July 2, 2024 Dinner Parties The Host By Alana Pockros I took the day off work to cook. Dad wore my apron and made the charoset and complained about how long it took to cut that many apples. Mom told me the soup tasted like nothing and made me go to Key Food to buy Better Than Bouillon. They were visiting New York to see my new apartment for the first time. Mom had always been in charge of preparing this meal when I was growing up, but for the first time, the tables were turned: I was hosting and we were eating at my house. She was older and more disabled now, which meant she could no longer use her hands to chop carrots and celery and fresh dill. So instead, she sat on a cane chair at the kitchen table she had just bought me from West Elm, tossing directions my way like a ringmaster. Read More
June 13, 2024 Dinner Parties The People Who Fight at Dinner Parties By Sarah Miller Oskar Schlemmer, Dinner Party, 1935. Public domain. I think most people like to walk away from a dinner party saying, “What a lovely evening.” I do. But I don’t feel compelled to do that. I know it’s not always possible. Also, I prefer people who don’t necessarily regard the warm glow of candlelight or the sound of a thirty-seven-dollar bottle of listán negro being poured into a glass as an automatic call for politeness, regardless of what is being said, or happening in the world. It’s commendable to walk into a dinner party assuming you’ll have a nice time but wise to prepare yourself for the wrong-thinking of your fellow guests. Read More
June 4, 2024 Dinner Parties Top Three Rivers By Christopher Chang The Nile River. Photograph by Vyacheslav Argenberg. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0. “Top three rivers. Go.” I wasn’t even sure I could name three rivers, let alone rank them, until Ruthie started rattling off her favorites. For most of dinner she had kept her twelve-year-old head buried in a stack of printer paper, only surfacing for the occasional bite of food. Her hair had grown into a long bob near her shoulders with a curtain of bangs that parted to reveal her face, resulting in us calling her Joey Ramone until her pleas of “Stoppppp” weighed more sincere than playful. She has since cut her hair. There were eight of us in total: Ruthie, her parents, another couple, a gallerist and one of her artists, and me. It was a cold night in January, and we enjoyed a hearty meal of risotto, roasted vegetables, and salad. I had come to New York from Los Angeles to use a free companion flight certificate that was due to expire, and I was ten, maybe fifteen minutes late, prompting the low-hanging chorus of “Well, he came all the way from California!” Read More
May 22, 2024 Dinner Parties Old Friends By Devon Brody From Cletus Johnson’s Details from “Winter,” a portfolio published in issue no. 68 of The Paris Review (Winter 1978). Marga was still living where she’d been at the time I’d left New Orleans, in a house shared with friends. On the first floor were Marga and her roommates, who I knew a little, though she continued to introduce us to one another. On the second floor lived more friends, and a piano, which one of them played sometimes, and which Marga and I could hear when we lay in her bed. It was February, I was visiting, and the city smelled of sweet olive, damp soil, and sometimes sweat. At sunset the light was as obscene as I’d remembered it, fluorescent oranges and pinks that someone once told me were so bright because of the chemical pollution. I had spent the week going on walks through the tall grass of the old golf course with people I hadn’t seen since I’d lived there, a span of a few years in which I had felt sometimes elated, often unhappy. I wasn’t unhappy anymore, which made things look and feel different, and made me wonder what it would be to come back more permanently, and who I could be then: if she would be a better version, or at least a version more able to appreciate her time. It was a work trip. I spent my first night with Marga, as planned, but then I moved to a hotel for a few days following a COVID exposure. My negative test on Friday allowed me back into Marga’s in time for the Shabbat dinner she wanted to host while I was in town, which was going to include us, Marga’s roommates, and a couple I’d asked Marga to invite, plus their dog. When the couple walked in, one half sat down and said to me, “It must feel so good to come back here and have a family waiting for you.” I was surprised, because I hadn’t really felt like that was true, but hearing her say it made me wonder if it was true: if I had left something behind that I hadn’t really realized I’d had, or if somehow in my absence it had thickened into something more real than what I had lived. Read More
May 13, 2024 Dinner Parties Story Time By Cynthia Zarin “Un Joyeux Festin.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 4.0. There was a time in my life when I went to many formal dinner parties. Were they parties, exactly? They were dinners orchestrated to celebrate something—a book, or an exhibition—or to raise money. Older and better-off friends often invited us to these events. I was young and newly married to my second husband. We had three and then four children, and pennies slipped through our fingers. For winter I owned a black dress with a keyhole neckline, and for spring a thrift-shop chiffon skirt and an embroidered tunic the color of spilled tea. I imagine our friends thought we would enliven the table. As I said, we went to many of these dinners, but one evening put a stop to it. It must have been springtime, as I was wearing my skirt and tunic. My husband wore his tuxedo. Before we left the apartment there was the usual brouhaha about his bow tie. In the movie version of Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin, Mr. Darling (Cyril Ritchard, who in an thrill-inducing about-face, also plays Captain Hook) cannot tie his bow tie properly and the scene devolves: he must tie his bow; he must go to this dinner; if he does not, he will lose his job, and the family will be in the poorhouse! He practices by tying it around a bedpost, but, after all, the bedpost can’t go to the party! My children had watched this movie perhaps fifty times, and whenever we went out to these dinner parties they would circle their father as he tried to tie his bow tie, chanting, To the poorhouse, to the poorhouse! As usual, in this grim ambience, we left them to their very tall babysitter, Ann, a Barnard student who looked like an elongated Alice; in the afternoons, she often took them across the park to the Met to see the mummies. Read More
May 9, 2024 Dinner Parties Death by Sea By Rosa Shipley Photograph by Isabel Dietz Hartmann. Heading to the dinner party, I wondered if people there would be able to tell that I was in crisis. Out the window of the Toyota Land Cruiser—on loan, from my uncle—islands and ocean floated past. I was on the car ferry from Lopez Island to San Juan Island, in the middle of the Puget Sound. It was February of 2020, and I was a few months into living on Lopez. I had moved from New York City, where I was from, so that I could help start a restaurant there. This restaurant, which would open in a dockside bar, had existed in many incarnations before our project. Now my team and I—food friends who would make their way in spring—were going to revamp it. I was twenty-four, earnest, electrified at my luck. But things had begun to go awry. Switching hands of the restaurant had caused local discord. Around town, strangers peppered me with questions about the future of the restaurant that I never seemed to answer in a satisfying way. The island’s Facebook groups were exploding with commenters fearful that outsiders were ruining something good, as dissident voices defended us with pleading emojis. At the worksite: anonymous, ominous notes. The island’s dogs had begun to bark at me. Insomnia and howling winds yawned unsettlingly into beautiful sunrise. I had come to the conclusion that the spirits of the island were angry with me. Everything felt big, dark, and personal. Read More