Until recently, I’ve never had the chance to host a party - in Korea, the house party culture is practically unheard of. You live with your parents until you get married, which obviously makes inviting your friends over a bit problematic; once you’re settled down, then you’re usually too busy to host gatherings of any sort. (Plus most Koreans live in tiny apartments; the population density in Seoul ranks somewhere in the world’s top 10, I think.) Anyway, I lived with my parents until I moved to Chicago in the fall of '06, but for the first few months I was subletting with roommates, and then for the rest of the school year I was living with my brother in a crappy basement apartment with very minimal furniture. So I didn’t really have a place of my own until last fall, when I moved with a friend into an actual three-bedroom apartment with the proper mix of furnishings from Ikea, charity shops, and other sundry articles we stole from our parents or picked up off the street. Since then I’ve discovered that despite the hassle involved I actually quite enjoy having people over. This has somehow led to our place becoming the default hang-out amongst our small circle of friends, which is interesting considering the fact that 1) we have a distinct lack of chairs - more than five-six people and we have to resort to using the cats as cushions 2) we don’t have cable or a game console or any other form of group entertainment more complicated than a pack of cards 3) the heating isn’t worth shit. Despite all of this our apartment apparently posesses an ambience that my guyfriends describe concisely as “nice,” by which they mean, “We bring booze and **HazelNutCoffee ** supplies us with food.” And I do like feeding people stuff. Must be some kind of maternal instinct that all my hoity-toity education failed to beat out of me. My aunts would be so relieved.
Anyway, so along the way I’ve discovered a party-planning process that has so far never disappointed me or my guests. And while I considered putting it in a glossy hardback book and becoming the next Martha Stewart, instead I’ve decided to be generous and share it with my fellow MMPers. So here it is: planning the perfect party in 12 easy steps.
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Decide what kind of party you’re going to throw. Is it going to be a casual low-key get-together or a huge drunken orgy? Or perhaps something in-between (a low-key orgy, for example). The last party I threw was to celebrate the Lunar New Year and introduce my white-as-the-driven-snow friends to a bit of Korean culture. Obviously the kind of party you throw will dictate the food and drinks and so forth. I decided I was going to make dumplings and a noodle dish, with rice and kimchii on the side. It’d practically cook itself.
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Send out the invites. Will they be handwritten on parchment or perhaps take the form of a casual text message? (“You free Sat. evening?”) For bigger parties this means creating an “Event” on Facebook, then sitting in front of the screen for an hour while checking and unchecking people on your Friends list. “Hm, I haven’t seen Dan in awhile. I’ll invite him. But if I invite him I know he’s going to bring Amanda. And Jill is coming, but she hates Amanda. And I can’t not invite Jill, because Kelly is coming, and she’ll hear it from her, and then she’ll be all hurt if I don’t invite her. And should I bother inviting Greg? He never comes anyway, but then if he doesn’t get an invite he’ll wonder why. . .” After realizing that grad school relationships are really no better than those forged in high school, decide your friends can all go screw themselves and invite whoever the hell you want.
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Clean the apartment the day before the party. This will usually involve terrifying the cats with the rarely-used vacuum cleaner, as well as finding about $1.56 in loose change, some student papers from last semester, and a hoard of beer bottle caps collected under the sofa in some nefarious feline plot to take over the world.
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Draw up a shopping list, then procrastinate until exactly seven hours before your party will start. Run over to your local Jewels, discover that you’ve forgotten said shopping list at home, then proceed to wander crazily around the store muttering to yourself while other patrons steer carefully out of your path. Come home and realize you’ve forgotten toasted seasame seeds, which your mother has insisted is indispensible for making perfect dumplings. Decide that your ignorant American friends wouldn’t know a perfect dumpling if it danced naked in front of them.
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Start cooking, planning your recipes in a way that is the most time efficient. Put the rice in the rice cooker first, so it’ll be done by the time the guests arrive. Start boiling the water before you chop up the vegetables. Dump the carrots in with the tofu, then realize that the tofu is for the dumplings and the carrots are for the noodles. Painstakingly pick out carrot pieces. Discover that the water is boiling over. Spend two hours making dumplings before wondering to yourself why the hell you decided to make dumplings when making the stupid things was the thing you hated most about celebrating Lunar New Year’s back home. Decide next time your friends are going to have to deal with the frozen stuff that comes in bags at the local Asian supermarket.
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Shoo cats away from nibbling at the scattered tidbits of food that now cover the kitchen floor. Then open a bottle of alcohol of choice and finish half of it at one go.
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Greet the one guest that inevitably is either on time or sometimes even early, God forbid. If a good friend, put them to work in the kitchen. If an awkward acquaintance that you invited with the expectation that they weren’t going to show up, dump the cats on them and wonder what nefarious motives they might have had in accepting an invitation they were obviously supposed to decline. If the boy you are currently sleeping with, collapse on sofa and demand sympathy. (And other things, depending on how much time you have left until your other guests arrive.)
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Greet guests as they trickle in. Usually this takes a good hour. Crack open the booze. Complain about work and politics. Talk freely about people who are not present.
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Serve the food. Unless you are having a fancy sit-down dinner, paper plates are the way to go. Sorry, environment, but my sanity is at stake. Always have plenty of paper towels on hand, as inevitably things will be dripped and spilled. As the host(ess), you should sit near the entrance so you can easily run to the kitchen and get whatever your guests may need. Either that, or sit wherever you want and tell your lazy-ass friends to get the damn forks themselves.
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As host(ess), you also have to ensure your guests are enjoying themselves. I’ve found that the easiest way to do this is to have plenty of alcohol around. They end up entertaining themselves. In emergencies, a laser pointer and two cats will do nicely.
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One of the most difficult parts about being the host(ess) is politely letting your guests know when they should leave. Usually for me this is not a problem, since I am almost always the last person to call it a night. (w00t!) But sometimes there is a need to take initiative and bring the party to a close - for exmaple, if it’s 3am and your friends are drunkenly trying to entice your cats to lap up the spilled vodka. Most of the time a polite, “Well, I really think I need to go to bed now,” will be enough, but if not, I’ve found that “You guys are WASTED; go home, for fuck’s sake!” can also be effective.
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Collapse into bed and sleep the sleep of the just.
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Wake up the next morning. Pop some Tylenol. Survey the aftermath and marvel at the sheer number of empty bottles taking up half your house. Go get breakfast at McDonalds in order to escape the chaos, and also because the thought of cooking anything else is enough to make you need another beer.
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So, there are my secrets, bared for the pleasure of the MMP. Now it’s your turn. Do tell - how do you throw a successful party? And can I come to your next one?
). Of course, once we finally get that live-in housemaid I have been begging for, that problem will not seem so insurmountable, since we will have a live-in, permanently on-call babysitter! w00t!!! I give it another 2 months to get everything organised (fingers crossed), then I can laugh (not too loudly) the next time FCM asks what happened to the staff she wanted ('cause they will be at my house, tending to my every need and vacuuming up my dust-bunnies and doing my washing and cleaning my bathrooms, and and and … BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!).