THE FIRST OPPORTUNITY for an office party comes at afternoon coffee-break time. It’s Alice’s birthday. On your lunch hour you whip out for the card, the cake, some candles and several yards of ribbon. Instead of having coffee and nothing at 3:30, you have coffee and Alice’s cake . . . with a very happy Alice on your hands.
To invite her, string a length of pink or white ribbon from the cake (in another office) to the door or desk of the guest-of-honor. Then burst open her door or sneak up to her with ribbon in hand. Tell her to follow the ribbon which will, of course, lead her to the party.
It is unthinkable not to celebrate everybody’s birthday in your department in some manner. At least have everybody sign a card. If somebody can draw a personalized one, so much the better. Pregnant girls are easy to draw. Also almost anyone can manage to profile the birthday man’s head on a large sheet of art paper. Block it off in departments just like the phrenologist’s diagram of a head. In each space you indicate the areas of his life: Women, Wine, Poker, Women, Race Track, Pro Football, Women, Data Processing, etc. Write “Happy Birthday, Larry” across the bottom.
What else can you do on a coffee break?
My husband’s charming English secretary at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios turned the period into high tea. Pamela started by inviting Stephen Boyd, Christopher Isherwood and a couple of other English people on the lot over for a cup of good English tea and a cookie. Her first mother-country invitees responded so enthusiastically she soon branched out to foreigners. Anybody who really didn’t go for tea was quietly slipped a cup of coffee. Pamela’s tea parties got so popular that one guest, long departed from the lot, used to show up at tea time every day, explaining that he’d been driving past the studio and heard the kettle whistling.
To go the tea route for visitors, for the people in your own department or just for you and your boss, Pam says you need a set of good bone china—teapot, sugar bowl, creamer and cups—a tin of excellent tea, and “goodies.” Goodies may be English currant buns, English Melting Moments, English sausage rolls, all from an English bakery, whipped cream cakes, pastries or tarts from the French bakery, or dainty English-style cucumber or watercress sandwiches on wafer-thin bread without crusts which you make at home. (If you’d planned just to pick up jelly doughnuts from downstairs, forget it. You aren’t the tea type.)
Refreshments should be paid for by your boss if the treat is for him and visiting friends. If office home-folks are going to attend, they must be collected from also. You aren’t really the Home Savings and Loan Company.
The bone china is best acquired, Pamela says, by giving a cup and saucer to each department member as his Christmas present, the teapot (filled with cookies) plus sugar bowl and creamer to your boss. This not only provides the office with an English tea service but also takes care of a large number of Christmas gifts. (Much better than bubble bath or pink stationery.) If tea is not yours or anybody else’s cup of, give handsome coffee mugs instead. Here is Pam’s recipe for a delicious tea-party treat from home.
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
2 sticks butter
¼ cup sugar
Mix soft butter and sugar together. Add flour until you have a crumbly consistency. Press into an eight-inch square tin and bake at 300 degrees for an hour. Cut into squares.
Suppose you aren’t Perle Mesta and your office isn’t the Court of St. James. You can just imagine what they’d say if you tried pulling off a stunt like high tea. True, you do have to be an executive secretary and a good one to have these privileges. If you’re that, however, you’re usually so valuable you can pull off just about anything you wish. Actually, charming your boss’s associates redounds very much to his credit and he should be pleased. The guests, even important ones, can also become your devoted personal friends. Pamela, who collected some wonderful people through tea parties, says you must be genuinely interested in them and care about their happiness if they are to be collected. Also she believes the office itself has to be a somewhat sunny and informal one, which more and more offices are becoming.
