My party, my rules.
My rules, well, I’m gonna make those rules really stupid.
The First Annual Soupsgiving
Simple: Thanksgiving, but everything is soup. The thought process behind this was, Thanksgiving is right around the corner, what’s the most f*cked up twist we could give it? We only eat food of one color? All the food is flavored to taste like other food? Only liquid foods? A liquid Thanksgiving it was.
It all went down smoothly, like a warm bowl of soup, except for the oven fire, which was a major hazard.
The night ended beautifully and peacefully - to quote my co-conspirator and soup-sous-chef Emily, “I’m sleepy from soup and the adrenaline of the fire has worn off.”
Americaversary 🇺🇸🦅
T’was the day of my roommate’s Americaversary (1-year anniversary of living in America). To celebrate, we obviously needed an aggressively American-themed party.
We adorned our ball pit with American decor, held a corn-shucking contest, guzzled hotdogs, and played beer pong.
My favorite moment was when we all sang the national anthem around an apple pie alight with “1776” candles. I’ve never felt more proud to be an American - in fact, this may be the only time I’ve ever felt that.
Please play “The Star Spangled Banner” as you read this description.
The Second Annual Soupsgiving
After the raging success of the First Annual Soupsgiving, we of course had to throw a Second Annual Soupsgiving. This one luckily had no oven fires. We are always iterating and optimizing.
Danielle Turns 1/4
In years past, my birthday was my favorite day of the year. Because I was constrained by the belief that there must be an occasion to have a party (I was a fool!), and a birthday is a quintessential reason to throw a party.
However, I was too busy committing fraud in New York (see: Cooking Up Mehran’s Steakhouse) to plan my birthday party, so I threw together a celebration where I made everyone adopt one of my core personality traits: the color green.
For context, I am incapable of liking anything a reasonable amount. My favorite color is green, ergo everything in my room is green, I am almost always wearing green, I eat green foods just for the sake of them being green, and a friend once told me she couldn’t even look at the color green anymore without thinking of me.
So yeah, I made a green-themed party.
Alextravaganza
Two observations led to this party idea. First, our roommate Alex doesn’t have many friends here. Second, there are so many Alexes in SF. These two concepts may seem unrelated to the novice mind, but we realized that we could help Alex form fast friendships with something very personal to bond over: a shared name.
At this time I was also making dating posters for Alex (see Hunk O’ Mania: A Tale of Romance, Fortitude, and Gangstalking). And so in a very serious co-working session, Mackenzie scribbled some solicitations for Alexes and we flyered for both.
Surprisingly given the lack of real effort, within the day a few Alexes texted us. We loved this, and made dozen or so more flyers, all just sharpie on white paper, and put them about town. Between these stranger Alexes and the handful of Alexes we knew, we planned to have a party that next weekend. But the number of Alexes stalled around a dozen, and I worried we wouldn’t be able to curate an Alex-ful experience for the Alexes that did show up.
Then our Alextravaganza went viral on social media, and suddenly all the Alexes texting Mackenzie became a real problem.
“Wait, you used your real phone number? I thought it was a Google Voice number or something.” I asked Mackenzie.
“That would’ve been a good idea.” She replied.
We now had the opposite problem, as the number of Alexes surpassed 50, then 100, then approached 150. Where were we going to put all these Alexes?? And what were we going to do with them??
Also, Mackenzie realized that our Alex would be out of town that weekend. “Ohhh, right.” Alex said when asked about it. “Can you make it another weekend?”
No, Alex. The Alexes were counting on us. The show must go on.
I created Alex-themed trivia (where all the answers were Alex), and made Alex and not-Alex name tags (in this world, you’re either an Alex or not an Alex). I emailed a couple local news sites to see if they’d be interested in covering whatever was gonna happen, but obviously only emailed reporters named Alex.
We decided Ocean Beach would be a safe place to meet a hundred Alex strangers.
Day of, I sent our coordinates, staked out an “Alex Central” sign, and whenever I saw a guy walking around the beach looking lost and confused, I’d yell out, “Alex?” And they’d cheer back “Alex!!” and join us.
The first Alex to arrive was Kite Alex, who came over, said hi, then immediately f*cked off to fly his kite. Other notable Alexes include Knife Alex, who used his knife to cut open the packaging around wood, hated being called Knife Alex, and said he wasn’t that kinda guy and proposed a bunch of other Alex titles he could have. But none had the same ring as Knife Alex. Another Alex came with a fanboy, who had her name and face on a shirt to definitively prove he was an Alex ally. A group of girls asked if they could share our fire pit, and serendipitously, one was named Alexandra.
But the best Alex was undoubtedly Cool Alex, who brought a ton of wood, held up the Alex signs to gather Alexes, showed us his Russian folk dance, and went around the beach to scout other Alexes to join us. When it was time to execute on the Alex tug-of-war, I knew exactly the Alex to go to, and of course Cool Alex rallied the group, set up the rope, defined the rules, drew lines in the sand, and was just overall an expert at tug-of-war.
