Happy (Anti-) Mother’s Day

Dorothy Parker wasn’t exactly blessed with mothering instincts, but she did understand this fundamental truth: “The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant,” she once said, “and let the air out of the tires.” So it’s apt that this Mother’s Day, Kevin Fitzpatrick, founder and president of the Dorothy Parker Society of New York, will lead a two-hour tour of the quippy anti-mummy’s Vicious Circle haunts. More than 40 destinations are included. Among them: speakeasies along West 49th Street, pal Alexander Woollcott’s Hell’s Kitchen home and the famed Algonquin Hotel, where Parker earned a most unmotherly reputation for breakneck barbs and boozing with the boys. Parker, of course, never became a mother. (Her own mother died just shy of Dorothy’s fifth birthday, and her stepmother died when she was 9.) The other ladies of the Algonquin Round Table were likewise amaternal. Writer Ruth Hale had a child, “but she was nutty,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “I can’t think of too many good moms on the table.” The tour concludes with an optional meal at the hotel. Perhaps you won’t gather tips on raising the next Super Kid, but the luncheon does have one perk. “Sitting there,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, “just makes you funny.”

Algonquin Round Table Walking Tour, Sunday, May 13, Algonquin Hotel lobby, 59 West 44th Street, 11:45 a.m.