The few-party system

Patti Jo and I don’t go to many parties, but we go to more than I want to go to, which means that there’s a certain amount of dragging involved.

Patti Jo’s view is that it’s good for us to get out as a couple occasionally. My view is that here at home we know all the people and animals; why take chances?

Last Saturday her view had more going for it, so we went to a party.

It was a get-together at a friend’s house to honor Nancy Blade, the outgoing Laguna Beach High School principal, and we attended along with 80 or 90 other people.

Afterward, as we were leaving, it occurred to me that it had been considerably different from the parties I overheard as a kid or went to later as a pretend grown-up.

Oh, I suppose if I’d been sitting up a stairwell listening it would’ve sounded the same, with that unintelligible animated adult crowd noise that we make when we get in a bunch. But the air was clear.

My parents’ cocktail parties were smoky affairs, and when I got old enough to throw my first parties, they were smoky and drinky both.

As a young man, I even developed my own drinking-smoking party style, which became ritualistic and invariable. In every party conversation, I would follow this procedure or recipe:

Inhale one lungful of cigarette smoke. Follow with one swallow of alcoholic beverage, and then speak, so that the smoke comes out in little spurts with every other syllable. Repeat till 3 a.m.

You can’t get much more sophisticated than that and remain upright. Sometimes I’d take an extra big drag on my True Blue and the smoke wouldn’t come out until the following afternoon.

The trouble with becoming dependent upon such a system is that you can’t sustain it very long without expiring, and when you finally manage to give it up, you’ve lost your conversational props and you’re never comfortable at a party again.

It helps to learn as you grow older that practically nobody else is comfortable at a party either, so you might as well go if there’s food ? and our hosts prepared quite a spread for us on Saturday. There were appetizers, followed by roast beef and salmon with rice and asparagus and little muffiny things, none of which was ever served at any party of mine in the old days. There was also Diet Pepsi ? my present drug of choice ? and a bar for those who hadn’t lost their privileges.

Finally, there was congenial company, in a group whose common bond was a desire to make a gesture of thanks to Nancy Blade for her dedication to Laguna’s children. So we ate and talked and thanked her, and we left feeling that it had been an enjoyable, worthwhile evening.

And I believe that was the biggest difference between this party and the parties I used to go to is that I felt good after this one.