Party Foul

I turned 30 on Saturday. I have a general policy of not celebrating my birthday, either on this blog or in real life, but a person only turns 30 once, right? Not only that, but I turned 30 on a Saturday, which is statistically unlikely enough that I felt cosmically obligated to throw a party.

Confession: threw a birthday party once where no one showed up. You are probably feeling sorry for me now, but wait! You'll feel even worse in a second, when I admit that this was not even the first time I'd thrown a party where no one came. The first time it happened was in college: Alex and I tried to meet our neighbors by inviting them to our house for snacks and drinks (at the time I think we called them hors d'oeuvres, but mini pizza bagels don't count as hors d'oeuvres to me anymore). There were 6 units in the building, with a combined occupancy of approximately 22. No one showed up. Was this because we invited them via flyers shoved under doors? Perhaps. In any event, we ended up eating a lot of mini pizza bagel bites by ourselves and then practically forcing our upstairs neighbors (who we actually already knew, but who still didn't show up) to come hang out with us.

That was back in 2007. Three years later, I threw that birthday party where no one showed up. Actually, this is an exaggeration: three people showed up. [Correction: Alex has brought to my attention that she was there too that night. I had no memory of her being there (sorry, Alex!) but after extensively combing through old emails and blogs, she has confirmed it. She even lost her coat at DC9 that night, and claims she had a lot of fun anyway. So: 4 people showed up, and my memory is faulty.]  They are three [four] people I really like, but when you invite 20 and only three [four] come, it's a serious blow to the ego. I was turning 25 and I had been in DC for only five months. This was the second semester of my first year of grad school, and I was miserable. Being miserable, I was feeling the need to celebrate myself. It didn't work.

It was an embarrassing but formative moment in my life. I did learn a lesson: only throw parties when you're feeling okay about yourself, because as it turns out, when you're a sad sack very few people want to hang out with you. I also developed some anxiety about parties, however, and what happens to one's self-esteem when no one shows up to them. So when it began to snow really heavily on Saturday morning, 10 hours before my party, I became rather nervous. When that snow developed into a full-blown storm and then morphed into sleet and freezing rain--making the whole city a cold, slushy ice mess--I became very nervous.

But: people came! I wore ugly snow boots and ratty jeans*, the cake decorations were forgotten in the rush to secure an UberXL, and some of the guests were scared away by the weather but...people came! They were often a bit frozen and grumpy upon arrival, but once they had a drink in their hand and some cake in their mouth, we all had a good time.

So my party-giving anxiety has been somewhat alleviated. I hope that this bodes well for my 30th decade. Maybe I will become a regular party thrower! (Possible.) The next Martha Stewart! (Unlikely.) Or I could even start enjoying planning my wedding! (Extremely unlikely.) You never know. There is always room for change.

*I left the house to get brunch at 11am, but the roads got so bad so fast that I didn't want to keep driving around. So we parked the car at a friend's house nearby and camped out there until it was time for the party. Hence the sad, non-festive attire. 

Mary Stuart

Josh and I went to the Folger Theater last night to see Mary Stuart, Friedrich Schiller's play about Mary, Queen of Scots. Neither of us could keep our Marys straight--we kept confusing Bloody Mary with Mary Queen of Scots--so we did some highly refined historical research beforehand. (By which I mean that we watched The Tudors and that HBO miniseries with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I.) Now I think I finally have it straight: Mary Queen of Scots was the cousin of Elizabeth I and (Bloody) Mary I. She's the lucky lady who was married for a minute to the King of France, then later arranged for her noble Scottish husband to be killed and then married his murderer. Because this all got kind of messy, she was forced to abdicate her throne to her infant son, James, who would later become King of England after Elizabeth's death. I love European history; not convoluted at all.

I've never read Schiller, but the play is quite good, and the acting in this production was wonderful. So was the set design, which was very imposing and some of the best I've ever seen at the Folger. The play centers on the final days of Mary's life, in which Elizabeth agonizes over the decision to chop off her head while Mary's Catholic supporters frantically attempt to get her out of prison and out of Protestant England. There is a convoluted love story in there somewhere too, but that part was much less interesting than the power-struggle that plays out between the two Queens.