I don’t need to tell you how to go out for a coffee break or what to do. You already know that. As for other entertaining, a friend tells me of a festive coffee drink you can make which will turn practically any coffee break into a celebration. It can be made behind a locked door of the ladies’ room if there are just too many great big sunflower eyes peering at you. Most bosses enjoy watching this brew prepared, however, after they get over the initial shock of seeing the pretty blue flames shoot up. It’s more fun if you can prepare two cups at one time—one for you and one for him—but you may have to make it privately the first time and serve it as a surprise. This beverage is particularly welcome when conditions are rainy, snowy, sleety, foggy or muggy inside or outside the office.
| For each person: | 1 cup of very hot coffee in a china cup. (Never paper or plastic) 1 ounce brandy 1 to 2 cubes of sugar, depending on his taste 1 deep tablespoon |
Put the spoon in the hot coffee for a moment to warm, then balance it over the rim of the cup. Put the cube of sugar into the spoon and pour in a little brandy, letting the sugar cube absorb it. Pour in more brandy until the cube is saturated and the spoon is full of brandy. Wait a moment or two for the brandy to warm in the steam, then set fire to it with a match. Beautiful blue flames result and will then burn out. Tip the contents of the spoon into the cup, stir and serve.
Depending on the size of your spoon, you may have to refill it with brandy in order to use up the ounce. Let it burn out each time as you did the first time.
Some wonderful chemical affinity takes place between brandy, coffee, sugar, boss and secretary. The brew isn’t sweet, nor does it seem to provide the nervous jolt that just pouring a blast into a cup of coffee has. Gratitude is inevitable, in whatever form you wish it, to the person who serves up such a blessing!
Most offices contain locusts. They can be very attractive people. I was a Locust S.G. (Senior Grade) for many years. There must always be something around for locusts to eat, otherwise they feel insecure. Preferably locust-snacks are kept in somebody else’s desk drawer on account of a locust’s almost pathological snacking habits. After the fourteenth trip to a neighbor for more jelly beans, the neighbor will finally shut the drawer on the locust’s hand, which may be the jolt he needs to kick the habit for a couple of hours.
If you continuously dip into a neighbor’s supply of snacks (with his permission, of course), you must repay him with exactly the same amount, kind and quality of snacks. One darling skinny fellow I knew kept dry, toasted peanuts and almonds in his desk drawer plus fudge brownies which his mother baked and mailed to him from Bangor, Maine. He finally laid down the law to us locusts one day and said, “Okay, how about replacements?” You ought to have seen what he got back .. . Goliath-size stale pretzels, bruised apples, corn chips from long-past kids’ parties, halves of tuna sandwiches from lunch, trick or treat Halloween candy from Halloweens past. It was a shocking display of not repaying in kind. We had to sweep out his office to find him the afternoon a group of locusts repaid with five pounds of peanuts still in the shell, then decided to help him eat them up right then.
It’s all right to bring leftovers from home for hungry office friends, but you must follow the Hobo Rule. During the Depression a hobo knocked at a housewife’s door and asked for something to eat. She gave him an ancient piece of pie which he ate. He then said “That was perfect!” The housewife knew exactly what shape the pie was in and gave him the raised eyebrow. “If it were any worse,” the hobo explained, “I couldn’t have eaten it. If it were any better, you wouldn’t have given it to me.”
You simply must not bring anything to the office that isn’t edible, because locusts are just as likely to plow into it and be half dead of stomach cramps before they stop eating. I get the shudders still thinking about the batch of shelled pecans I brought in for some fellow locusts. They were from a theater date the night before, and during the second act I’d found a glossy green worm nibbling away at one. Do you just waste $1.65 worth of nuts? (I’d put Greeny on the floor with his own pecan half and two others for good measure for act three.) On the other hand, who knew what somebody might have fed me in an innocent-looking deviled egg one day? I brought the nuts to the office. It was only one little worm.
The ethical thing to do, of course, is to bring only food that you would cheerfully have eaten if there hadn’t been so much of it. Party hors d’oeuvres from the night before or half a pumpkin chiffon cake are fine. Locusts are the greatest little helpers in the world for people who are about to start on a diet. They’ll follow you around and clean out every last naughty snack that a dieter is not supposed to have.
