steps up as the show’s executive producer as soon as it becomes clear she’s the only one involved who cares about the cast, the crew and the quality of the show itself.

There remain plenty of opportunities for Kudrow to make us laugh at Valerie, but as the season progresses, we find ourselves rooting for her more than ever. That’s because Kudrow has altered Valerie’s fuel mixture a bit. She’s always been acutely self-aware, she’s always known when she’s being disrespected, but the Valerie of seasons one and two was perfectly content to swallow other people’s low opinions of her if it meant she got some time in the spotlight.

Now, that self-awareness is matched to something besides her default, pathologically sunny perseverance; it’s married to defiance, and to action.

She stands her ground against a costume designer (Benito Skinner) who sees her as camp and nothing more (yet another of The Comeback‘s knowing digs at its rabid gay fanbase). She agrees to play nice with a network executive (Andrew Scott) until she, very publicly, doesn’t. And when her dour husband starts flailing on his own reality show, Valerie draws on her vast reserves of experience on both sides of the camera to show him how it’s done.

But a self-actualized Valerie affects the show’s comedic chemistry, and there are times when the season can’t quite manage to sustain its satiric bite. On two occasions, the show’s pitched disdain for Hollywood phoniness and hollow ambition falters, and something akin to sincerity peeks out from behind the mask. In one, a beloved real-life Hollywood comedy legend delivers a short monologue to Valerie about why AI can never replace real comedy writers, because comedy needs broken people. In another, a cast member from The Comeback‘s first season returns simply to assure Valerie that she is a good person, a wonderful person, and that she is in no way in the wrong.

On both occasions, seasoned viewers will be patiently but eagerly awaiting the turn, the rug-pull, the reveal that such abject, wet-eyed earnestness will of course get swatted down, because this is The Comeback. But the turn never comes, the rug remains firmly in place and we are left to grapple with the knowledge that we’ve just been exposed to the creators’ true intent, delivered with a gravid plainness, without anything even resembling the gimlet-eyed take we’ve come to, well … cherish.

But you know what? Fine. Who knows if Valerie will return in ten years’ time to once again Cassandra us all about the state of the entertainment industry? Who knows, in point of fact, if there’ll be an entertainment industry for her to return to? I forgave those moments of uncharacteristic ingenuousness because I managed to convince myself they felt valedictory, triumphant — a few discordant bars within Valerie Cherish’s swan song.

Which, as viewers of The Comeback’s definitive, beloved, iconic Season 1 finale will remember, is “I Will Survive.” Because it could never be anything else. Y’know?

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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Hear the name the Witch’s Cottage and you might conjure a mystical vision. And inside the new North Hollywood space, here there be witches, yes. But that’s just the start of it.

In one area of the two-story cafe, restaurant and bar, constellations beckon. A guide to crystals calls forth in another. An azure booth is flanked by an abstracted mermaid sculpture, and elsewhere howling wolves are engraved into the bar tops.

Hidden wonders are everywhere. Circle the cottage’s hand-constructed tree trunks, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll spy a tiny door hiding a little witch. Sit at one of the tables, and don’t be surprised to hear the sounds of birds chirping from the man-made trees. Branches spring forth from paintings and every nook is a nod to something born of a fable.

A decade-long vision of the founders, the Witch’s Cottage has transformed the old Federal Bar into a colorful, whimsical fairy-tale-like forest of a gathering spot. A place where one can come for the fantasy, and stay for the chicken etouffee and the Hex Breaker, a tiki-style, rum-heavy drink for grown-up sorcerers.

“I wanted this to feel lived in,” says Danielle Ozymandias, who dreamed up the space with business partner Celina Lee Surniak, a fellow creative who like Ozymandias very much identifies as a witch. “I wanted this to be a visual feast because I think maximalism is just so interesting. That may be the ADHD talking, but I knew I wanted a lot.”

The dining room of the Witch’s Cottage aims for a fantasy forest-inspired look.

While they certainly designed the Witch’s Cottage to be family-friendly, Surniak and Ozymandias say part of their creative intent was to bring joy to adults.

“Everybody tries to shame you,” Surniak says. “Like, ‘You can’t buy that coffee. Save your money.’ No, let them have the coffee they really love. Let them get that annual pass to Disneyland. Let them have a weekly night at the movies, even if they go alone. The world is so weird right now. What we can do is find joy in tiny things.

