High WASP Entertaining, If Online Invitations Were Perfect

Just imagine if online invitations were layered, interactive, beautiful, evocative. (Given that I am not a visual designer, the imagination part is key.)

Imagine that there are designers out there and you love their stuff. That part's not hard. For example, Erin at inkOBSESSIONdesigns. I think her graphics are adorable. This birdie, for one.

My personal favorite graphic is her space age flowers. Imagine you wanted to include these in a birthday invitation. And you wanted animation. And there was a tool like Polyvore where the two of you could collaborate. The collaboration part is as important as the actual design and effects. (The problem now is you would have to collaborate with software engineers. Not advisable for normal people.) It might come out like this. Only way better. (Note that Erin is ONLY responsible for the cute flowers here. Don't want anyone to think this prototype would be what her talent would produce. It's me muddling around.)

The invite email.

S. Invitation First Page by High WASP on Polyvore.com

You click on the >>click here<< (genius, huh?), and come to a web page with a gorgeous, textured, full screen image.

S. Invitation Second Page by High WASP on Polyvore.com

This is a Roy Lichtenstein painting. Imagine it’s animated so that the sun sets and the colors change and the pixels pixel. With, in my taste range, a fragment of Happy Birthday by Stevie Wonder playing in the background. Then you click again. You don't see a new page, the animation takes you, as though you were opening a page, to this. We've moved on beyond HTML.

S. Invitation Third Page by High WASP on Polyvore.com

And again. The border is a Crane stationery image. If they wanted to get in on the deal, we'd let them, right?

S. Invitation Fourth Page by High WASP on Polyvore.com

The designer’s name rolls by like movie credits.


I don’t think I’m insane. Not a designer, clearly, but not insane. If I were Jan, who codes her own, I could do this now. If I were Erin, it would actually look great.

High WASP Entertaining, The Family Gathering

Theme parties aside, the High WASP's most favorite sort of entertaining is the family gathering. Let's face it. It's tiring being a High WASP. All that social signaling. I am sighing at the thought.

At family gatherings, you will not offend anyone with incorrect signals. The language is shared. You may offend someone by calling them an effing princess, as I once did, or admitting that you don't like fruit desserts, but at least it's clear. Not murky. Devoid of anxiety. And more often, you will sit round the table and say things like, "Remember when we were in Mexico and the mariachi band played in the villa's living room and embarrassed us into silence and we ate all that food the cook made that we didn't even like?" You may all be amused at the tendency of New York Times book reviewers one year to use the term "luminous" in reference to prose, and wind yourselves up into uproarious laughter deciding which books were in fact, "matte."

In short, you are a family. In this, I imagine, much like any family. Comforting each other with shared experiences, thoughts, patterns.

One of my most dearly beloved family gatherings happened on a rare hot California night. Northern California almost always cools down at night, thanks to our marine layer. But a week or two every summer, it gets hot. This night, it was hot.

I cooked, as I always did. I don't remember what food. It was so hot, what with the night and the cooking, that someone said, "Let's take the dining table outside." We dragged my old french bread-making table outdoors. Also chairs. We pulled out the candelabra and the vase which was in fact a polo tournament trophy. Picked some flowers. Lit candles. Laid mats, and napkins, unmatched plates. There were a lot of us.

Dinner On The Patio As Night Falls by High WASP on Polyvore.com

We ate dinner on the patio fully served. Sat around the table for much longer than usual, watching darkness come. Eventually just breathing. An enormous sense of well-being overtook me. Perhaps it overtook us all, except as High WASPs, no one said anything much more than, "Um, yes, well, nice fish. " Or chicken. We're health conscious.

Because at the end it's clearly just a family, sitting at a table, eating dinner, feeling love.


Notes
- Many of the goods above are from our friend TPP
- Yes, I noticed I said love without irony. It was difficult but necessary. It's the truth after all.
- You will also find this post at the wonderful blog, The Blushing Hostess, along with other posts on grace in everyday living

High WASP Entertaining, The Themed Party

Costume parties, scavenger hunts, holiday parties, you name it. High WASPs like parties with themes.

When I was at Princeton, my sophomore year I lived with 3 roommates in a 4th floor quad at the top of many, many stairs. A gray stone dormitory. With turrets. At Christmas, we decided to give a party. We sent out invitations. In this case, they were just Xeroxed, handed out everywhere on the gray stone paths of the university. Under arches. In the invitations, we stressed that the party would involve mistletoe, Christmas carols, and punch. We said, dress for the occasion.

And, in 1974, they did. Our room was full all night. Carols were sung, punch was drunk. I can only imagine what a photo of that party might look like now, tall boys with floppy '70s hair wearing sports coats they had bought back home in Atlanta or Houston or New York, clean-faced girls with Echo scarves around our necks, a Cartier tank watch we got for our 18th birthdays, our one pair of high heels, intoxicated, crowded, worried, giddy, privileged. Dirty carpet. Mistletoe in the doorway. Red ribbons.

That Easter the roommates decided to give another party. Only this time, with hats. The invitation was quite ironic. We collected more girls, 10 of us in all, to host the event. We took a picture of all of us outside on one of the gray stone balconies, with parapet. In hats. And clothes of course. This was 1975 after all. Again we distributed invitations far and wide.

This time the room was full, but this time so was the narrow stairway. All the way to the ground level and out the heavy wooden dormitory door. Everyone in hats.

Lest you think this love of themes was college student foolery only, my mother was, in the 21st century mind you, the chairperson of the volunteer board for one of Santa Barbara's cultural institutions. She ran the annual fundraiser. The party? A scavenger hunt. It was a huge success.

I think the High WASP effort spent on getting it right means that when someone says be silly, we take advantage. Maybe themes were another sanctioned way to step outside the code. To behave in ways that we might not otherwise consider. I say were because, as I have said before, our original species is a dying breed. The full set of generational and geographical permutations is not yet known. I'm writing an elegy, a celebration of what I valued, and an attempted debunking of everything else. We might or might not wonder why.

Saturday Morning at 9:15am

It’s the boy child’s birthday on Monday. He will be 19. First time he’s ever been away from home on his birthday. I, however, have twice before been traveling on business. Never neglected to celebrate of course, threw birthday parties ranging from homemade carnivals at the park, to a day at the slot car race, to a ski weekend for three. But I prefer that he be gone and I be here. I prefer maternal loneliness to maternal guilt.

Looking for something to do, I asked my daughter if the boy child needed a birthday cake. Answer?

Daughter: (8:14:49 AM) his friends are throwing him a surprise party
Daughter: (8:14:54 AM) they invited me
Mother: (8:15:00 AM) oh good

[I’m super-eloquent like that. I try not to talk too much when I have my kids on IM so they don’t notice that they are talking me. If they knew then they might have to run away…]

So I sent him various and sundry dinosaurs from the Oriental Trading Company (having already sent the Cold War unicorns) and gave him money to go to Belgium with my best friend’s daughter for a week. I have a feeling that from now on this is the mode for boy child birthdays. Needless to say I still remember the day he and the girl he's going to Belgium with were in the back seat of my car, aged 2-ish, chattering about whether they preferred pachycephalosauruses or triceratops. But such is motherhood.

Ironic Wine Charms

At the lovely and famous blog, design*sponge, they showed this DIY project today. Making wine charms, you know, so no one else drinks your Pinot. So pretty.



However. At this point in my life I do NOT need my wine glass to look any prettier. It looks pretty enough already. It calls to me. Here are the wine charms that I would like someone to DIY for me.

By me on PowerPoint since that's all I know

Volunteers?