Should you or shouldn’t you keep a bottle in your desk drawer? Oh come on, you’re a big girl! If you’re a secretary, you should not. As a minor executive I think you can. When I reached that level I stowed a pint of vodka and Rose’s lime juice for emergency gimlets. In the ad agencies where I worked there seemed to be about as much work from five to nine as there was from nine to five. (Many art directors are night people.) I wasn’t much of a drinker, but it just seemed friendly to have a small private stock.
Naturally a lady doesn’t hoist her bottle and guzzle away like one of the boys, but if one of the boys has run out of his own J & B, you produce yours. (Doesn’t a mother run for the snake-bite remedy or mustard poultices when her boy is bitten or ailing?)
I assume nobody breaks out a bottle in the office before closing hours. Some managements feel that nobody should drink in the office ever, of course. How misguided! Salaried persons usually take as much pride in their work as management does—or more—and are not going to do anything to impair its quality. Cocktails in the office before or during an evening work-bout can be friendly and warming and can save running off to the bar and wasting time. Creative people do some of their best work after five, but they may not want to do it parched.
A friend of mine who had just joined a national magazine was working late one evening after tragedy had befallen the country. Her magazine had immediately junked its entire ready-to-ship issue and was starting over. After the five o’clock noiseless gong sounded to close the formal day, Sharon noticed people making runs on the coffee pot as though rationing might be coming back. She went over to have a steaming cup of coffee herself and found the pot wasn’t even plugged in. Instead of steaming black coffee, there was cold dark Demerara Rum.
Did the staff get the issue out? Of course it did. Was it a gasser? Several million subscribers said that it was.
The children’s hour, or cocktail hour as it is known in more sophisticated circles, may hold unusual blessings for a secretary. Some girls, for all their charm and efficiency, simply do not get taken to lunch as they should. Stuffy company policy and stuffy executive cowardice. The girls may, however, come into their just deserts after five. Bosses making journeys to the far reaches of Westport, North Hollywood and Shaker Heights like to be fortified. They need help.
Now a man who won’t take his secretary to lunch probably also won’t buy her a drink in a bar, but he may teach her to make one. One executive I know spent a month teaching his secretary the art of mixing a really dry martini. They sampled batch after batch in an empty office until finally (at the end of twenty patient working days) the martinis were bone dry. The man had married his previous secretary and wasn’t going through that again, but he does brag that his little helper mixes the best dry martini outside the Princeton Club and often invites other men—sometimes single—to join him and his bartender-Friday for drinks.
If you’re the bartender, mix the whatever-he-prefers with great style and see that he has pretty glasses to drink them in.
Obviously many people go off the premises for cocktails. I think it’s safe to say that whatever tactics you used to get yourself asked to lunch will suffice to bring off a cocktail date. And whatever happens to you in Lunchland ought to happen double (and sooner) at cocktails. One girl I know was chatting with a man about seafood at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Bar and they got right on a plane and flew to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. At the very least you may go on to dinner somewhere.
If it’s your date—you asked him (for business reasons, of course)—quietly sign the check and thank your patron saint for this neat arrangement that lets girls ask boys without seeming pushy.
When a group from the office is drinking, the men pay for everybody from secretary classification (if they’re females) on down the job scale, usually. A junior executivess sometimes gets paid for, sometimes picks up her own tab and occasionally buys a round for the group. Go on, you had it free for years!
Back in the office there are many occasions for revelry in addition to those occasioned by secretaries dispatching bosses to the hinterlands and workers working late. There is a powerful little institution known as the Office Party.
It’s as crowded as Churchill Downs on Derby Day and so noisy you can’t hear a cry for help. “I’m not going to the country tonight, Clarissa,” a corporate vice-president whispers to the blonde receptionist he’s just handed her fifth drink. “Perhaps we could have dinner at my hotel...”
The five-piece combo is playing “Begin the Beguine” and the all-brain, no hanky-panky (up to now) company comptroller has the steno-pool director clasped firmly around the fanny as he glides her about the room in a very intense waltz.
