Reverb10

December 9 – Party Prompt: Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans. (Author: Shauna Reid)

REVERB 10 is kind of awesome: i love to look back and forward (bad buddhist, fortunately i am not one) so any kind of writing exercise that encourages me to do so is kind of awesome. Also I am so over writing about Adorno... and its been 12 hours. 20 more hours, 10 more pages. So excuse the diversion.

Seems only fitting to talk about not the parties that blew me out of left field-- the art car saloons at Burning Man that zipped around the desert in a blur of vodka and endorphins, leaving only the zigzag trace of purple lights against the night like a photograph of fireworks. No: this party was someone else living through all my expectations and longings about what summer in New York is or could be or should be--like a picture postcard and allowed me to laugh at myself and be myself at the same time. Beautiful.

I crashed a stranger's birthday party this summer. She was one of these just-so people and it reminded me that while my fantasies-- in which I wear party dresses and demand RSVPs and curate experiences-- usually cause me stress, anxiety, and frustration, they could actually be real. Sometimes experiences really are just-so. And so this girl wore a big structured poofy dress and a summer hat and drank sangria from a bag in Brooklyn Bridge Park, it was a joy to watch. After dreaming about Pimms Cups in San Diego for months and months, we trekked through the heat to a liquor store in Park Slope with handwritten notes beside particularly exotic cordials and bought Pimms and made pasta salad. We got there late, as the sun was setting and the grass was getting wet and I ate most of the pasta salad that we had made with my hands, picking out salty chunks of feta and olives and leaving the cucumbers and tomatoes. Because who cares.

The lights on the bridge twinkled, ivy-league fops wore boat shoes, someone handed me a crazystraw and I realized-- hey! sometimes life really is as magical as you want it to be. If only you stop wanting it to be.