Party time excellent

A few weekends ago I spent my Saturday skipping from party to party. I began the evening with a long and leisurely Metro ride to Ballston. Accompanied by a great book (Snow Crash) and my iPod I transferred and rode out into the warm and humid embrace of Virginia. The first party of the evening was the housewarming party for my friend Susan. Susan and I first met in high school and first became friends when we worked on the production of A Midsummer’s Nights Dream my senior year. It was the first show I’d ever stage managed and she was the ASM (Assistant Stage Manager). Currently I work I polling and she’s….a professional assistant stage manager. I should really contact Actors Equity and see if I can get some sort of finders fee for discover her talent…though in all honesty the greatest miracle was that I didn’t destroy her interest immediately. I liked stage managing but I was constantly making it up as I went along. Being a moron with a prompt book appealed to me, and I was pretty good at pretending to know that which I did not.

Susan’s party was about 2 blocks from the Ballston Metro. In the space of those 2 blocks I passed two parties in which it appeared Abercrombie and Fitch had invested heavily. It’s entirely possible that I passed by a convention of the “I heart A&F” society. Thankfully Susan’s party was filled with people my speed: theater folks and law students. I hung around for about 2 hours in blissful uneventfulness. Soon thereafter I packed myself (book, Frisbee and iPod) up and schlepped myself back to the Metro. Then it was over to Logan Circle and Allison Stuntz’s homewarming. It’s strange that the home necessitated warming, since a week earlier I was there warming it with my good wishes and poorly made jokes. Allison played host to the aforementioned music theme party.

This party was a bustling and bursting affair. There were numerous folks fitting the profile of nearly political job in DC. There were interns, techies, legislative staffers, pollsters, consultants, organizers and lobbyists. It was like a job fair without the promise of employment. I quickly sought out and adopted as my own a circle of Dean staffers. We caught up and I found that my little nebula of friends soon dissipated and dispersed in search of other friends, potential one-night stands and other staples of the 20 something party.

I meandered around and caught up with old friends and tried to worm my way into conversations in order to make new friends. But, truth be told, I really wanted to be at home reading Snow Crash. So I ventured to the second floor and said my goodbyes to the few folks I knew up there. As I was saying goodbye to my friend Buffy I saw Sandra. You may remember Sandra as the host of a party I went to sometime ago. At that party I felt awkward and out of place and so I left early. Well it turns out Sandra read that post and thought it a slight at her, or at least her friends. At Allison’s party she began yelling at me. Shouting accusations, and loudly and somewhat violently quoting back to me lines from my post. It was mortified. I write these posts realizing they are going to be read, but I tend to have a sense of whom I imagine will read them. Even still I try pretty hard not to say mean things…and in fact I don’t think I said anything mean about Sandra. But still here I was getting accosted, loudly for something I’d written. I was being asked to explain who were the “busty women and busty men.” Now I don’t remember writing the second half of that, and I was certainly not going to enter into a debate about the nature of blogging and the idea that writing what you feel is sometimes more important that writing what was there. I tend to write what happens to me, but some of the descriptions are, of course, more in the Hunter S. Thompson methodology…where you write what you know to be true even if it never happened. So in this case I explained how I felt about the party even if it’s not accurate in the sense of a documentary. Anyways, I was not about to enter into that discussion with Sandra at this time of the evening. So I did the next best thing. Basically I pointed to someone else, she looked there and I ran out of the house. I essentially reenacted a scene from a Looney Tunes Cartoon. I half expected to be destroyed by an anvil, or to draw a hole on the wall and jump through it.

As I ran out onto the street I realized, that sometimes I’m just not a party guy. I’m built for less intense encounters. I’m not equipped for the sensory overload that is a hectic party. After running a bit of the way to the Metro I descended into the underbelly of the transit system, resumed reading my book and thought about how nice it is to just sit….alone…reading.