A Ridiculously Long Post About Parties

Parties terrify me. (Stop laughing, J.) Really, they do. Every time we have a party, I am convinced, in the hours before, that this time we have made our worst mistake ever, and I vow never to do it again. Every time I go to a party, it is only after deciding numerous times not to go, coming up with an elaborate strategy for success and an escape plan in case of failure, and, finally, donning a mantle of fatalism. Of course the parties almost always turn out fine, but the fear is inescapable.

What I fear is very specific: the flop. The party where nobody shows up, or, even worse, a few people show up and hover awkwardly about, aware that the right thing would have been not to come so as to miss this visible failure. If you don’t see it, you can pretend it’s not happening, even if your absence helped cause the fiasco.

As I said, this rarely happens. We’ve had a lot of parties, and they’ve pretty much all been successful, except for one party in Red State Capital City Suburb which everyone else thought was fine but I could tell wasn’t working, or at least wasn’t working as well as it could have. But that was a work-related obligation kind of party, which leads to the point of this post, only I’m not going there yet.

Despite the plethora of pleasant parties in which I have participated, I once attended the party of my nightmares, so I know it can happen. The long version of that party involves a seductive guy who turned out to be a pathological liar (I first wrote paradoxical for pathological, which seems telling), the Grateful Dead on New Year’s Eve, an eventually-to-be-famous poet, a bunch of would-be junkies (some of whom eventually became real junkies), my sister telling me she loved me a lot (Amber can guess why), and did I mention the Grateful Dead?

But I’m going with the short version. A long time ago (I’m thinking 1985), my sister and I went out to California to see the Grateful Dead on New Year’s Eve. I had a friend who grew up in the Berkeley hills, and another friend was staying with her, and I’m pretty sure they went to see the Grateful Dead too, though who went where when is understandably hazy. Anyway, the friend who lived in the Berkeley hills invited us to her mother’s New Year’s Day brunch.

My sister and I were staying in this crazy student house in the Berkeley flats where you had to go outside to get to the second floor and there was not a lot of food. We went to the Homemade Café every morning for breakfast, and then maybe we ate burritos? Brunch in the hills sounded like a very good idea indeed.

We showed up around eleven. My friend and her mom were putting out an enormous and beautiful spread of food. The only thing I specifically remember was an entire side of smoked salmon, but that can be taken as symbolic of both quantity and quality. We hung around the kitchen while they finished up. Then we moved to the living room and chatted. Eventually we started picking a bit at the food.

You can tell where this is going.

Nobody. Not a soul. No phone calls to apologize. No nothing. At some point, my friend said that her mother must have forgotten to invite people. At the time, I just assumed the mother was crazy, but maybe my friend was so embarrassed that was all she could think of to say. My sister, the other friend, and I pretended everything was ok. Eventually we pulled chairs up to the buffet table and settled in. I never ate so much smoked salmon in my life.

I’ve told this story many times. But until just now, I never realized that in fact we had a great time, even though the party fear had been realized. So maybe parties always do turn out ok?

Definitely not. Because there are parties and then there are obligations. And we are faced with three obligations in the next week, and the fear is taking over. There is the party for parents at M’s school, the party for members of our synagogue who live in Town, and the Super Bowl party at S’s restaurant.

The Super Bowl party is pretty easy. S is excited and so are the girls. I have about as much interest in football as I do in the barbecue they will be serving (which is to say, none). Nice people, but S's friends, not mine. Easy solution: send him off with the girls, and I’m going to the movies.

The party for parents at M’s school is a bit more problematic, but my path is clear. This one has serious potential for awkwardness, but I feel like, as a new member of the community, I really should go and meet people and make a good impression. However, S will be at work, and I am certainly not going to a party with dancing and pool tables and lots of people I don’t know alone. End of story. (In Red State Capital City Suburb, I did go to such parties alone, but in Red State Capital City Suburb I had a posse, and that’s a totally different situation.)

I’m not quite sure about the synagogue party. S will be home, so the going alone problem is solved. We already know a bunch of people from our synagogue in Town, and we like them. So the party has potential. But do people actually go to these parties? What if they don’t and we do and we feel like idiots? What if they do and we don’t and we feel like idiots? Oy. Luckily it’s not for another week, so I have plenty of time to decide not to go, come up with an elaborate strategy for success and an escape plan in case of failure, and, finally, if necessary, don my mantle of fatalism. It’s hanging in the closet.