parties

I think I am done with parties for a while. At least throwing them. E and I threw one for my birthday over the weekend. It's a lot of effort: cleaning the house spotless, spending a few hundred bucks on 30 beers, writing Evites, obsessing over vast numbers of people for whom responding to an invitation is a Herculean/impossible task, fending off challenging parties set up at the last minute by the coworkers' social committee, and so on. But in the past it's been worth it in the end, worth the effort when the magic happens of bringing a whole bunch of different people together and seeing what happens when they meet each other.

Saturday's come-as-an-American theme party was successful, at least in terms of attendance. But we all know that attendance isn't the real story. It's the mix. It's the mix. It's the mix (backwards scratch) that makes a good party. And this party came up far short on the mixing. Very few guests left the comfort of their cliques to meet someone new standing just a few feet away. I don't know if this is an Iceland thing, or a thing with the crowd we had. But people coming over to my house and then standing around talking to people they already knew does not make a party, that's just me subsidizing people going out drinking with their friends.

It's nights like Saturday when I miss that "party sound": that ebb and flow of bubbly chatter, the fridge being squeezed open in a tight kitchen, "where do I put this?" and paper bag full of Maine microbrew, those sounds that carry so well out onto the street from a Somerville three-decker on a summer night.