A fairy at a media preview for North Hollywood’s new Witch’s Cottage.

“Being able to give adults the opportunity to say ‘I’m a fairy,’ is the best feeling ever,” Surniak continues. “And it’s not just at Renaissance fairs. Be a fairy here.”

Or be anyone. A sign near one of the restaurant’s restrooms makes it clear it doesn’t matter which one guests use. It asks that they simply wash their hands. “You can walk in as a witch, or a dragon, or just a FedEx worker,” Ozymandias says. “There’s no judgment.”

The Witch’s Cottage had its grand opening this weekend, and the community immediately responded with lines out the door. That wasn’t entirely surprising — the project was built by a collective. More than 200 volunteers donated more than 3,000 hours to bring the space to life, and the two founders attracted more than 100 investors via an online crowd-funding campaign that raised more than $167,000.

“We’re regular people,” Surniak says. “We don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have a nest egg. We don’t own property. If we were going to do anything, we would need help.”

Surniak says within three days of creating their campaign, they found an angel investor who offered them the funds to secure the building. Other investors followed, including Ana Lovelis and her husband Kenny Enea, known in the area for the elaborate haunted houses they have hosted at their home. The two joined as creative partners and helped with construction. Lovelis says she recognized in the Witch’s Cottage a similar outlook on life as hers. She recalled once years ago dating someone who had a skeptical and practical view of the world.

“And then there was me, being like, ‘That butterfly is a sign from my grandma,’” Lovelis says. The Witch’s Cottage, she says, is reflective of viewing the world through a magical lens. At a time of much stress for many, such a place may be needed. As Lovelis says, “What’s the harm?”

The Witch’s Cottage is a two-story space that serves as a cafe during the day and a restaurant at night. Dinner service begins at 5 p.m.

Surniak still has a day job, working as a stunt and intimacy coordinator on theatrical and Hollywood productions. Ozymandias, who previously worked in the local theater world, is focusing primarily on the Witch’s Cottage at the moment, helping to devise recipes and ensure the bakery can accommodate as many dietary restrictions as possible.

Beyond new menu items, there’s more in the works, including community events like sound baths, comedy nights and classes on composting, native plants and parenting. Or even some workshops that are more lighthearted, such as a hoped-for night on how to make a broom.

Hidden behind the upstairs bar is what’s called the Tempered Flask Tavern, and it’s an elaborate tabletop role-playing game room. Here, one will find a smoke-puffing dragon, but also digital windows that game masters can use to trigger various effects. A long table sits at its center, flanked by a knight, a digital fireplace and weaponry. Not open yet, the plan is for the room to be rented out by the hour.

The Tempered Flask Tavern is a hidden room dedicated to tabletop games inside the Witch’s Cottage. It will be available soon for guests to rent out.

Though Surniak and Ozymandias say they’ve been building vision boards for more than a decade of what the spot could look like, recent cultural shifts gave them the confidence that the timing was right. They point to “Stranger Things” and how it spawned a conversation around “Dungeons & Dragons,” or the success of Disney+ series “Agatha All Along.” More locally, they watched the rise of a game-focused bar such as the Roguelike Tavern, which is relocating to Studio City, as well as the news that experiential art firm Meow Wolf would be building an exposition in the city.

Taken as a whole, they felt bolstered that North Hollywood could support a heavily themed cafe, a home for those who have rolled a 20-sided die, once looked up the meaning of the Tower card or just enjoyed a viewing of “The Lord of the Rings.”

But one need not know the inner workings of RPGs, tarot or Middle-earth to feel at home in the Witch’s Cottage. This is a space, after all, for anyone who has ever been touched by a fairy tale, dreamed of the fantastical or wanted to believe in the power of wishing upon a star.

Views from inside North Hollywood’s the Witch’s Cottage.

So spend a little time in the Witch’s Cottage, and maybe you’ll start to imagine that cocktail is a potion, and those deviled eggs did in fact hatch from a dragon. Diners may debate between the “iron forged fondue melt” (a patty melt) or the “meze heartwich” (a white bean purée on sourdough), but childlike wonder is the specialty of the house.

“Everybody is somebody’s kid,” Ozymandias says. “And I just want a safe space for people’s kids. Even if you’re 50, or 80, you’re my kid. I want you to feel loved, and to have a cup of something warm or magical. I want you to know that whatever is outside those doors, when you’re in here, I got you.”