The Everybody

That moment where I darken the lights in the kitchen, coax up the music, shoot an integral friend a specific look through the crowd, and soon there are all my friends dancing. A moment of YES, and I'd rather be nowhere else in the world, there among my pots and pans with the table pushed aside. It was all spontaneous and downstairs the curtains buzzed from the bouncing. The man from Sweden, my new grad student, the architecture history woman of soul, the indefatigable pal of southeast Asia, all those dear ones with whom I was 14 once. All of these dancing together. And I brought out hats, the red bowler, the white bro hat, and they were rotating around as dance props.

I was throwing an Everybody Party.

I have amazing friends and I am beyond blessed for all of them. And all my amazing friends were saying throughout the night that my other amazing friends were amazing. "SEE, right!"

I love being at parties, being among the buzz and the energy, but even better I love doing at parties. Meaning: the hostessing, the mixing of drinks, introducing people ("Annie, this is Ben; he knew me when I had long hair and was way less fun"). I always had a reason to thread through the crowd, allegedly to refill drinks, but it meant mingling with intention and seeing to everybody.

I had made a menu, The Annie (ginger, cider, whisky), The Holly (nutmeg whisky clove), etc, etc, all these friends and their cocktail spirit animals. I left out a pen and invited others to add themselves. We all stood around drinking Hollies at first, people rather intimidated perhaps by the black pepper lemon vodka sassy Mariahs. No solo cups for us, I was proud to bring out Grandma June's gold rimmed glasses on a tray (the tray, in fact, was a flat from the greenhouse for plant starts, but whatever).

It was all sort of a big experiment, all these mixing of circles (from my work team, to the beautiful yoga goddess I met randomly who happens to have my birthday, to the famous Big Ben I went to college with), and all these bizarre yet hopefully delicious cocktail ingredients. Cardamom, ginger, rosemary, cider, lemon, nutmeg, clove, lemon verbena. I love mixing.

Now is not the time of a shared house where parties would be a burden, not the time of living out too far where nobody can walk over. I love my apartment. It's third-floor height and tree-house-ness, that its two blocks from anything, that it can become Hotel Mansard for visitors. I write this in the early morning light of post-party glow, both couches and papasan chair holding my sleeping friends.