Cocktails, Dinner & Whine
(I never knew fresh basil was going to be so hard to find…Friday’s post continued…)
I moved the guest list to the back burner and forged ahead. Major mistake. Interesting guests and copious amounts of alcohol should be at the top of any hosts’ “To-Do” list. My planning continued to go south while all I wanted was to fit in up North. The menu was long and complicated, my chosen outfit, Junior League and stuffy, the table linens, monogrammed and pressed, the serving pieces, awkward and silver. Everything screamed pretension and inexperience.
By the time my virtually unknown guests and I (friends of friends of friends) were on to the third course, I had dark circles around my armpits and under my eyes. Everyone was miserable and there was no more wine to soften the edges of the disastrous picture I had painted.
The cheese platter was the end. It groaned with half a dozen imported wedges that the inevitably body-conscious (anorexic anywhere else in the US) guests would not touch. “Murray’s Cheese” was $60 richer and I was infuriated by their finicky eating. My saving grace: the patio mouse that scurried around the table and their absurdly over-priced Jimmy Choos. Horrified, the ladies exited stage left. Wisened, and still a little hungry, I stayed out in the warm August night and dreamed of the day when my New York would make sense, when friends of friends would smile sweetly and try to secure an invitation to my dinners and cocktails.
April 12th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
lucky you! having it over with. lie down, have a nice glass (or four) of red and a hot bath.
the other half and i currently have no kitchen of which to speak (its a microwave on a table with a utility sink and a rather rusty oven that is quite literally, falling apart)and thus, the threat of growing up and having to entertain remains completely elusive.
April 12th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
well, i think it was cool you even went to all that trouble in the first place. it sounds like a really good dinner to me. i hope your second try went better!
April 12th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
But if you think about it…isnt it the dinners that go all wrong, the most memorable ones? They’re the ones we talk about fondly, the ones we laugh the most at, and the ones that stick with us forever. Besides, isnt it also true that we are our worst critic?
April 13th, 2006 at 12:20 am
What ever happened to eat, drink and be merry? Who would turn down great cheese? Guess I am just not that body consious! Scratch that list and find some new dinner guests, huh?
April 13th, 2006 at 3:49 am
Send an invite south and we’d bring enough love and appreciation to cancel out most of the negative vibes,
And we can dress up real nicelike too.
April 13th, 2006 at 8:45 am
I would love to come to your parties. I throw so many of my own. My boyfriend and I and our friends consider the “dinner party” to be a blood sport.
Ok, I’m the one who named it, because one Valentine’s Day, I wanted to throw a dinner party based on ingredients that were associated with love: Pomegranates, lavender, oysters, rose syrup, etc. You get the idea.
Well the night before, I decided to roast a chicken for dinner. Now, you have to understand, I went to cooking school, apprenticed in a kitchen in NYC (where I learned I was not cut out for professional cooking where I had to work with mostly men, this was before Tony Bourdain’s book). So, I should have known better but I was lazy and decided to cut the string holding the legs together with a knife and cutting upwards towards my hand holding the fork … get it? Cut my tendon on my index finger and had to be rushed to hospital by a boyfriend who’s sqeamish. Had to have emergency surgery the next morning and then had to instruct said boyfriend, who is probably a better cook than I’ll ever be, in how to cook and assemble the dinner. I’m sure you know what he was thinking.
Of course, the most memorable part of this is that when we arrived home from the hospital the night before the dinner, BF said to me “well if you had JUST asked me before you left for the grocery store, I would have told you to get lamb chops and not a chicken for dinner.” ……….
April 13th, 2006 at 10:00 am
Belle, from your description, it doesn’t sound like you stuck to your plan about keeping it simple. I know, you wanted it to be perfect. As I understand it, if you’re working that hard to make it perfect, then there wasn’t a good chance that it would be.
$60 for wedges of cheese? I sounds like you spent a fortune trying to impress your guests. You hardly needed to do that, your company should have been enough.
On the bright side, you are more experienced, and it will allow you to better eliminate what doesn’t work.
So, when are you planning the next one?