““… Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… ”
– Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

I’m not much of a party guy. Used to be. Not any more. I’m dangerously clumsy at the art of air-kissing and never have figured out how to make small talk. Get a couple drinks in me and ask what I think of this crazy weather we’ve been having and I’m likely to drag you off into a corner and ask intense and embarrassingly personal questions about your life.

My strategy then is to listen more and talk less, which naturally has turned me into an eavesdropper. For years I’ve collected fragments of conversations overhead at parties. Here’s a selection:

“…Collie. No, his nickname. A pun on his dreadlocks, I guess, because when they get wet they smell like wet dog.

“…ultramodern music, apparently anti-sense, but deconstructed you could discern threads of melody.”

“…They’re a closed shop. You and I can’t get in. I don’t think we could get in if we won the Nobel, Pulitzer, and National Book Award all in the same year. Unless you’re an obscure Russian poet. They love obscure Russian poets.”

“…People like us should never have to work. We should be identified at birth and separated from the common herd and set up with stipends that allow us to live lives of creative lethargy. When we sleep until noon it’s for the common good. We’re escape valves for a too-pressured society. The world needs people like us to be wholly unproductive. The world does owe us a living.”

“…Look, you will never, under any circumstances – I must stress this – absolutely never, it’s impossible — find better ones than Tupperware. They’re the crème-de-crème. It’s one of the tragedies of the modern world that you can’t buy them in stores – you have to go to those horrid parties – we should have one ourselves! Oh but Rubbermaid sucks. Planned obsolescence, like panty hose, except it’s not that they wear out, it’s that they have dozens of sizes in round, square, rectangular – or I should say cylinder, cube, and what’s the three-dimensional form of a rectangle? Little caskets, all in a dozen sizes, so no matter how careful you are, you always lose the lids and have to buy new ones.”

“…Most people lack a ruling principle.”

“…What’s the opposite of an epic story? That’s my life.”