On Parties

Kim and I are back home from Philadephia having put on an 80th birthday party for Carol, her mother. We rented the special event room at a local Irish pub she likes and invited a whole bunch of friends from her neighborhood and her past. Everyone had a great time, as near as I can tell, and Carol really loved seeing all her friends and so on.

I love parties. I love throwing them and I love going to them. Throwing them is, obviously, much more work, but in a way more rewarding because no one is going to make you leave early. I used to think that the best way to get invited to a lot of parties was to throw good ones. After 20 years of throwing what everybody said were really good parties in Philadelphia, though, and not ever being invited to any, I concluded that the best way to get invited to a lot of parties was to be friends with people who throw parties. Unfortunately for me none of our friends turned out to be those kind of people.

I said I love parties but it’s important to say that I don’t really love loud parties where you can’t hear anything. This makes me sound really old but actually I have always been like this. What I like are parties where you get to talk to a lot of interesting people, make connections, make new friends, catch up with old friends, and so on. This kind of party turns out to be actually really rare, which surprises me. Either my idea of a good party is radically off from everybody else’s, or what I think of as a good party is difficult to achieve. I’m going to go for the second thing since the first would just imply that I’m weird or iconoclastic, which may be true but not the point of this blog…

Ultimately I think good parties require forethought, mostly about who you invite. It’s a bit like planning a meeting. I used to think that you could plan a meeting just by grabbing everyone who has an interest in Topic X and making them talk about it, which is really not at all the case. Parties are the same, which unfortunately means sometimes you have to leave people out to make them good. And suddenly politics has come into the mix, and the risk of offending people, and so on. Maybe this is why people don’t throw more parties…

Ultimately though it is worth the effort. I’m sad we haven’t done more since we moved to Boston, since I think our apartment would make really a pretty good party locale. Maybe we’ll plan something for Memorial Day.