The Dinner Party

"If that jerk breaks my chair I'll break his leg!"

Maybe we've all been mislead by romantic stories of the first Thanksgiving. It could have been the first dinner party disaster. After all, most dinner parties are disasters. What other activity requires you to dress up to spill gravy on your chest? Holy Time Warp! They don't even have dinner parties anymore!
If you're a baby boomer you might remember those evenings when your mom got the good dress on, and your dad left his tie on after work. It meant there would be "company" for dinner. They don't have "company" any more, either.
When people come over, they're called "people," as in "we're having some people over for dinner."

Those were ugly nights for the kids. We had to put on clean clothes and smile but not say anything for an hour while the company feasted on our mom's leg of lamb. Holy Hocks! They don't have leg of lamb anymore either.

My mother, Betty Crocker

We'd use the best china, and the candles would be lit. No saucepans full of gravy were allowed on the table, which was decked in my mother's hand-crocheted tablecloth. At some point during the meal, she would be sure that the company knew it was hand-crocheted by her. She was clever, saying something like, "Don't worry about that drop of gravy on the cloth, Harry. When I hand-crocheted this cloth I used washable thread."

The one thing you might do was tip your chair, but you would pay for it later. Our mom never corrected us publicly; that would have been an admission that we weren't perfect. But she could stare a hold through you with her Betty Crocker eyes, and you could be sure you'd be doing extra chores for a week.

There wasn't much to do after the first ten minutes. We kids would have done all the right stuff: kept quiet, passed the food, smiled, and kept our elbows off the table, while kicking the heck out of each other under the table. You couldn't be excused until the dessert was over and the adults were having coffee, and the men were lighting up their  Chesterfield cigarettes.

Maybe it's better the dinner party is gone. I won't miss it any more than Ed Sullivan on TV or my maiden aunts coming over on Sunday and pretending to like kids. But I still get a really bad feeling whenever I feel like tipping my chair.