’Tis the season for parties. We may be anti-social for the rest of the year, but between Thanksgiving and New Year, we feel the urge, or even the compulsion, to go to parties – and to even give one.
Parties are hard work for the hosts, and even more for the guests. Some of us don’t have good party-going skills. I wish I had a fund of interesting small talk, but I don’t. Sometimes I worry that I’m one of those people, like Britain’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, of whom it was said that “He can brighten up a room just by leaving it.”
In this dilemma, as in so many others, my Bible is Parkinson’s Law by the great C. Northcote Parkinson – one of the most useful books ever written about how to get along in society. Parkinson recommends the following strategy: arrive at the party forty-five minutes late when the room is full, circulate around clockwise (the natural human flow pattern), avoid the corners where introverts gather, avoid the middle of the room, where loud and over-confident people gather, never sit down, and don’t get into deep conversations with people you see every day. The latter habit, says Parkinson, is the sure mark of a loser. Having circulated once and spoken to or smiled at all the guests briefly, linger conspicuously by the door for five minutes and then quietly slip away. Everybody at the party will remember that you were there, and how sociable you were, but the whole performance should have taken no more than thirty minutes.
I used to enjoy parties more and stay longer. I’m sometimes nostalgic for the lively English village where I lived for some years. A party there might start at eleven at night on Saturday and end sometime on Tuesday morning. But I don’t get invited to parties like that anymore.
This may be because they don’t exist. Parties have become shorter and more sober. We are living in a new age of moral Puritanism. Parties and Puritanism don’t go together, as any teenager can tell you. Smoking and drinking are as essential to a good party as music, but these traditional pleasures are heading for extinction.
Smokers are treated pretty much the way lepers were in the Middle Ages. I don’t smoke myself, but I know it’s powerfully soothing, and it’s a great social facilitator, look at all those old movies where boy meets girl in a cloud of smoke. Smoking is banned almost everywhere now, even in Irish pubs, which I still find unbelievable.
So, effectively, we already have a tobacco prohibition. Now that we have a teetotal president, we may be only a few steps away from the kind of Prohibition that America enjoyed in the 1920s. Because we live so far apart in the suburbs, social drinking is obviously dangerous. But it does happen, I’m sorry to say, and it’s not the only risky thing. Every week, we read in the local press about parties ending in gunfire, as guests are driven to violence by too much warm Chardonnay. This is a discouraging trend for older partygoers like us who go out to celebrate unarmed.
The age of the classic, out-of-control party, which began with the Roman Saturnalia, seems to be fading into oblivion. But we have our memories, or at least we think we do.
