CHAPTER SEVEN

THE AFTERMATH

If your dinner party was a video game, at this point in the evening, peppy eight-bit jams would blare from your stereo as the following words hovered, shimmering, above your head:

!!!Dinner Party Magic Zone!!!

Congratulations—you’ve done it! Take a good look around. Bellies are full. Spirits are high. Everyone you see now owes you dinner. So what if the hake recipe called for marjoram but you used mayonnaise? That’s all behind you now. See that dewy glow on everyone’s face? That’s the dewy glow of satisfaction. Or possibly the dewy glow of having just pounded down a ton of food and booze in a home that’s super hot from your oven. Either way, people are happy. They either want to bed you or be you. Cats, for a brief moment, consider the possibility that being human might be more awesome than being a cat, and then lick their bellies and fall back asleep.

That feeling you feel—that feeling is joy. It’s what Aristotle felt when he learned that Plato didn’t copyright his ideas. It’s how Einstein felt when he realized he didn’t have to comb his hair anymore. You have reached dinner party nirvana.

Enjoy it. This feeling will last anywhere between fifteen seconds and fifteen minutes. Then it’s back to business.

PART 1: THE THREE PATHS

Now that dinner is over, it’s time to work on the most “party” part of the dinner party. We at D.E.C.E.N.T. (Dinner Party Executive Council Ensuring Nifty Times), during our seminal October 2005 conference at Todd’s Bar and Grill in Playa Del Rey, identified three distinct paths down which you can now lead your guests. Choose one and get cracking.

PATH 1: THE CLASSIC (A.K.A. CHILLING)

The most common end to a weekday dinner party, “Chilling” is also the post-dinner-party style preferred by chatty people, lazy people, and those who like to keep nibbling and sipping, even though they just had a full meal and a bunch of booze.

For best Chilling results, transition from the dining table to the living room. If a living room is not available, either a) transition careers so you can afford one, or simply b) clear the table and hang out there some more.

The point of Chilling is to wind down any serious conversation or antic high jinks, and conclude the evening with a calm period of warmth and mellowness. It’s a time for mutual reflection over cognac and roasted chestnuts (or, more likely, chips ’n’ wine dregs), with long pauses for contented sighs. A time to share belly-laugh-inducing personal stories. Or a time to not talk at all: some may choose to doze off, or stare at the popcorn ceiling and imagine it is the surface of the Moon. All that’s required is at least two people engaging in conversation, plus groovy background music, preferably with lots of reverb.

If there’s a marijuana smoker at your party—now’s definitely her time to shine. Assuming yours is a THC-tolerant crowd, let that sister get everyone baked. Otherwise, invite her to step outside, where she can pot-vape alone and wonder what happened to that little girl who wanted to be a ballerina.

Chilling’s a pretty casual affair. Showing each other photos on your phone is even permitted (though only as brief exhibits to enhance conversation). One caveat: If things get so casual someone unbuckles the top button of their pants, hurricane belches, and starts murmuring “Tummy happy, nap, nap,” you’re Chilling too hard and it’s probably time for the party to end.

PATH 2: THE PDPDP (POST-DINNER-PARTY DANCE PARTY)

Dancing is like vertically having sex with one or several people, in public, while fully clothed. You should do it as much as possible.

Sadly, as we get older, opportunities to dance dwindle. We grow more afraid of looking silly, and also our cartilage turns to dry cork. This is precisely why the tail end of a dinner party is the perfect time to dance: Everyone is now friends, everyone is loose, and Band-Aids and compression wraps are in your medicine cabinet nearby.

The trick with the PDPDP is you can’t force it. Do not leap up, flick the lights on and off, shout “DANCE PARTYYYY,” and begin gyrating alone in the center of the room. This will frighten your guests. They will also suspect—possibly correctly—that you just took a snort of pep powder without inviting them.

