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What’s wrong with old-fashioned parties—with Old Fashioneds?

By Ed Goldman

As summer begins to wane so does the late-afternoon/early-evening, elegant/awkward ritual known as the soirée. 

The soirée (SWAH-RAY) is often held in the recently and frantically manicured backyard of someone’s home. But this isn’t a pool-side barbeque—and whether the music is “live” or pre-recorded, it usually favors harps and violin quartets over Grateful Dead tribute bands (“live”) or the actual Grateful Dead (pre-recorded, due to the actual death of its founder, Jerry Garcia, who died of a heart attack 29 years and one month ago this very day. These are the facts you demand when you subscribe to this column).

The food at a soirée is less likely to be chips and dip than heavy appetizers—now there’s an oxymoron for you—meaning, people can actually stuff themselves on many tiny portions of things on crackers and then skip dinner. And don’t look for cold cans of beer in a metal tub; a soirée is strictly about chilled white wine and Champagne in a crystal ice bucket.

You don’t make a boneheaded mistake at an event like this. You commit a faux pas. Here’s the key difference between the two (other than spelling and pronunciation):

Boneheaded mistake: “I thought Costco stopped making its own brand of beer.” (It did. But it was called Kirkland. A beer critic said it smelled like “a urine-soaked diaper sitting on a piping-hot radiator.” In fact, all beer smells like that.)  

Faux Pas: “This can’t be Champagne. Unless it’s from the Champagne wine region of France, you can’t really call it Champagne.” (This is true but it won’t endear you to your hosts.)

Because soirées walk a fine line between being casual and upscale, many of them have supposedly “fun” dress codes—like “safari chic” (if the host’s backyard has more than two trees), “anchors aweigh” (if the venue is a yacht or the host has toy boats floating in the pool) and “summer jammies” (those shortie PJs we had to wear as children being put to bed while it was still light out).

I hate theme parties almost as much as the smell of beer. Not all soirées are thematic, of course—just as all Champagnes are sparkling wines but all sparkling wines aren’t Champagne. That said, all theme parties are god-awful.

The ones I most despise are “mystery” parties where all of the guests are given a character to play and nobody knows until the final reveal (or final card, or something) who the villain is. But if you’ve ever read, watched or listened to a mystery, the identity of the villain isn’t brain-wrenching to figure out. He or she is usually the one who acts the least suspiciously. 

I deduced in about four minutes that I was the murderer at a theme party 25+ years ago. And if I could discover my own guilt, this couldn’t have been a very mysterious mystery. My track record is pretty spotty at figuring out who did it in a whodunit. Making it worse, I can re-watch a crime film or re-read a crime novel and still be surprised by the outcome.