“We infamously met at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas,” says Lace Manhattan, with a straight face.
That’s her version of how she and Dixie Normus first connected. And it only gets more serendipitous from there. They also crossed paths “many years later at Chautauqua’s institute for the performing arts” while studying ballet. Then again, while walking alone along the Mississippi River. Over and over, across lifetimes, the universe kept tossing them into each other’s orbit.
Eventually, they decided to stop running into each other and start running with each other. We’ll form a pop duo, they thought.
That’s how Margaret Qualley and Talia Ryder became Lace Manhattan and Dixie Normus, two alter egos as surreal as they are magnetic. Their debut track, Girl, arrives with a music video that looks like a VHS fever dream: rooftops, graffiti walls, basketball courts, cosmic overlays, and even splashes of blood. The idea took root on the set of Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t! (they both co-star in the film) and blossomed in the studio with producer Jack Antonoff. But Girl isn’t a side project. It’s its own trippy world.
A city that smokes
“NYC is the place we now call home,” Lace says when asked why New York was the perfect backdrop. It fits. Cannabis is legal, smoke drifts through parks and sidewalks, and the city’s chaos already feels like one long contact high.
The video makes it explicit. Lace and Dixie pass a joint — or try to.
“She was hogging the joint,” Lace says.
“I was hogging the joint,” Dixie admits.
It’s a quick joke, but it also points to something deeper. Asked why they wanted smoking in the story at all, Lace answers: “I guess it’s a good …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
