Mid-Summer Night’s Dinner Party

There is this amazing woman who owns one of my favorite escapes in the world, Poor Richard’s Landing in Provincetown, Cape Cod. The woman is a fine and eccentric creature of a certain age and I love to be in her presence. She was friends with Tennessee Williams and Ten, as she calls him, used to stay on the Landing in the summer. Every time I get the chance I pepper this lady with questions about the Bird (as Gore Vidal calls him) and she never ceases to bring interesting history into the present. One of my favorite stories is this. “Ten use to have fabulous dinner parties here on the Landing. He would invite whomever he’d run into that day in town, on the beach or at a bar and there would always be some visiting luminary included. We would all arrive here at the appointed time and Ten would have nothing but liquor, not even ice cubes. A few of us would trek down to the market and pick up some simple groceries and cook the dinner. Ten never, not once, cooked at his own dinner parties. And they were wonderful.”

SP decided last week to honor a visiting friend with a dinner party. It is always a dicey prospect as I too, like Mr. Williams, do not cook. And my closest friends have limited my run to the Colonel to once or twice a year. It was not only the Independence Day weekend but also the occasion of my favorite full moon of the year, The Full Buck Moon.  How could you not celebrate? So the guest list was chosen, the date and time set and then the appointed day arrived. My friends arrived early with all kinds of food, picked flowers from the garden, arranged a  beautiful table and waited for our guest of honor, the other guests and of course, Full Buck, as I like to call him.

I have to say it was one of the most brilliant evenings I’ve spent in a long time. And I owe it all to the kindness of strangers. Well, not really strangers, but kind none the less (shooting for the TW tie in, here). The point? Dinner parties do not have to be expensive, frightening, formal, intimidating affairs. Just good friends coming together enjoying life’s simple pleasures. Good simple food, an easily arranged table with a thoughtful seating plan, a hydrangea and a gardenia from the yard, a post-dinner game of Celebrity and one gorgeous full moon and booze, lot’s of booze.  I do know how to pour that.