Instead, await the slightly up-tempo disco track you cleverly dropped into your party playlist to facilitate exactly this moment (see chapter three, part two, “Preparing the Music”). Nod your head or tap your foot along to the rhythm. Perhaps take a fellow guest’s hand and, still seated, begin ironically-except-kind-of-sincerely swaying it back and forth in a vaguely dance-like way. Then rise with them and set the dance party in motion. Others will soon take your cue.¹

Wait ten minutes or so after dancing begins before introducing that big phat booty-bouncing sex jam that really raises the roof. Otherwise you might scare off shyer participants before their inhibitions are shed. WARNING: This is the part of the night when frisky people, particularly the drunkest ones, forget about the “fully clothed” part of dancing. Monitor misbehavior, and be prepared to dance the mashed potato between people you know would be a disaster together.

This is also the part of the party during which you are most likely to hear a loud knocking at the door. That is your neighbor, ready to kill you. Oh, did we forget to tell you to tell them in advance that you might be having a late-night dance party tonight? Yes: we did that so you’d have plausible deniability when you now say to them that you had no idea the noise would be so bothersome. Apologize, turn down the music, and relish feeling like a salty teenage punk.

PATH 3: ADULT ACTIVITIES

We’re not talking about orgies and paying bills. Though if you can make the former happen, hey—achievement unlocked, you. No, we’re talking about parlor games,² sing-alongs, and their ilk.

This path is most common at Friday night Gen X dinner parties, when no one wants to end the festivities early, but everyone’s tired from having worked all day. Adult activities provide a little spark of mild competition to make up for the raw adrenaline that used to power you into the wee hours back in college and which you now lack. If a dinner party is recess for adults, think of this as the dodgeball portion of the evening.

Parlor Games

We suggest sticking to the classics—but not too classic (see “Parlor Games of Yore,” below). For example:

CHARADES: Recommended if one or several of your guests are cooler/more famous than everyone else. Charades levels the playing field by making everybody look foolish. Also, like other old-school activities such as drinking Scotch and living in New York City, people will say they enjoyed it even if they didn’t.

CELEBRITY: A kind of modern update on charades, wherein the names of celebrities are scribbled onto scraps of paper that are then folded and placed in a bowl. Teams of two then see how many of the names they can guess in a minute, based on abbreviated clues. Becomes really fun when a snob who just got his MFA puts only the names of obscure Russian playwrights in the bowl, making everyone else mad.

EXQUISITE CORPSE: In this game, a sheet of paper is folded into sections. Each guest draws part of a body on a section, without looking at the other sections, to create a weird mutant beast. Exquisite corpse was invented by the early surrealists—thus the MFA snob guy will probably recommend playing it.

THAT GAME FROM INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS WHERE PEOPLE PUT CARDS ON THEIR FOREHEADS, a.k.a. “Who Am I?”: That’s a good one. Make sure all pistols and shotguns are removed from the room beforehand.

Card/Board Games

Card games kind of frighten us because they rely on two of our least favorite parts of high school: math and cutthroat competition. And yet we see the pleasure in breaking out a deck and engaging in an old-world pastime with friends. To keep things friendly, we suggest non-gambling card games. That means gin, rummy, pinochle, canasta… really any game with a name that sounds like a cocktail. Therefore Uno is also acceptable, while seven-card Texas Hold’em is not.

If you want to avoid numbers altogether, stick to interactive “social” card games like Cards Against Humanity (if no family members are present) or Apples to Apples (if they are), which are more about facilitating conversation than crushing your competition.

Also acceptable: traditional board games which can be completed in a relatively short period of time, like Sorry!

DO NOT PLAY MONOPOLY. It will last for two hours and by the end someone will hate someone.

LIKEWISE, SCRABBLE, because of the one person who takes fifteen minutes to finally put down “CAT” for five points. And don’t even get us started about RISK.

Sing-Alongs

Gathering around an acoustic guitar isn’t just for hippies anymore. In fact, over the past few years, musical practice spaces have become the hunting lodges of a certain brand of urban American male—the place they go to get away from their families, drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and push buttons and levers on expensive pieces of technology. Except instead of bringing home meat and a fear of government overreach, they bring home songs.

