Friday Five: Party Down!

The RevGalBlogPals' Friday Five this week is all about partying down.

Would you rather be the host or the guest?
Maybe this is a little control issue thing, or because of the many parties where I've sat uncomfortably, like Ugly Betty at a Mode soiree'...but I'd rather be the host. Imagine that.

When you are hosting, do you clean everything up the minute the guests go home? Will you accept help with the dishes?
It depends on what time it is; and I hate doing dishes -- make that HATE -- so any help is more than appreciated.

If you had the wherewithal, and I guess I mean more than money, to throw a great theme party, what would the theme be?
Well, we like wine-and-cheese tasting, so I might be inclined to do that in a thematic way -- Michigan wine and cheese, or Spanish wine and cheese, with appropriate nibbles. On the other hand, a friend of mine once dreamed of throwing a kind of northern-Michigan-redneck party -- as one of our local radio personalities calls our populace, "jackpine savage" -- with cheese doodles, pickled gizzards, blind robins and jerky, and other local-party-store fare. Flannel attire requested; chainsaw optional. (Lest you think I'm joking, there is never a time during the day in my neighborhood where you cannot hear a chainsaw in the distance. I was home the other day after work to pick up my mail and look for sprouting morels...and there was that buzz again. Think Possum Lodge on The Red Green Show.)

What's the worst time you ever had at a party?
That would have to be my high school graduation party. My friends all had parties with their friends. My parents insisted that my relatives -- mostly people I didn't care for, and who didn't care for each other -- needed to be invited. I didn't want to invite my friends then, because I didn't want them to meet my relatives. In the meantime my dad had gotten into a huff about something and decided to go fishing; and my mother developed a "sick headache" and spent much of the day throwing up in the bathroom, leaving me to entertain the people whom I didn't want to be there in the first place; sort of an instant-karma thing, I think, in retrospect.

And to end on a brighter note, what was the best?
When I was in college, my gang -- these were my churchy friends from the local LCMS and ALC/LCA student parishes; we all, unlike our denominations, got along -- decided to throw an end-of-school-year party. The hostesses, who had a duplex in the campus neighborhood, decided upon a bordello theme. (Now, you have to remember that we're talking some of the most white-bread, pure-as-the-driven-snow, repressed, pious college students you can imagine, give or take the collective Lutheran fondness for elbow bending. Several of the participants, by the way, are now pastors. But they'll remain nameless here.) The hostesses dressed up Mae West style in feather boas and bling-bling and decorated their abode like...well, you know. It was quite the evening. Highlights included a unique commode-based "Hit the target" game for male revelers in our bathroom, a Motown singalong and a future-pastor-guest's jug of homemade wine from a relative in Arkansas. (A vintage that probably would not show up at one of my middle-aged wine-and-cheese parties.) A good time was had by all; many of whom spent the night crashed in the living room. I had such a good time that my the very roots of my hair hurt the next day...which also happened to be Sunday, when we all still managed to show up at church. I don't think I've ever been to a party quite like that, before or since.