In short, Mary refuses to concede that she has been defeated, and the play explores what happens when two uncompromising sides try to get what they want. Even though she has been stripped of her crown, expelled by her country and thrown into an English prison, she still thinks of herself as a monarch anointed by God. So when it comes time to try and convince the conflicted Elizabeth to spare her life, she fails miserably; she calls Elizabeth a bastard and basically tells her to get lost.

Everything I read about Mary Stuart insists that is an anti-Elizabethan play, and that the whole point is to expose how deeply misunderstood Mary was by her Tudor enemies. I disagree with this reading, though; by the end, I had more sympathy for Elizabeth than Mary. Yes, Mary is thrown into prison and convicted of a crime which she did not commit, but she was still a traitor who had no intention of obeying the laws of England or recognizing Elizabeth as Queen. She also arranged the murder of her husband and then married his killer! Why wouldn't you want to get rid of such a person? Elizabeth may have overstepped the rule of law, but she wasn't wrong to cross Mary off her list of enemies.

The more I think about it, the more I have to conclude that Hobbes would have really liked this play. Elizabeth is not a perfect illustration of the sovereign, but she's close. Her own conscience tells her not to order Mary's execution, but she does it anyway because she knows that while Mary is alive the commonwealth will remain divided; two Queens cannot occupy the same space. She doesn't fully own the decision, which the sovereign definitely would have, but she still gets the deed done. Maybe this is why everyone thinks Elizabeth is the villain of this story--they haven't yet read Hobbes and come around, as I have, to the idea that a Leviathan might be kind of swell, if only we could pull it off.

Bad Bride, Part 1

Many years ago, way, way back around the time when I was just starting this blog, I read this article in New York Magazine by Ariel Levy. Over the last couple weeks, memory of this article has resurfaced in my mind, and by some miracle I managed--over 7 years later--to remember not only the author's name, but also whole chunks of the article itself. Given that I had to think really, really hard to recall the name of one of my roommates from the same time period, the article must have made an impression on me.

In a nutshell, Levy writes about her decisions to a) have a wedding, despite her misgivings and b) wear a dress to said wedding that was not white. At the time I first read the article, I was: a) single, b) very single and c) nowhere close to planning a wedding. Nevertheless, her travails must have resonated with me pretty deeply. And now, I'm a) planning a wedding, despite my misgivings and b) trying to figure out how to wear a not-white dress to said wedding. So the resonance is ringing loud and clear. My past-self was prescient.

Truth talk: I've never really wanted a wedding.* In fact, up until a couple weeks ago, when my mother insisted that there would be some kind of party to celebrate my upcoming marriage, I was pretty set against having one. Eloping always seemed like the best possible option for everyone involved. I wouldn't have to find a dress, the groom wouldn't have to buy a suit, my friends wouldn't have to travel or buy presents, and my parents wouldn't have to pay for a single thing. As it turns out, the groom wanted to buy a suit, my parents were happy to pay for stuff and all my friends insisted that they wanted to be there. I caved.

My wedding is in 101 days. And thus, I must find something to wear. My problem is: I've never been to a wedding where the bride didn't wear a white dress, and I've never wanted to wear a white dress to any event, much less my own wedding. I'm not just trying to buck tradition here, either--I'm a very, very pale person and white does nothing for me.** I don't really have any precedent to work from, however, except for Ariel Levy.

Her solution only goes so far, though, because in her case, she bought a a crazy-expensive Carolina Herrera gown for her wedding, a wedding which she refers to as a "party about love." On both of these counts--what she wore, and how she referred to her wedding--I am in utter disagreement. I do not want a gown, I do not want to spend a fortune and I do not want to refer to anything as a party about love (unless it's a joke about swingers). So on this score, the article can only get me so far.

No wedding shop can do anything for me either--they sell colorful dresses, of course, but they are bridesmaids dresses, which I've found really look like bridesmaid dresses, even when they are not on a woman standing next to a woman wearing white. I do not want to look like a bridesmaid, but I don't really want to look like a bride, either. I want to look like myself, but a version of myself that is wearing a pretty dress and looks awesome. Is this too much to ask?

And this is why I never wanted to have a wedding. They make otherwise sane people go crazy.

*This does not mean I never wanted to get married, of course. (Just in case the groom is reading this and has become worried.)

**It has occurred to me that a tanning salon could be the answer I've been looking for, but does it seem wise to risk cancer just to fit the color scheme?