my supper

X had a soirée last evening in the city’s suburbs. I sat at home and finished viewing the second season of the series Rescue Me. A socially-driven comparison of our respective events would be embarrassing - she thinks of Rescue Me as nothing more than a soap opera for guys. I think of it as an evening drama for guys that’s filled with lots of profanity, sex, firefighting, strange hallucinations, violence, addictions, and completely flawed characters. I’ll guess that none of those terms could be used to describe her evening of catered food and wine. Actually, there are probably flawed characters populating the beltway ‘burbs. I get the impression that the topics of conversation lean a bit too much toward vacation destinations, some USA Today shallow topics (my term), and the generally inane subject matter of hard-charging people. The problem here is that you’ve got a group having dinner and drinks that's too much like a game of soccer with 9 year-old players. If you’ve ever seen one of these games you’ll recognize the analogy. If not, picture two teams of kids 'playing' soccer yet all of the players are constantly glommed together in an amoeba-like pile of yelling amateurs. There’s no spacing between players and they all seem to be trying to do the same thing: either kick the ball or kick the other kid in the shins. Eventually, the ball acccidentally pops out of the nucleus and one kid takes a run at the poor goalie sitting down and playing in the dirt in front of their net. The dinner party idea often turns into that Saturday morning little league soccer game – you might think you have two teams, or at least more than one, when in fact you have only one big old group of chuckleheads moving about in a cloud of dust and confusion. The one interesting and different person at the table is like that goalie…they’ll eventually get to play but it’s purely by accident.

I’m having a dinner party and inviting eight guests. I thought about inviting ten but I’ve got no interest in cooking for that many people and, quite frankly, probably don’t have enough people I’m interested in inviting. Here’s the opening salvo for a seating chart for my gala.

Fire away.

T.