Regina's Rants

All parties are outstanding, but some are more than others for all the right (or wrong) reasons.  Once in a while, something triggers a specific memory, and I hurtle into long-past moments.  And sometimes I don’t even need to attend a party to have all the joy of being present.

Chilli & Balinese Dancers    

Bachelor (Need I say more?) had invited a select group to his wonderful home in Jakarta.  The dinner table was in the garden and we enjoyed a Balinese dinner:  sate lilit, chicken marinated in coconut milk and spices and chilli;  babi guling, skewered pork in spices and chilli;  sambal matah, a mix of ingredients and chillies.  And so on.  Spices and chillies garbed every dish.  Except the white sticky rice.  Didn’t Bachelor know that Balinese party rice has to be turmeric yellow, arranged in the shape of a large cone atop banana leaves?

A vivacious group of Balinese dancers entertained us.  Their makeup exaggerated their eyes and caterpillar eyebrows;  they would look formidable on a stage, but at such short distance they looked scary, something that some of my co-guests ignored, given their half-glazed admiration of the danseuses.  Their hands twirled to the melodious gamelan music coming out of a boombox (Remember them?), and they writhed in their multicoloured sarongs and tight tops, their bottoms looking and behaving like a pendulum. The dancers’ gold-coloured headdresses shed bits here and there, like an ill-planned confetti shower.  Talking with the dancers afterwards, I learned they had come from Java itself and had never set foot in Bali. And they were Moslems during their time off.

Between dishes à la chillies and gamelan music, of course there was some conversation.  I tried to woo a guy on my right, for I wanted the assignment to write about one of his large company’s programs in Java. (Don’t blame me, everyone flirts for much less than a big fat cheque. And it’s called networking.)

We discussed how the article could be slanted, and by the end of the evening he had turned Assignment Boss.  By then the Balinese dancers had disbanded to the Bachelor’s bedroom, and we said goodbye, lovely-to-see-you-dahling, kiss-kiss, oh, what a fun evening! Let’s do it again!

Some people left, but I had learned a hard lesson in Jakarta: empty your bladder before leaving home and getting into a car.  At any time of the day or night, you never know how long you are going to be caged in the car due to macet, traffic that does not move for interminable hours. So I headed to the loo.  I opened the door, only to find a man sat on the throne, wiping his arse. He looked like the proverbial rabbit caught in the headlights.  He was Assignment Boss.

Why didn’t he lock the loo door?  There was no lock, as I found out later.  Bachelor didn’t care much about embarrassing his guests at times of need.

No-Show

The best party I’ve never been to was a surprise birthday party thrown by a guy’s bit on the side, in Brasília.  Bit on the Side seemed to be on a power trip and had prepared to go public, launch herself socially and professionally, as his favourite. A Madame Pompadour to his Louis XV;  an Alice Keppel to his Edward VII, although the guy was no king of any type.  Bit on the Side believed her control went beyond the bedroom and she was on a mission to neutralize his wife and children, with the help of his friends and acquaintances. Bit on the Side had invited co-workers and bosses and ministers and the international community. And their spouses.

On the day, nobody who mattered turned up.  Two of the few guests who attended confessed to many who didn’t that Bit on the Side had plied them with far too many extra portions of chicken with pineapple and cascades of mediocre wine.  There were heaps of fruit-covered birthday cake left over, and someone was wrapping some syrupy take-home bundles which nobody wanted.  Even her reputation as a menu organizer was in tatters.  But the greatest ignominy came from him, the birthday boy, who left early to go home.

Anne Boleyn to Henry VII. Although neither of them, in the end, really mattered.

Stinking Plonker

In Geneva, we were having dinner à trois with J, a man renowned in his field, when he revealed that P, henceforth described as Plonker, whom we knew as a notorious liar, had entertained everybody at a party in another country with the hilarious story of when I saw him naked, and how I had stared endlessly, fascinated, at his plonker. (Well, I didn’t know I deserved such attention.) This was a bit disingenuous of J, for Husband was present, and frankly, I had no reason to stare at another man’s plonker.  Besides, what was J thinking?  Repeating such juvenile-like remarks, laughing at me, and, indirectly, at Husband? (Was he pressuring us to pay the bill due to our embarrassment?)  

Ready to set the record straight, I said that I had never seen Plonker’s plonker, and I was glad of it. I added that it would have been very difficult, on that day four decades or so ago(!) when we went to Plonker’s home for dinner and he opened the door wearing Y fronts that had been white a long, long time ago, and nothing else.  I had stared at the sorry, sorry state of Plonker’s underwear, something I wish I could forget. But its filthy grip on my memory remained and did not let go for all the wrong reasons.  In hindsight, perhaps I should have been a tad juvenile and mentioned to J that, if I remembered correctly, there really wasn’t much of a volume to admire inside Plonker’s soiled underwear.

I met Plonker again, some years later. He had the effrontery to ask me for a kiss, loudly, in front of lots of people, some of whom might have heard his story about me.  Few people can beat me for loudness, and Plonker was no match. I said, “Nah, you stink.”

Salads

The 60^th birthday party had grand celebrations and caterers.  Guests clustered around the pool and found their seats around little low, rickety tables where they rested their drinks.  Someone, without fail, would knee the table and drinks tumbled into a mess.  Eventually, we were served the salad.  A waitress made her round from one cluster of guests to another, holding a huge bowl of green salad and a big pair of tongs. She bent down to make sure every green leaf found its way onto a plate.  And each time she bent down her huge breasts got pushed up and the valley between them turned into a narrow fault line.  As her breasts swelled, her flimsy décolletage seemed like a dam about to burst. 

