Hosting Your Dream Party—An Introduction

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I used to really enjoy a good get together from time to time.  But I find that I have yet to get back some of the desire to attend social gatherings that I lost during the peak COVID-19 years.  Just as it takes many cups of coffee each morning to boost me up to the level of basic human functioning, it will perhaps take several post-pandemic years for me to shake off all the lingering effects of that enforced isolation.  For some reason, I just can’t get as excited about being invited to events as I used to be, and I find myself, more and more, coming up with excuses for not attending.  Perhaps this withdrawal is an aspect of aging, an incrementally increasing introversion, or a form of creeping misanthropy.

But perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I so rarely enjoyed, anyway, the many parties and other gatherings I’ve gone to over the years.  Most of them were never as fun as I expected them to be, including the ones I hosted.  It was always something.  A fight would break out, or somebody would break a tooth on a rabbit bone, or the music was too loud, or the crowd was too drunk, or I was too drunk, or not nearly drunk enough.  Always anticipating a great time at the start of the evening, I would all too often end up by the early morning hours feeling deflated, dejected, over-full, disappointed, and hangover-bound.

This has never been true, though, of any of the events I have hosted or attended within the grand venues of my own imagination.  These dream parties have always been a blast—lavish, lively, and packed to the rafters.

Appropriately, and as with so many things in my life, my inspiration for these make-believe get-togethers has come from another realm of the imagination: the world of the movies.

From an early age, I loved watching that certain style of old-fashioned film in which charming and sophisticated people do charming and sophisticated things.  These films could be anything from romantic comedies to murder mysteries, mob dramas to horror films, but they always featured principal characters who knew how to dress well, banter well, and conduct themselves with a certain degree of panache, whether they were falling in love, plotting a heist, or offing each other with poison or guns.  Mostly, these stories took place in Paris, London, Rome, and especially New York.  My favourite parts of the flicks were always the scenes involving elegant dinner parties or cocktail parties.  There is such pleasure to be had from watching suave people who know how to live life well rendered in crisp black-and-white.

As a tough-minded and pragmatic adolescent, I dreamed of one day making it rich in the lucrative field of writing weird poetry, and then moving to Manhattan.  I might not become a wealthy tycoon myself, but by virtue of my columns in Paris Match and The New Yorker, I would certainly be hobnobbing with the sorts of people who threw cocktail parties in penthouses overlooking Central Park, or invited their friends to dinner aboard their private airships as they drifted above the rooftops.

I could picture these dream parties, the fanciful festivities, right down to the smallest detail, from the shrimp canapes to the languidly turning ceiling fans.  There would be Venetian masks and mylar balloons.  There would be jazz bands, of course, and caviar, and magicians roaming through the crowd, and waiters twisting bottles of champagne deeper into buckets of shaved ice.

I don’t like to brag, but I consider myself to have quite a flair for putting together imaginary soirees.  So, in my never-ending quest to be ever more frivolous, over the course of the next couple of columns, I plan to offer up my own little banquet of tips and hacks for any readers out there who may wish to vary the usual humdrum weekend bashes with false friends and irritating co-workers by putting together the occasional shindig in their very own minds.  In these next columns I will be providing suggestions related to choosing a suitable setting, what food and drink to serve, establishing a theme, what music to listen to, inspiring good conversation and, critically, who to include in the guest list.

I really hope you will join me here for that, so please consider this your personally engraved invitation.