Leaving the Party
I’ve never been a big party-goer. I’m not sure why that is. I consider myself a reasonably social person. I don’t drink much, if at all, but I think it would be wrong to attribute this to that. It certainly reinforces my preference to avoid parties, but I felt this way about parties long before I decided I didn’t care for alcohol. I am a morning person, which means late-night is not my best time of day. My biorhythms peak in the morning hours and fade at night. This all makes me an outlier as much as anything about me. I think that means it’s worth exploring.
I was invited to a holiday party at the Embassy of Pakistan on Saturday night. The man who was recently made the Pakistani Ambassador to the UN (a position he had held in the past for a good many years and was now reappointed to) invited me as we had gotten to know one another during a trip to Pakistan two years ago. It struck me as interesting, so I said I would attend with Kim. Then I spent time on Saturday with the friend who introduced me to this Pakistani gentleman. He is not able to attend for a complicated set of reasons. His concern was that I engage in some loose-lip talk with his friends at the gathering. He mentioned the request that I not speak to these people about him, and he did so at least three or four times. I finally took the hint. I would likely not know many people at this gathering anyway, but those I might know are the ones he didn’t want me talking to. In addition to that, Kim was doing a show that afternoon and I know she is always quite tired after a show (she puts so much into it all). Therefore, I made the decision not to go and told my friend that so as to ease his mind. When I told Kim that we did not need to go, she was very relieved. We could live without the grandeur of such an event, but it got us wondering what it was about us that made us such party avoiders.
When we were out last week, heading to a show (West Side Story in its second night of previews), we met for dinner at The Palm West with out friends. We brought with us our nephew and his fiancé, who were staying with us for a week of New York City during the holidays. I understand that New York is an exciting town. In the forty-four years I have lived here it has only become more exciting to the world at large. It is now the number one urban tourist destination in the world. It is also the most cited venue for a vacation by Americans, which is pretty amazing with all the beach and theme park attractions out there. I get it. New York City is a cool place to enjoy. It’s exciting and energized. That night at The Palm West, a restaurant where the walls are covered with caricatures of famous and infamous patrons, it was busy, loud and festive. It was December, so it was chock-a-block full, with hardly enough room to sit and even less ability to hear each other across the table. My nephew’s fiancé, the youngest at the table by far (late-twenty-something) was blown away by the scene. She could not help herself but say that we were so lucky to live in such a City, to have the ability to regularly enjoy such a lively place and she wondered aloud how we could ever think of leaving it for sleepy San Diego (where she is from). We shrugged.
Kim and I discussed her comments on the way home that night after the show. Kim and I had thoroughly enjoyed the revival of West Side Story, perhaps the most quintessential New York City show. We love New York City and we revel in its diversity and energy. But as for the scene at The Palm West, we just couldn’t get our heads around why that festive party scene would appeal to anyone. We recognized that the young San Diegoan was more into the party scene that we were. She was enjoying her martini. She liked loud and brassy. We, on the other hand, are much older, we’ve seen it all and been around it all. I’ve eaten in The Palm West (and East for that matter), not to mention Morton’s and Bobby Van’s, more times than I can remember. It is a favorite spot for the meat-eating Wall Street crowd. There was absolutely nothing about that scene which struck me as unusual, special or particularly appealing. It is a scene you put up with if you want to eat dinner in the theater district before the show. I think that even our other friends, with whom we regularly go to the theater and thus have dinner before, and who enjoy drinking much more than we do, were at best tolerant of the scene at The Palm West.
An objective analyst would probably suggest that the biggest factor that explained the differing views was age. Young people like loud and brassy and older people prefer calmer and quieter. That is undoubtedly true for the most part, but I also think that there are simply party people and non-party people. I will not speak for Kim, because she is not as far to the extreme as I am, but I am clearly a non-party person for some reason. Even during college and my fraternity days, during a party, I was more likely to be the guy cleaning up as we went rather than the guy with the lampshade on his head. It’s just who I am and I do view it as a non-conformist path.
We all know that there are several types of parties. The other party that gets so much play now is political party. I suspect this is a crowd that also likes the other type of party. Where do you see more hoopla than the political conventions with the balloons falling around? I’ve never really connected the two uses of the word before, but I have never joined a political party, so I guess I am not a party person in either use of the word. I read about Rep. Jeff Van Drew deciding he needs to change party from being a Democrat to be a Republican. In Democratic terms, he is leaving he party. He wants us to believe it is about impeachment and his objections to it, but when you look at his constituent support you quickly realize that he has to either switch party or likely lose his seat in Congress. Jeff Van Drew is truly a party man. And that’s how I come to my rationalization about the party concept and how I fit with it.
Party seems to be a conformity issue. In the college fraternity sense, it is a gathering of like-minded people who want to have fun in the extreme. In the political sense it seems to be a gathering of like-minded people who want to win control in the extreme. My tendency towards non-conformity or contrarian ways has me leaning against party. I do not think of myself as a contrarian by nature and I actually actively dislike the party lifestyle in either sense of the word. I do not like staying up late, drinking to excess, being stupid and loud. I do not like being constrained by ideology that I do not personally establish. That all means that I prefer to not going to the party rather than leaving the party, but if I find myself in the party for some reason, I am likely to be in the first group leaving the party.