The assistant receptionist has kissed every man in the place and is going back for seconds.
Two wastebaskets are on fire. One couch is sagging under the weight of the head bookkeeper, who has passed out. The assistant bookkeeper has been restrained from throwing a bucket of water on him.
The usually shy shipping clerk has just cornered the production manager at the water cooler and told him, “Mr. Bates, there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you all year. You STINK!” The head librarian has sweetly told the research director to go do something that is anatomically impossible.
In the second-floor men’s room, the office nymphomaniac has backed the financial vice-president into a lavatory and is running her hands through his sparsely distributed hair. “For God’s sake, Evelyn,” he gasps, “somebody’s going to come in here.” “Who cares?” says Evelyn, nibbling excitedly on his ear.
In the conference room behind locked doors, the chairman of the board is lying on a couch with his head in the lap of the teletype operator, who is dropping paperclips into his open mouth.
“Why don’t you and me get on a plane and go to Mexico?” says the man who was repairing the coffee machine when the party started and who stayed to have one drink. He leans closer still to his drinking companion, the president’s Vassar-graduated secretary. “Usted habla Espafiol, baby?”
The four couples who have already left the party are ensconced, in order of their disappearance, at: his apartment, her apartment, his wife’s family’s boarded-up summer place, the Cozy Corners Motel. A typist being delivered to her father’s doorstep in Hacken-sack is trying to persuade the old man that the gendeman who drove her home really isn’t responsible for her present condition—she didn’t have any lunch and got hold of some poisoned sherry at the party. Her father isn’t listening, having gone to get a gun.
Back at the party three desk lamps have crashed to the floor, five vodka bottles have been thrown out the window, a typist is having hysterics, the chief of data controls is trying (with obvious pleasure) to help fish an ice cube out of the bosom of the relief switchboard operator. It’s eight-thirty. The party started at four and will likely not be over until four comes around again.
Does any of this sound like what goes on at your office party? I didn’t think so! It is the big bash—probably the Christmas party—of twenty years ago. Some office parties still stack up that way, but far fewer than once upon a time. Everyone I know who watched the office party in the movie The Apartment found it interesting as a relic of ancient folklore.
But why get maudlin reminiscing? It’s all pretty much G.W.T.W. And you and I both know what killed these Yule parties, which were supposed to be gruesome but were actually some of the swingingest parties ever given. Wives killed them. Wives and the local police department, who complained that husbands were driving home intoxicated. They were driving home, weren’t they? Doesn’t anybody ever give anybody credit?
If you should be the fortunate girl whose company still gives a traditional Christmas party, cherish those bosses. They are probably all widowers, grass widowers and individualists as rugged as Ghengis Khan. The rest of us will just have to concentrate on smaller in-between parties and on an occasional different kind of Big Deal.
There still are lovely official company parties, of course, but they’re different—and duller. Many conscience-stricken companies have taken to asking wives (and husbands). At my last office party I decided to liven things up for David (my husband) by pointing out who was sleeping with whom. That was easy. They were the ones who were conspicuously avoiding each other and holding hands with somebody else. What a state for an office party to have got to!
Whatever its faults or advantages, a big office bash can only happen once or twice a year at best ... or worst. Small office parties—the warm, intimate, brotherly and sisterly fun kind—can spring up like fat white mushrooms in a damp forest just every few days. And they’re not poison, either!
You surely must know all the standard excuses for impromptu parties—toasting the bride, somebody leaving the firm, vacations being gone on and returned from, or any other reason you can get away with, from the birth of new kittens to Bolivar’s birthday.
