10. Lunchables: Let's destroy the environment AND our kids's digestive systems!
9. Meg Ryan's career: hammily aware of the camera, she's just so damned awful in everything she's ever done. I don't get it.
8. People who flap their fingers at their eyes when the risk of tears appears. As though they might undo the eyelid job or something. Why?
7. The celebrity industry. I just don't even know what to say. I mean, even when there's really not even a guilty pleasure involved in following them, when they are so achingly boring that I... I can't even finish this thought.
6. Cocktail parties: no thanks, I'll stay home and re-sort my socks.
5. Keanu Reeves' career. I don't care if he has symmetrical features or whatever. They make him even duller than he might be otherwise, say if he had Owen Wilson's nose or something. And I'm including Speed. In comparison, the bus gave an Oscar-winning performance.
4. Scrapbooking: why? WHY????
3. Pop-classic "artists". Oooh... they're not quite pop, they're not classic. They could try to do one or the other really well, but no... they're just MORONICALLY DULL IN EVERY RESPECT.
2. Concious cruelty.
and...
1. Bearing in mind the fact that war makes a pile of people a pile of money and so economically I sort of understand, I still have to ask WHY???
8 comments:
The trouble with cocktail parties today is that the old-fashioned cocktail party has gone the way of the dodo.
In the old days, a cocktail party meant 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. People came and went during that time period. By 7, everyone had vanished. People moved on, to the theatre, to dinner, or for a long walk in the rain with an enchanting new friend. The food served was simple: olives, carrot curls, little pickled onions, and celery or belgian endive stuffed with cream and Roquefort cheese, tiny codfish balls.
Perhaps some little sandwiches--with simple fillings like cream cheese and chives, or chopped egg with curry powder.
As for drinks, two kinds of cocktails were enough. One containing gin and one whisky or rum. Or a pitcher of martinis. Sherry. Tomato juice.
Nowadays, people think cocktail parties mean staying till all hours...no one leaves. Harried hostesses are put upon to serve more food and drink than is technically correct for a proper cocktail party.
One throws up ones hands at this modern era.
LH, I feel your pain.
However the pain of cocktail parties for me, is the mingling mindlessness. I agree that a short and sweet occasion (as you describe) is all the better, and all the better to escape from if bores abound. If you find a convivial companion for conversation, well that's just splendid.
For me the best gathering is a dinner party of about eight people, who possess curiosity about each other (how many of us has turned into an interviewer for the evening when lumped with entire rooms of dullards?) and the world at large.
I don't exaggerate about the interview process. I attended a party a couple of years ago, where I literally interviewed about six people in the course of two hours. They were magnificently, excruciatingly self-interested and yet entirely lacking in anything worth relating. I left early. I recall walking down the street and thinking... never again.
And for this ideal dinner party, I love it when we linger at the table into the wee hours. The candles cast such a lovely glow on the contented faces. The drink flows freely, the cheese is nibbled. The banter is sublime. The heated political and social debates fall into goodnatured ribbing ere long, and - if you are lucky to be the hostess of such a gathering - you finally see your happy guests out in the wee hours, blow out the almost non-existent candles, cast a look about the shambles of your well-loved home, and stagger to bed, full of wine and good feelings about the world.
As you collapse into bed, Cary Grant or his exact replica, lies down beside you and soothingly rubs your tired feet!
"Another magnificent evening, I don't know how you do it!" he murmurs....
Your last comment reminds me....of a long ago time, when I was a teen with a prized regular customer. Prized because it was regular income: I had a standing Saturday morning babysitting assignment while the lady of the house went shopping with her mother. The two kiddies were easily entertained by Saturday morning cartoons, the house was large and rambling, but best of all: 1) they had malt bread, which I would toast and butter and eat to my heart's delight, and 2)they often entertained on Friday nights and part of my job was cleaning up the remnants of the party from the night before...which invariably included stray bottles with a couple finger's worth of booze left at the bottom. I would take a cautious sip or two of this mysterious, forbidden liquid. Usually, truth be told, I didn't like what I tasted, but sometimes...I did!
Yes, yes and yes. Sigh.
Don't you mean, "Yes, Cary", and "Yesss, Cary!" ?
Yes... and yes.
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