The end of a dinner party is a perfect outlet to try out one or two of those ³… and then to get over yourself and launch into cover tunes everyone knows. This is supposed to be a time for communal interactivity, not a showcase for your nascent indie rock career. Also: NO MORE THAN TWO SONGS PER SINGER. Otherwise you are not having a dinner party, you are having a nightclub with a headliner.

“The number of times I get asked to sing ‘Willkommen’… Seriously, it must be thousands of times. People think, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if you sang “Willkommen”?!’ I’m like, ‘No.’”

—CABARET STAR ALAN CUMMING, ON THE COVER YOU SHOULDN’T ASK HIM TO SING

PART 2: CLEANUP

The finish line approacheth! You’ve now chilled for an hour or two. Or your stupid old legs just can’t dance any longer. Or you’ve all realized one of the guests is a ringer at canasta and there’s no point in trying to beat her. The party is winding down. At this point in the evening, you will realize your household is in one of two states of cleanliness.

The first and most desirable is a kind of cozy, ramshackle disorder. Guests have thumbed through your books and scattered them across the dining room table. Record albums are piled in front of the stereo. A tower of plates and silverware, topped with a crown of chicken bones, rises precariously from your kitchen sink, and on every flat surface sits an emptied wineglass. It’s the kind of mess that makes a home feel lived-in. You gaze upon it with a sense of quiet satisfaction at a job well done.

The second state of cleanliness might best be described as “Dresden, Germany, February 1945.” Total wreckage. Holes have been knocked through your drywall. Broken shards of glass and porcelain crunch underfoot. Your favorite chair somehow has only three legs now; a drunk guest tries to sit in it and crashes ass-first to the floor. Your tablecloth is shiny with a crust of melted candle wax and spilled sauces. Soiled dishes lie anywhere but in the sink. There’s one in the cat box. Why?! There is no reason. Piled in a corner of your kitchen are five overstuffed garbage bags, torn and leaking a fragrant slurry of shrimp tails, olive pits, tomato guts, and beer onto the linoleum. Already flies are swarming in anticipation of the mighty feast that awaits them. You can practically hear their tiny fly tongues, licking their hairy little lips.

It’s the kind of mess that crushes the soul. You gaze upon it and pray for blindness.

If you find yourself in this second scenario, the first thing to do is take a breath and understand that it’s late, you are very tired, you’ve probably ingested a lot of salt, and you’re beginning to be hungover. Your perspective is a little warped—really, this mess is not as bad as it seems.

Second of all, we’re going to get you through it step by step. Starting with a cry for help.

CRYING FOR HELP

Here’s the bad news: Though a polite guest will offer to help clean up, the polite host’s duty is to refuse the offer.⁴

Firstly, because neither guests nor YOU should be spending these last few precious minutes of social time trying to get gravy stains out of the rug. Relish this time! Reality can wait!

And secondly, your guests are as tired as you are, but they’re not lucky enough to be standing ten feet away from their bed. They have a walk/drive/cab ride/subway trip yet to deal with. What’s more, to attend your party, some of these people are dropping sixty bucks an hour on babysitters. They’re not spending that cash for the privilege of scraping dried Parm out of your pasta bowls. Don’t make them.

There are, however, a scant handful of circumstances where it’s okay to conscript/trick your guests into cleaning up.

Clearing the Table

Most guests understand it’s their duty to help clear the dinner table. Let them. Moving plates from the table to the sink is easy and makes people feel like they contributed, without getting their hands dirty. It creates table space around which Chilling or Parlor Games can occur. Most importantly, it ensures that dirty plates are hidden in the kitchen as swiftly as possible, so you can pretend they don’t exist until later.

Garbage Hauling (a.k.a. the Waif Rule)

You have a giant garbage bag full of stinking wine and whiskey bottles. It weighs two tons and must be moved outside to the recycling bin before the cockroach armies come to slurp. The problem is, you are a waif with all the upper body strength of a tiny baby. Or perhaps you were recently injured, or are disabled. Or maybe your home is in the kind of neighborhood where one can be mugged three times between your back door and the recycling bin. In all these circumstances, it’s okay to sweetly ask the biggest, muscliest guest ⁵ at your party to take out the garbage for you. Go ahead: it’ll make them feel like a hero.