When it’s decided to have a party, the best procedure is for the committee (probably one girl) to collect from everybody in advance. A dollar a head is a standard fee. A rich boss may kick in more, but if he’s been doing it for fifteen years, don’t expect too much largesse. Regardless of whether Miss Goody Two-Shoes plans to have only ginger ale or water, if she’s going to attend the party, she must be collected from like everybody else. (In some bars it costs more to drink ginger ale.) Buy as much liquor as your collection will allow. When this runs out, a fresh collection can be made from those still at the party who wish it to continue. If there’s any liquor left over (fine chance!) have another party next week. If it’s just a tiny scrap, the party organizer gets to take it home. (Let your conscience define “tiny scrap.”)
A party, of course, can sprout because someone receives a gift of Jack Daniels from a supplier that day and decides to open it after work. From such innocent beginnings nineteen people have been known to wind up on the Staten Island Ferry strumming banjos until after midnight. (These parties are not official parties and are also small, so they don’t start the newspapers, magazines, police department, W.C.T.U., etc., etc., clucking and trying to stamp them out.)
One of the best after-work parties I ever went to sprang up among some leftovers who weren’t going out of town Labor Day weekend. As one after another of the Las Vegas group began slipping away Friday at noon, we pitiful remainers rallied and started our collection of two bucks a head. With twenty-four dollars we bought a case of California champagne (I think the liquor store must have felt sorry for us too and knocked down the price), which gave everyone a bottle apiece. The store iced it for us and we had a lovely, smug, leisurely summer afternoon bash with love and kinship hanging heavily in the air.
Whether your impromptu parties are department-wide or company-wide would depend on the size of the organization. A general office party at a large insurance company could tie up several thousand people. That would be out. A “department party” in a tiny personal-service firm would involve just one person. Better to merge. I do think snippy-dippy litde “private” office parties from which you try to keep out certain uninviteds are ridiculous. Start with a small choice list if you like, but if an interloper comes by looking thirsty, welcome him.
People who deride these litde office parties as being rather scruffy and funless are, in my opinion, simply ignoramuses. Either they never attended one, or they are wives who remember them too well, or they attended a party where wives somehow got in. There’s no doubt that one wife stopping by to pick up her husband can cause a party to go downhill faster than somebody shouting “Mad Dogl” (Husbands picking up wives are less destructive. They know a good thing when they see it and can join in the fun without eliminating it.)
The reason informal office parties are good is strictly because nobody is married to each other. Take a husband to a regular party and if he doesn’t have a good time, you worry. You married a misfit. If he has too good a time—girls are lined up three deep to dance the Mashed Potato with him—you worry worse. In offices everybody is on his own, with no loved ones around to cause anxiety.
Other good things about office parties are:
A single girl doesn’t have to bring a date. They like her just for her.
Fun is the single motivation. No hostess is showing off her Quiche Lorraine, her new Louis XIV chest or her chest. No host named Roger is burning the Filet de Boeuf Roger and cursing a blue streak. Only the people matter.
There’s no discrimination at an office party. Class lines are unheard of.
Since I’ve left the office to work at home I honestly get so homesick some days I could crawl right up the street to the Pan Am Building to see if anybody would let me into a party.
If your office has as many as two impromptu parties a year, I think glasses should be bought. Liquor tastes terrible in paper cups. It may well be that office parties got their seamy reputation partly from people belting drinks to get to the bottom of the cup before the wet cardboard taste set in.
I’d suggest peanuts and only peanuts—in or out of their shells—for hors d’oeuvres. Nearly everybody likes them and they have some food value.
If you want to go in for punch—the liquor goes farther and punch can be delicious—here is a basic recipe. You’ll need a large container. This could be a plastic wastebasket from the dime store.
3 or more bottles of vodka (an inexpensive brand will do)
A gallon of Gallo or other white wine
1 can concentrated fruit punch
Jar green or red marischino cherries to pretty it up.
This would serve as many as thirty-five guests. Actually it’s a very flexible recipe. You could use one bottle of vodka, a little white wine, cherries and punch for a small group; two bottles of vodka, more white wine, more cherries and more punch for a medium-size group; three bottles of vodka with a gallon of white wine, lashings of cherries and plenty of punch for a large, thirsty group.
