Conversations at Dinner Parties
Image Courtesy: Pinterest
There’s something bittersweet about going from sipping tap water from your grandmother’s china tea cups in the backyard of your childhood home to setting the table with the very same dish set in your own kitchen at 20 years old.
The little joys from childhood reappear in a new form. The same colored pencils pack from art class are dug up from the junk drawer to hand draw the evening’s menu and hors d’œuvres. The same friends from down the street visit now from across the country, with the same eyes but with a different more grown-up essence.
The charm of the “dinner party” is not one to go unnoticed by this budding generation of twentysomethings, yet it deserves more credit. Stepping out of the teenage years to adulthood marks a largely transitory phase and the intimacy of a crafted meal with friends helps navigate through the chaos.
There’s so much intention in creating the ideal night. Going back and forth on who receives a handwritten invite in the mail, which circles and personalities with meld and clash, who will bring the creative dishes, and who will draw the crowd in with card games and a sense of humor. The careful or carefree calculation when deciding the seating chart, picking out the entrees, and encouraging the constant flow of cocktails and sips to loosen up the guests and start the conversations. It’s something else to have your friends and loved ones all dolled up, as well as new faces joining the table with a variety of perspectives and lives lived to be shared. Needless to say, it’s the ideal opportunity to show off your culinary expertise (potentially sensual paired with a “kiss the chef” apron draped on your waist– who doesn’t love someone who can pull together a delicacy?)
After a three course meal paired with a couple drinks and sleepy eyes, it forms the perfect dimly lit environment for conversation and thought. On first glance it’s not quite noticed, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s quite fascinating how a group of people from all different lives, perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds can come together nearing a little too late in such an intimate setting, and fall into place with each other like puzzle pieces. From that perspective, it seems impossible, but something about a dinner party has that effect.
The questions go from mild to deep to delirious as it gets later. Whether silly or stupid, these questions allow you to learn the ins and outs of one another. You get to learn how your childhood best friend can tie a cherry stem with their tongue in record time, and how the friend you met that night would search for their grandfather first in a room of everyone they’ve ever known.
At the end of the night when the candles are blown out and the guests are wrapping up, someone asks the final question of the evening. You don’t have to know the answer quite yet, and maybe it’ll change as time passes. It doesn’t have to be so philosophical, nor does it have to be generic. After all, you’re just entering your twenties and you’re just getting to know this new you.
If you could keep only one memory from your life as the rest fades away, what would you pick and why?
Strike Out,
Writer: Jenna Weiss
Edited by: Sarah Harwell and Nina Rueda
Orlando
