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Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

(Bloomberg) -- Danny and Shawna Birdsall met at a club in Amagansett on Fourth of July weekend in 2004, when they were in their 20s -- a classic Hamptons love story.

By 2010, they were married and Danny was settled into a job at Morgan Stanley. Their son Drew was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia about 10 days before his third birthday.

Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

“It took us about three days to decide to take him to St. Jude, and we never looked back,” Danny Birdsall said Saturday in Water Mill at the fifth annual Hope in the Hamptons benefit.

The Birdsalls moved to Memphis, Tennessee, for Drew’s 2 1/2 years of treatment at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where Morgan Stanley let Danny work remotely. Six years later, they still call it home -- but the family hasn’t given up their summers on the South Fork.

Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

For the past five years, they’ve returned to Water Mill, where he’s the star of the St. Jude fundraiser with his younger sister, Layla, who was nine months old when Drew was diagnosed. The grandparents founded the event and contribute the horsey theme: David Birdsall is a blacksmith specializing in horse hoofs.

Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

So there glowing in early evening sunlight as horse jumpers performed in an open field were Brett McGonegal, who left his investment-banking life in Hong Kong to raise his family on the East End, and Robert Zavell, an equities derivatives trader.

Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer
Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

The event has become a favorite of Wall Streeters and plenty of other members of the community drawn to the Birdsalls’s story.

“About half of my parishioners are here,” said Rev. Sarah Bigwood of First Presbyterian Church in Southampton.

Drew, 9 years old and cancer free, started his summer in mud camp -- “It’s basically mud, you play in the mud,” he said -- and water skiing in Wisconsin.

In the Hamptons, he likes riding his grandfather’s tractor and going to the beach, because, as he noted with dismay, there are no beaches in Memphis, only swimming pools. It’s also muggier in Memphis.

Drew’s parents learned of St. Jude roughly a year before their son’s diagnosis, while attending a fundraiser in Chicago. They’ve embraced the opportunity to educate others about what makes the hospital special.

At St. Jude, “Your kid doesn’t realize what he’s going through,” Danny Birdsall said. “They will do everything possible to make sure your kid is comfortable, and walking in with a smile on his face, and really doesn’t realize the gravity of the situation.”

Shawna Birdsall added, “Kids are showing up with their IV tubes, with their masks on, and everyone else looks the same, so it becomes normal, and they feel like just a kid.”

Meanwhile, a few miles away, the Parrish Art Museum hosted its Midsummer Party honoring Maya Lin and Leonard and Louise Riggio.

Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

Goldman Sachs M&A co-head Michael Carr and a director of the firm, Adebayo Ogunlesi, were seated for dinner (squash three ways, black cod, confetti cake) on the museum’s patio, along with artist Ross Bleckner and the directors of three museums: the Parrish’s Terrie Sultan, the Whitney’s Adam Weinberg and the New Museum’s Lisa Phillips.

Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer
Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

Artist Shantell Martin, who played Yahtzee by the pool at the home of her host Larry Milstein earlier in the day, brought an existential flair to the occasion by passing out stickers reading, “You Are You.” (For more of her philosophical probing, see her installation on Governor’s Island.)

Citi’s Alan MacDonald took in the scene with Stormy Byorum, founder of Cori Investment Advisors, and two artists visiting from Brazil.

Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer
Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

As the museum’s theater turned into a dance floor, complete with disco ball and fabulous photo booth, others including Anna Nikolayevsky and Yan Assoun kept to the well-lit galleries while iPhones chimed with alerts about the blackout on Manhattan’s West Side.

John Paulson showed off a photo of his claiming a trophy in doubles tennis at the Meadow Club, while Assoun said he and his wife, Polina Proshkina, had worked out that day at Tracy Anderson before having lunch at Tutto il Giorno in Southampton.

Wall Street Gets Horsey in Water Mill to Fight Children's Cancer

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill, Peter Eichenbaum

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