When the waitress approached my group, nobody’s eyes were on the salad.  Nobody talked.  Nobody drank.  Nobody knocked the drinks table.  Heck, nobody moved!  When she left, it took a while for people to recover.  A  man said, “Nice salads.” Some of us made noncommittal sounds or agreed on the freshness of the greens.  His wife was silent for a while, but she had recovered by cake time.

Never Again

 I cannot for the life in me remember where in the world I was when someone emptied a glass of gin and tonic, lemon and ice cubes included, on my face. Maybe Kingston, Jamaica, or Manaus. It was a garden reception, and I wore a fine green dress, and, rule of the game, mingled with people I had never seen in my life.  If lucky enough, I would never see them again.

Our group was on a wide deck built about 30cm above the grass, from where we had an overview of the large number of guests, each mingling and making themselves seem attractive and intelligent to others.  The woman by my side let out a scream and flayed her arms, and I found myself drenched in gin and tonic.  She had fallen off the edge, and had landed on her back.

We all moved, some ready to call a doctor, of which there were a great number milling around, but I wouldn’t trust any of them because they had been imbibing quite a bit (and there was nothing to munch on).  Another group came in my succour:  tissues materialized from all sides, and I hoped they were unused. I was guided to a darkened restroom where I rinsed my face, and where my liquid assailant, in surprizing ship-shape condition, caught up with me and apologised profusely.  She said sorry so many times that I felt sorry for her. Well, of course I didn’t like the stuff on my face.  But I had to reassure her that I was not offended; I understood she did not mean it; and it was not the end of the world.

In the end, we were in luck:  we never saw each other again.

Ladies’ Lunch

Then there was the ladies’ lunch at home, as always, several nationalities and many diets to consider before reaching a final menu.  I decided on a type of plentiful mezze, which everyone was enjoying. I offered one of my guests the tiny sausages, and she ate two, smiled and ask me, “What is this made of?”

I blanched. The sausages were made of beef.  She was Hindu.  I apologised, immediately took the dish to the kitchen and brought out something unoffending.   Sausages in Jakarta were made of beef, and I plain forgot.  It was one of those situations: if there were a bottomless hole in the ground, I’d have happily jumped in.

Since it was around Diwali time, I sent my guest a pair of dainty silver candlesticks and white candles as an apology.  She was the most gracious person.  We became friends and, when I moved, she gave me a pearl necklace to wish me good luck in the next post.  It has been my frustration that she also moved, and as it happens so often in this peripatetic life, we have lost contact.

Sliders

There was the housewarming party, for which the hosts had gone to great lengths to offer us, less-than-august guests, entertainment for body and soul. The party was held in a vast garage-cave, something that started at the street and delved into deep darkness. I’m sure people got lost in there, but I never ventured beyond the drinks station. The garage was wonderfully finished with tall, pristine white walls decorated with a few unimaginative, framed prints. And the virginal glossy tiled floor made the venue look like a true party room.

The table was full of the usual fare for dozens of people, laden with a plethora of dishes, wheels and slabs of cheese, and buffalo wings with instructions:  grab the wing, dip in dip, eat.  A special friend and helper, and there were several of them around, had made chicken with parmesan crust that looked more like an anaemic, lumpy casserole. Any reasonable cook would know that friend and helper had placed too many chicken pieces and crust mix in one baking dish, so even after two and a half hours in the oven the crust had reached only the clumpy porridge stage.  Somehow the crust barely adhered to the chicken, and the hosts could have written instructions:  grab chicken, shake off crust, eat. As guests ate their chicken pieces, the crust disintegrated, leaving blobs and fat stains on party shirt fronts, settling on polished shoes and on the beautiful, smooth tiled floor.  Nobody minded as it was tasty food helped down by a deluge of alcoholic beverages.

Our kind hosts had prepared entertainment, too.  We had a classic ballet dancer in her voluminous pink tulle skirt and dainty pointe ballet shoes. Guests moved away from the food table, opening space for the ballerina.  The stage might not have been as large and haloed as Carnegie Hall, but it had the huge advantage of being covered in parmesan goo.

Most guests, managing purse, liquid and solid bits and pieces, found their way to a number of white plastic tables and their matching chairs, which the hostess had bought that same day. We sat, someone played something classic (from a tape?), the ballerina assumed her first position, and everyone’s face shifted to put on airs and look, at least a little bit, erudite and appreciative of the hosts’ and ballerina’s efforts.

It didn’t take long for the first chair to disgorge its occupant. And the second, and third. And so on.  Sometimes it was the two front legs, or the two back legs, or the four legs. The combination of smooth glossy flooring and chair legs that didn’t have much of a grip made for a surprising whoosh sound when the chair’s legs spread out, followed by a snap when the seat itself clashed on the floor, coupled with repeated oooohs by the astounded person who had disappeared from sight midsentence, and hit bottom.  Solicitous neighbours helped: Are you OK?  Let me help you up.  Is the place jinxed?

The ballerina finished to much applause, and the party programme advanced undeterred.  We had live music, singsongs;  people devoured the chicken and dripped its gloopy parmesan;  dipped the buffalo wing in the wrong dip;  wine flowed;  and once in a while during the evening conversation stopped for a moment with the joy of a Whoosh!  Snap! Ooooh! Are you ok?

You need nothing more, really, for a good party.