The plate was set for a return to social dining.
A friend who recently moved to East Rock called last week inviting us to a dinner party.
A dinner party? Leave the house? Eat with other people? Change my sweatpants?
“Don’t worry. All the guests have been vaccinated,” she said. However, the event was only two days away, and in the Land of Steady Habits public spontaneity is a violation of, I believe, Connecticut Statute 4871b.46. Even so, we accepted.
In the interim between invitation and the actual event, I dusted off memories of previous dinner parties in years when attending was not a health hazard, except if the host for the evening was a ghastly cook.
In the summer of 2019, politics became physically threatening. We invited friends to a backyard gathering at our home. It all went well at first.
The Weber grill did its job, the Tuscan wine flowed, laughter was the language of the night, and the weather couldn’t have been more accommodating.
It seemed that the evening would end triumphantly. But, well, you know what happens when you think that.
One of the guests was a woman who had charmed us all. And then, out of the fading blue, a friend of hers showed up. He was a big fellow, and seemed congenial, as he took a seat right next to me. But then for some reason, he felt it necessary to indicate the need to reelect the person who then occupied the Oval Office, “the greatest president ever.” He then put forward a encyclopedia of conspiracy theories, and the hypothesis that it is people like me who are the real threat to America.
Mind you, he had the audacity to espouse these views right in the heart of the People’s Republic of New Haven.
I poured him some Montepulciano in the hopes that alcohol would reduce his fever. But he carried on, and it became necessary for me to speak up, objecting to his points in the most strenuous terms. I did this even though I knew well what Mark Twain had advised: “Never argue with a fool. Onlookers will not be able to tell the difference.”
This fellow had a broad chest and bulging muscles, and it would have done me no good to challenge him to a fistfight, which I last undertook in the sixth grade with Stanley Zowitz, leading to a painful result.
Fortunately, one of the other guests at the table had mastered the art of talking down even the most ardent of nincompoops. The fellow left without laying a glove on me, and eventually the evening’s temperature was lowered.
This, however, was far from the only uncomfortable dinner party. There was, for example, the event Suzanne and I produced as our contribution to a charity fundraiser.
The winning bid of $800 for “Dinner for 8 at 8, Dress to the Nines,” was bought by four couples who banded together to come to our house for a formal affair, in which I would play the piano, and Suzanne would serve a truffle-themed dinner. However…. Because many people were involved, and schedules were complicated, there was some back and forth over the date for the event, and something got lost in the cacophony.
One Saturday night, we were getting ready to retire for the evening when we heard cars pull up in the driveway. Indeed, the four couples had arrived, each dressed, as requested, to the Nines.
One of the women came up the steps carrying a large bouquet of flowers and a ribboned bottle of wine.
“We’re so excited,” she said. “I know Suzanne is a marvelous cook, and we’ve haven’t eaten all day.” She then stared up and down, as we were wearing our bed clothes.
“What?” she said. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
In our minds we had planned for the party to occur two weeks hence, and tried to explain this to our exasperated guests. Not only were we not attired for the occasion but, alas, we’d been away for a few days and there wasn’t anything to offer them other than peanut butter and Raisin Bran.
They didn’t think that was funny. Nor did we.
In our effort to evade serious scorn, we called around to local restaurants to make a reservation for the eight people. But as it was a Saturday night, not a table could be found. The woman who brought the flowers and wine scooped them up in a huff and left.
When things calmed down a few days later, we established a raincheck date. I put on my tuxedo. Suzanne put on a beautiful dress and filled the champagne flutes on a tray by the front door where we planned to greet them. Candles flickered and fresh flowers had begun to open, as both set a dreamy tableau. The piano was tuned, and I was ready with a new version of Frank Sinatra’s 1944 hit “A Lovely Way to Spend An Evening.”
They arrived right on time. But when they got out of their cars, we noticed that something was up. None of them were in formal clothes. All had on robes and pajamas.
The joke was on us, and we had a good laugh. Joy reigned once again in Dinner Party Land.
Opening day: Guests opine on politics before turning to baseball.
As to last week’s event produced by our East Rock neighbor, it turned out that while rust had us all off our games for a few seconds, soon we were back at familiar topics.
It was interesting to see what the guests thought to wear on this occasion. One woman stayed in her “at home for a year” comfort clothes, dark colors, although her husband shone in a blousy orange shirt and Hartford Whalers cap. Our host outshone us all, as she should, also in orangey Indian dress and flowing pants.
In the first few minutes, sitting in the breezy and comfortable back yard for the cocktail hour, we dived right into matters that brought nods of recognition.
One of the guests, an old friend of mine, began a theme that lasted throughout the evening. When we spoke of the pandemic, or Georgia’s new oppressive voting law, or how much we have missed the theater and concerts, somehow baseball, which had just started its season, came up.
So, in the same breaths where we mentioned Dr. Jonas Salk or the King of Jordan or, pardon the expression, Congressman Matt Gaetz, there were also interspersed comments about icons of the diamond from our era.
We reviewed the merits of Casey Stengel, Satchel Paige, Marvelous Marv Throneberry, Bill Mazeroski, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, Al Rosen, and Ted Kluszewski (“The Big Klu”) as well as the general consensus around the table that whenever the Yankees lose the pennant, a national holiday should follow.
I was in heaven, especially when we refuted the movie line, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Some of us recounted crushing moments that reminded us of the old saw, “Baseball is not a matter of life and death. It’s more important than that.”
Not only was the food wonderful, but I had the occasion, which I always seek, to point out that the Cleveland Indians are Connecticut’s home team. That’s because it’s the Cleveland club, not the Yankees or Red Sox, that plays on land of Connecticut’s Western Reserve. (As Casey Stengel often said, you could look it up.)
I poured another glass of wine, and thought: Gee, it’s really nice to be back in mid-season form and in civilization again.