How to Party

In New York City, people show up for free drinks….

Each year, around this time, I used to throw a big, noisy party in my apartment in New York. And each year, as I plan the guest list and order the food and drinks and generally fret about the arrangements, I try to keep the following story in mind.

Years ago, when an older friend of mine moved to New York City from Iowa, his sophisticated man-about-town uncle gave him some advice.

“Within the first six months of your arrival,” his uncle told him, “throw a party.”

After six months in the city, the uncle reasoned, my friend would have met enough people to fill his apartment during the cocktail party hours of five and eight o’clock. (This was back in the days when people actually had cocktail parties, with drinks and cigarettes and tipsy after-work flirtations.) His uncle told him that the key to being invited to parties is to throw one of your own, and the whole point of moving to New York was to be invited to parties, so don’t waste any time planning the first bash.

My friend thanked his uncle for his advice, but wasn’t sure he could pull it off.

“What if nobody comes?” he asked.

“In New York City,” his uncle answered, “people will show up for free drinks.”

Besides, his uncle explained, the best thing about a cocktail party is that it comes with its own time limit. By eight o’clock people are shuffling off to their dinner plans — or making them on the spot with a new acquaintance. Just be ready at five o’clock to receive guests, he was told, because people in New York love any excuse to leave work early.

It all sounded way too expensive to my friend, who was a young attorney just out of law school.

His uncle had an answer for that, too.

“Buy the cheapest liquor you can find, set it out on a table with mixers and cups — whatever you have, mixed up, coffee mugs, it doesn’t matter — and plenty of ice. Get a big supermarket ham, glaze the hell out of it, heat it up and serve it with rye bread and mustard. Done.”

It didn’t seem glamorous enough for New York sophisticates, my friend said. His uncle waved that concern off, too.

People, he said with the confidence of man who had cut a swath through New York City society in the 1950’s, are simple creatures. They just want to be invited someplace. They want to meet some new people, have some fun, get a little loose after work, and eat a sandwich. People, he said, even really fancy people, don’t want fancy. They want fun.

My friend often tells the story of his first cocktail party, executed with strict adherence to his uncle’s directives. It was a smash hit. From his description, it was a little like the packed cocktail party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, without the broken glass or the utterly racist depiction of the Japanese upstairs neighbor, played with buck teeth and Coke-bottle glasses by Mickey Rooney.

The place was filled with laughter and cigarette smoke. (This was 1972.) Nobody noticed, or cared, that the liquor was bottom-shelf and the ham was oddly-shaped and covered in pineapple slices. “Nobody ever does,” his uncle reminded him later.

The party was a success, and it also accomplished the larger mission, which was to get my friend invited to a lot of other parties, to embroil him in a few disastrous love affairs, and eventually, a few years later, to introduce him to his future wife — who it turns out had actually been at his apartment for his very first party, but in the crush of guests and comings-and-goings she never got the chance to meet her host.

I tell myself this story every year, because as I plan a party of my own I need to remember that the best parties are a little unruly, a little too full, and decidedly low-rent when it comes to food and drink. That may be true of life in general, when you think about it.