You can start at Stage One and see how the party develops. If it’s swinging along, proceed to Stage Two. If it promises to become a real bash, pull out the stops and dump in the additional quantities that make it Stage Three. Watch out for Stage Four. Redoubtable ten-year employees have been known to take lovers’ leaps out to the sidewalk when this punch got past the third stage.
As for outside parties, I think a group organizing to do anything away from the office, like ice skating or going in a body to see a Van Gogh exhibit, is just a little too orphans’ day at the zoo. I could be wrong. If you’re a born organizer, organize!
The company baseball team with the attendant cheering section and awards dinners is a good thing, I’ve heard. (I loathe baseball and have still achieved a normal, healthy adulthood.)
A golf tournament at the miniature golf course is delightful. Run it just like a real tournament, except that handicaps are drawn out of a hat and so are names of foursome members. There are prizes, of course. The trophies are children’s toys or figurines made from modeling clay. A champion’s banquet follows the tournament at a nearby Chinese restaurant or Nineteenth Hole Bar.
You might have your office turtles (the real ones) handicapped and entered into a race some Friday afternoon. At my office it was Maid Marion by two lengths, Ben Casey trailing a poor second, Oscar Levant and Marjorie Morningstar refusing to leave the starting gate.
Impromptu, sneak-away affairs by a small group can be fun. If three or four people have been working nights and weekends and have an afternoon off coming to them, you could all go to the track ... or the ball game, (Naturally I won t go to the ball game with you, but I’m sure there are lots of people who will.)
Should you ever give parties in your home for loved ones from the office? Certainly! It used to be considered declasse to socialize with office friends, but that was when it was considered d#x00E9;class#x00E9; to work. Now everybody’s friends work in some office, so it might as well be yours!
These are some nonserious, low-overhead Thursday, Friday or Saturday night parties to consider throwing for an office group:
National Inventors Day Party. Have this in July. Everybody brings an invention he thinks needs inventing. At the party I went to an electronics wizard brought a self-hypnotizing machine. It made so much noise it practically defeated its own purpose. Somebody else made an ashtray with wall-to-wall carpeting for people who like to grind butts out in rugs. One fashion plate stitched up a sequined headband with a pocket for mad-money and two aspirins. A beautifully constructed fly trap was submitted. It had a little ladder which led up from a courtyard of white pebbles to a tiny wicker platform above. The platform was roofed and just large enough to hold one sugar cube and the fly. Then the ladder went down on the other side but there was a broken rung from which the unsuspecting fly plunged to his death on the rocks below. Alas!
October 21 is National Whale-Watching Day. Gather a group to watch for whales from your balcony. Have several pairs of binoculars handy and a foghorn to sound in case anything is observed. Whether whales are sighted a-sounding or not, grog can be hoisted and sea chanties sung and listened to.
Polaroid Party. Almost anybody can lay hands on a Polaroid camera for the evening. If not, pair up the haves with the havenots. All photographing will be done in your apartment. It’s nice to have a few reflectors and light bars around but they aren’t vital. Categories of competition will be: Nature. Portraiture. Advertising. (This should net half a dozen of Tabu’s fiery fiddler.) Industrial. Animal. Still Life. Everyone must agree to pose for others but the original instigator of the picture gets the award. You may uncover a new Cartier-Bresson!
Bossa Nova Fiesta. Everyone brings musical instruments and plays along with the Bossa Nova records. I’ve seen one fiesta bring out three guitars, an accordian, the usual bongos, a boombass, two or three kazoos, a six-fingered Japanese flute and child’s trumpet. People who have no instrument to play can be given emptied wastebaskets to pound. Barefoot interpretive dancing should also be encouraged. Warning: Either pre-soften the neighbors or invite them.
There, that should give you a selection.
And now I think we’ve had enough partying for a while. It’s time to get you out of that sozzled crowd and fly you around a bit. Yes, we are going to travel on business, which can be as much fun as any office party and sometimes even sexier.