The Dishwashing Bestie

Back in chapter five, we exhorted you to seat your best pal next to you at dinner. But maybe you couldn’t. Maybe you had to displace them with a lech (see chapter five, part two, “The Throw-Yourself-on-the-Grenade Exception”). If so, a cunning way to squeeze in some one-on-one time with your bestie is by whisking them away to the kitchen to help you out with the dishes… provided you keep two things in mind.

1) YOU CLEAN, THEY DRY. You’ve brought them in here mainly to dish, not to do dishes. A good host does not force a guest to plunge their hands into greasy sink water with little pieces of lettuce floating around in it.

2) THIS MAY END YOUR PARTY. Launching the dishwashing process is a universal signal that the party is ending, and that you want guests to leave. So either make it clear that you want the party to continue in your absence, or be prepared to emerge from the kitchen with your pal to find a scene straight out of 28 Days Later, your home eerily emptied of humanity, as if they were never there.

Food Pawning

A good party ends with two things: a warm feeling in your soul, and between ten and a hundred pounds of leftovers. Some of these you’ll consume during whatever cleanup you punt to tomorrow. The rest you’ll have to store (or not; see sidebar “Leftovers: What to Keep and What to Burn”).

But packing all that stuff away takes time. It also means you’re creating future dishes for yourself, in the form of soiled storage containers which will eventually have to be cleaned when you finish eating the leftovers. If you eat them. In many cases, they will take up space for weeks, getting pushed further and further to the back of the fridge, until finally you rediscover them, with a whole little mold civilization growing on top, and chuck them in the compost bin.

Solution? Make your guests take some leftovers home. No, please, you insist! If it means letting them also take home your baking dish, in which sit the last two servings of paella, fine: that’s a baking dish you don’t have to clean.⁶ In fact, they’ll probably clean it for you, before returning it. A year from now.

“If you brought a dish [to my party], take it with you, because I’m going to take it to Goodwill in one week. Because that’s on you. That’s on you.”

—BETH DITTO

Your Good Morning Maid

Perhaps you let a drunk guest crash on your couch overnight. When they awaken the next morning, you are officially no longer having a dinner party (see chapter one, part one, “Time”). Therefore, dinner party rules no longer apply, and you’re free to consider this guest your personal janitorial staff for the ensuing two hours. Have them scour the toilet, wash windows, paint your walls, or build that backyard fence you’ve been meaning to erect. In return, they get coffee. And leftovers.

WHAT YOU NEED TO CLEAN TONIGHT

After exploiting guests as much as possible using the above selfish justifications, you will now be faced with a bunch of stuff to clean on your own. What can wait till morning?

Frankly, all of it. You’ve done quite enough for one day, thank you, and you deserve blessed rest. Just understand that you’re only going to become more hungover as time passes—cleanup isn’t going to be easier tomorrow. Also, you will likely awaken to questionable scents. And possibly a bunch of tiny new insect friends. Therefore, a checklist of the stuff you might want to deal with before the sun rises on the wreckage.

1. Things That Can Hurt You

Broken glass, skewers and knives lying on the floor, copies of books written by hate-filled talk radio personalities strategically left behind by your one friend’s spouse… you don’t want to stumble upon any of that tomorrow morning. Sweep your place clean of them now.

2. Fish

We told you. We told you not to cook fish. But you did, and now you must face the consequences. You should have refrigerated any uneaten fish within two hours of serving it. If you didn’t, trash it before someone eats it and gets sick. Then super fast get the garbage bag with the fish in it into a dumpster outside. Hurry the hell up: it isn’t getting any less smelly.

3. Things Ants Want

A.k.a. all food. If you live in an area with ants, you are going to have to make sure no food from the party remains anywhere the ants can get to. Meaning everywhere. Don’t delay. The ants come quickly. They are organized and relentless. They’re probably watching you reading this book right now. Waiting.

