At the Brooklyn Bowl, she encircled herself with her liberated friends: artists, writers, organizers. They subbed out their footwear for bowling shoes and made their way to the lane where Ms. Tamblyn ordered for everybody: French fries, a platter of fried chicken, a bubbling cruet of macaroni and cheese. She switched to bourbon on the rocks and hefted a couple of balls for size.
Size didn’t matter. In her third round, a ball guttered on the left side for a change. “That was better,” Ms. Tamblyn said with equanimity.
With the Jackson 5 playing, several of her friends provided pointers. Paola Mendoza, a founder of the Women’s March, noticed that she was twisting her wrist and told her to imagine shaking someone’s hand. “Don’t flail,” Priya Parker, the host of the Together Apart podcast, added. “And don’t let go too early.”
That also seemed like good life advice, as did “Don’t be afraid to use your strength,” which hasn’t been a problem for Ms. Tamblyn.
Still, Ms. Tamblyn must have listened. She downed six pins on her next turn and then dropped toward the floor, twerking in celebration. She finished that first game with a floor-grazing 38.
When the game ended, Ms. Tamblyn turned to dancing, which she did with gusto, sometimes with chicken in hand. She danced with her friends and without them, executing a few moves atop the black couch that faced the line. When Questlove took a brief break, she reached up to his DJ booth and hugged him long and hard.
“I deeply missed nights like this over the last year when everything felt so terrifying, and my body just wanted to get free,” Ms. Tamblyn said. At 2 a.m., after another game in which she very nearly managed a spare, she rode home — liberated, free and with the leftover fried chicken tucked into a napkin.