It’s your party
Before you cry about it, try these party-planning tips from the experts
BY RUTH TOBIAS
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It’s your party
Before you cry about it, try these party-planning tips
from the experts
BY RUTH TOBIAS
The days when planning a party meant scoring a keg and unclogging the toilet
are over. From now on, it’s all about gold-lettered invitations and canapés,
ivories tinkling and champagne flutes clinking. Top hats and little black
dresses. Ice sculptures and doves ...
Well, maybe someday. For now it’s about eschewing the cheese curls and
Pictionary in favor of using your imagination and showing some style. It’s about
maintaining realistic expectations as you marshal your organizational skills.
And, ultimately, it’s about ensuring a good time, for yourself as well as for
your guests.
By way of inspiration, we asked some local pros to name the most important
things novice hosts should keep in mind as they approach the day of the big
event.
Choose a unifying theme
The advantage of a theme, explains Ellen Hochberger of Hostess Helper Inc. (20
Whittlesey Road, Newton, 617-244-7465), is that it gives you a firm yet flexible
foundation on which to build your party. She uses ethno-cultural themes as a
case in point: "They’re easy enough to do because you start with a menu and then
you can go from there, deciding at each step how elaborate you want to get. If
it’s a Mexican theme you choose, then you can have some kind of Mexican dinner,
put up Mexican decorations, and the waitstaff can even wear Mexican attire." In
other words, building on the foundation of the fiesta, you start with the food:
do you want a casual buffet with, say, a taco bar and other walkabout snacks, or
do you want a sit-down dinner, beginning perhaps with avocado soup or ceviche,
continuing with turkey mole, and ending with natillas (custard)? From there, the
beverage selection — beer, tequila, margaritas, and maybe some tropical juices —
is a snap; as for decoration, depending on your budget, it can be as simple as a
few well-placed sombreros and a Frida Kahlo poster or as showy as an assemblage
of Mexican folk art on the tables and textiles on the walls, a homemade piñata
overhead, and the like. By the same token, you can check off music by making a
compilation of everything from traditional folk music to rock acts like Café
Tacuba, or by splurging on the services of a strolling mariachi trio. And so on;
the same formula would apply were you to choose a Russian, Irish, or, heck,
Micronesian theme.
‘Make the party your own’
That’s the advice of A.J. Williams at Creative Events Inc. (31 Newbury Street,
Boston, 617-267-2244; www.creativeeventsinc.com), implying that to some extent
your theme should be you — not literally, of course, complete with rounds of You
Trivia and grade-school photos as party favors, but in the sense that you "put
yourself into the event, personalize it, and keep it original." The best way to
do this, Williams says, is to "go conversational" when it comes to detail. "You
can print up napkins with a work by your favorite artist on them, and they would
be a conversation piece. You could create your own specialty cocktail. You could
make a dish that’s based on an old family recipe." In each case, you’re offering
not just food or a drink or a paper product, but a starting point for
discussion. You can take this principle even further and make the party your
guests’ as well as your own. For instance, you could ask attendees to send the
name of a favorite song with their RSVP and make a compilation of the results.
Or you could ask them to reveal some salient tidbit about themselves — within
the bounds of decorum, of course — and make place cards with trivia questions
written on the inside; guests could then read aloud the questions and try to
guess which of their tablemates trains homing pigeons, whose native language is
Tagalog, and so forth. The point is simple and rather poetic: everyone and
everything has a story, and it’s your job as host to create a forum for their
telling.
Relax!
According to Interactive Cuisine’s (Cambridge, 617-868-5995;
www.interactivecuisine.com) Julia Shanks, the entire "success of a party is
contingent on the host being relaxed and having a good time — if the host is
calm, the guests will feed off his or her ease." Of course, relaxation requires
some forethought: Shanks says she coaches her clients "to prepare as much ahead
of time as possible, and to plan a menu that doesn’t require last-minute
preparations. Save the complicated recipes for smaller, more intimate
gatherings." Ultimately, it’s "better to serve a stew that you can keep warm in
the oven than a sole meunière that requires last-minute finesse, will cause you
to become stressed, and, most important, keeps you from spending time with the
guests — the reason to entertain in the first place." In fact, Shanks says, you
should aim to get out of the kitchen well ahead of schedule: "Reserve the 30
minutes before the guests arrive for sitting on the sofa with your favorite
magazine, drinking a glass of wine." To provide a model for such a "relaxed
disposition," she invokes her namesake, the iconic cooking-show host Julia
Child: "Despite various kitchen fiascos, she made the viewers feel that even
when they made mistakes, the food could and still would be delicious. She taught
us how to recover from our mistakes" — and, when all else failed, how to laugh
them off.
Finally, we might turn to poor Martha in our hour of need. Offering a
comprehensive guide to party planning in the last chapter of her gorgeous tome
Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook (Clarkson Potter, 1999), Stewart thinks
of everything so that you won’t overlook anything — urging, for instance, that
you tailor your guest list to your living space (there should be "just enough
people to create a sense of movement and conviviality") and encouraging
creativity when it comes to serving implements ("cutting boards, baskets, tall
jars, glass and ceramic vases, and bowls of all kinds can be pressed into
service"). Hey, nobody needs to know you got your idea of a good time from a
convicted felon.