TracyFood

On dinner parties. 19 March 2008 7:21 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking, friends, identity, politics, responsibility, school, time versus money, work , trackback

Oh, lady. Stuff White People Like wins again with yesterday’s post on dinner parties, a subject I’ve written about on a few memorable occasions. The following little essaylet, first posted on Everything2.com on September 1, 2001, tells the story of one such occasion. (Writing it was another, and I suppose reposting it here is yet one more, in a very meta way.)

* * * * *

For years and years, my parents have belonged to a club that treated its members to gourmet dinner parties, sometimes in restaurants, but also for some time hosted at members’ homes and prepared in a prescribed potluck style by the guests, who were given recipes for dishes selected to fit the evening’s theme. In addition to these smaller seasonal events (four times a year; you figure it out) the club — ominously named The Establishment — used to meet in its entirety twice a year for an annual formal, black tie dinner in January and a much more informal outdoor picnic/barbecue in July. The venues for these latter two events were fixed for years, at the homes of the club members with the most extensive silverware, glassware, and flatware collection, and the largest back yard, respectively. But I digress.

As a result of my parents’ participation in those black-tie dinners, I learned quite a bit about the workings of the dinner party, first-hand, by working as part of its catering staff (with the help of a rotating roster of friends recruited to help) for five years in a row (the pay got better every time, especially when I returned to “the annual dinner” as a starving college student). However, I believe that it was as a result of this experience that I failed to earn a potentially valuable scholastic distinction during my senior year of high school.

I’m not exactly sure what qualifications made me a candidate for the Presidential Scholar Award (having spanked the SAT probably helped), but after all my college and scholarship applications were finished, I found myself called upon to write yet another, complete with essay. I gamely set myself to the task, but in the end the prescribed essay topic was just too painful for me.

My memory is not exact, but the general gist of the essay question was, “If you could host a dinner party for three famous people, living or dead, whom would you invite, what would you discuss with them, and why?” Bleaugh, I thought, don’t these people know how much work it is to throw a dinner party? And so my essay response was born.

Long story short, I wrote a polite, well-worded statement explaining that I knew how much work a formal dinner party entailed, and that since I, a seventeen-year-old senior in high school, could not possibly afford to hire a team of kids like me to staff the kitchen, I would end up spending all of my time making the dinner party happen instead of engaged in deeply thought-provoking conversation with historical notables, so I’d rather invite my three best friends over to chat while I made pizza. Suffice it to say I never even heard back from the Presidential Scholar people.

In retrospect, of course, it was a pretty obnoxious thing for me to do. But I maintain that I did the right thing, if only because I had so much fun doing it. If I had the chance to write that essay again, it would probably be way more obnoxious. The social class assumptions implicit in the essay question are so unpleasant they make me wonder if I read it right. Then again, given that there’s a linear relationship between mean SAT scores and parental income, it’s probably not unreasonable for that award application to reflect a little classism in its design. Still, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And besides, fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.