4. Things Pets Will Destroy or Sicken Themselves With

During the party, you or your guests could oversee your pets. Or maybe you shut them away in another room where they couldn’t get into trouble. But as you sleep, they will once again have free rein. Records and record sleeves left unprotected on the floor become fun chew toys or scratching pads. Half-empty wineglasses will become fully empty as your pets knock them onto the white rug. They will find the deadly fish you didn’t trash and eat it. We told you not to cook fish. We told you.

5. Stains

Some food stains must be treated immediately, or they set forever. Interestingly, most methods of removing food stains involve deploying other foods. Did you know you can use beer to remove tea or coffee stains? Also, salt and white vinegar works on light carpet stains. Of course, after you deploy these methods, your stain-free home will smell like a British pub after an upset win in the World Cup. Your call.

To be honest, most stains probably happened earlier in the evening, and if you’ve waited till now to deal with them it’s too late anyway; go to sleep. And if you live in student housing, don’t bother. Tomorrow your roommate is just going to spill bong water in the same spot.

6. Dishes

Ignore most of these for now. But soak pots with egg, rice, or strands of pasta grafted onto them overnight—or you’ll need a pickax to get it off tomorrow. Also, clean a few utensils and dishes. That way you can use them in the morning to eat leftovers, which you’ll need to fortify yourself for cleaning everything else.

Note: If your spouse/domestic partner is hosting a dinner party, YOU are ALSO hosting the dinner party. Even if you didn’t want to have the dinner party at all, and argued like hell against it. Everything expected of your now cohost is also expected of you. Grin and bear it.

You are also expected to help clean up afterward—even if your spouse/domestic partner assured you in advance that you wouldn’t have to.⁷ That is something spouses/domestic partners say. They might even mean it. That doesn’t mean they won’t silently resent you for sitting there watching The Shawshank Redemption again while they ant-proof the kitchen at 1 a.m.

PART 3: GOODBYES

“When can I say goodbye?”

It sounds like the title of a Morrissey song, but it’s actually what you’re thinking right about now. When, you wonder, is it okay to indicate to your guests that it’s time to hit the road and leave you to sober up and begin cleaning?

You may not have to. Departure proceedings often begin naturally, like a tornado. A guest peeks at their phone, someone yawns, and suddenly the magic protective bubble surrounding your dinner party is swept away, as the grim realization sets in that the real world cannot be avoided. The real world: where bosses, children, and debtors roam; where food is not free; and where sobriety is expected.

But if that doesn’t happen, at a certain point it’s perfectly within your rights as host to say—sweetly, always sweetly—“Hey, I think I gotta kick you guys out.” The question remains, though: When? Provide yourself with an answer by tracing a path through the following chart.

SHOULD I KICK THESE GUYS OUT?

AT THE DOOR

Can you almost taste it? You’re about to successfully end a perfect dinner party! Holy shit: just a few more niceties and you’re done.

Negotiating Future Contact

Most guests, as they leave, will suggest that you get together one-on-one in the near future. Unless the guest is a close friend, this almost surely will not happen. You will not see most of these people again for several weeks, or even months. If you live in Los Angeles, make that a year. Longer if you live on opposite sides of the 405 freeway.

Also, at this point in the evening, guests who are not already your friends may suggest you exchange contact information, so you can “hang out again sometime.” Use the following scale to gauge the likelihood of this ever occurring.

LIKELY: The guest personally enters your phone number and email into their phone, and tells you about a specific event to which they want to invite you within the next month.

SOMEWHAT LIKELY: They assure you they’ll friend you on Facebook, and an hour after the party they actually do.

UNLIKELY: They urge you to friend them on Facebook.

NEVER: They give you what is obviously their work email and tell you to “keep in touch.”

Hugging Out

At the beginning of your party, you may have greeted guests with either hugs or handshakes. Hugs for old pals and family, handshakes for people you’ve never met before or don’t know well.

But here at the end of the party, there is no such need for equivocation: everyone hugs. Yes, this also applies in the Midwest, where even a handshake feels like a breach of personal space so painfully intimate you might as well be having intercourse. Sorry, get over it. There is too much gray area, too much gnashing of teeth over the hug-versus-handshake question. We’re calling it for universal night-ending hugs. Humanity needs hugs.