Interestingly, the Alex party seemed to go viral in closed networks even more so than social media, and the attending Alexes said they’d heard about the Alex party from multiple sources. One of the Alexes even said she was telling her optometrist about the Alex party and he’d already heard about it.
Some Alexes had seen my Alex roommate dating posters around town, and inquired where the original Alex was.
As Alexes were coming or going, everyone would yell “hi Alex!” “bye Alex!” and they’d reply with the same, giving very “hi Barbie!” vibes. It was really cute.
Post-party, as we were planning our next, we reflected on how great Cool Alex was, his skill at managing a large crowd, and how he’d be a great addition to our friend rolodex. However, since we had no idea what his last name was, he was lost to us in a sea of Alexes. So in a situation akin to Cinderella, Mackenzie texted a hundred or so Alexes, saying, “One of you was the coolest Alex and we’ve been calling you Cool Alex, send a photo to identify yourself so we can find Cool Alex.” This worked, but also left many Alexes heartbroken to learn they were not cool Alex.
We made a group chat with Cool Alex instead of our regular Alex roommate, with the same name but “Cool” at the beginning. And now we just regularly hang out with Cool Alex. Cool Alex and Regular Alex have a bit of a competitive, yet brotherly, even somewhat s*xually-charged relationship. Regular Alex hates being called Regular Alex, but there’s no denying that Cool Alex is Cool Alex. He’s just objectively, undeniably cool.
Survivor Party / Housewarming
Ever watched the show “Survivor?” Well this is loosely inspired by but nothing like it. The idea is every 20 minutes someone gets voted out of the party by tribal council. Cool Alex was the show host.
Highlights of the night include:
My roommates Mackenzie and Regular Alex getting immediately voted out
I overheard my friend Riley trying to get everyone to vote me out, so I got everyone to vote him out instead. Suck it, Riley.
Cool Alex got voted out and without a show host, we descended into madness in a situation akin to Lord of The Flies, also the music was so loud that we couldn’t hear the doorbell ringing to let him back in, so he was stuck out there for way longer than his intended banishment
When I got voted out, my co-outcast and I decided to do mystery shots at the bar under our house for redemption
It’s Cuffing Season
To a few friends’ confusion, this has absolutely nothing to do with dating OR kink. It’s just a handcuff-themed party. Obviously.
We had to send out a PSA that this was NOT an XXX party because a few people thought it was, and then a bunch of strangers tried to get invites and we were very concerned the sudden interest was due to a misinterpretation of the event.
Some weird guys kept finding and messaging us on various platforms, saying they heard we throw cool, underground parties, which is kinda funny because that’s just what they’re calling a party where we invite our friends and not the general public - which is the nature of most parties.
In the moments leading up to the event, as we were turning on police beacons, hanging handcuffs off furniture, and stringing together the conspiracy wall, Mackenzie said, “This is so stupid. Everything we do is so dumb.” Which really encapsulated the night. (And every other night.)
We took mugshots at the door, assigning people their crimes under a height backdrop that was deliberately 4” short (as almost every man made sure to let us know). Any good party has a ton of rules, and our rulebook spanned a 6 foot whiteboard. People turned up highly committed to the theme, which was amazing, one guy spent a week making his costume.
Mackenzie bought walkie-talkies for us hosts, and we created code names - The Dishonorable, Officer Nasty, President of the Coffee Bar, Black Mamba.
A couple hours into the party, no one was really handcuffing so Obinna started arbitrarily cuffing people together. As I was “The Dishonorable” judge, he called me intermittently to preside over cases, and I sentenced offenders to take shots, go to “jail” (get chained to the bannister), or perform their special hip hop dance (long story) to earn their freedom. But Obinna soon became drunk with power, locking people up and issuing punishments left and right, running out of control. I sentenced him to life without parole, but he ran away and hid under some boxes in the guest bedroom. Then he was cuffed to another partygoer, and whisked away in a cluster of ten or so people, meanwhile, two other gangs of chained-up people formed, and we were pulled around in giant clusters.
It was really fun! But also a lot of strangers in our house somehow.
And so we raised very little money but a lot of awareness for criminal justice reform.
Slumber Party Party
In contrast to the handcuff-themed party, I wanted to have a party that was extremely wholesome. Like a middle school girl sleepover party.
Since it was a co-ed party, there inevitably was a bit of a gender divide. While the girlies gravitated toward painting their nails and making ice cream sundaes, the boys were enraptured by the Barbie and The Magic of Pegasus movie and doing face masks (male-coded activities).
There were even historically-accurate slumber partiers, as some of my childhood friends who I had sleepover parties with 10+ years ago (eep) attended.
We live above one of the most popular clubs in SF, so friends got strange looks while waiting outside our apartment in their PJs with stuffed animals. And yet we raged harder than the club, finally tucking into bed (a collection of air mattresses scattered through our living room) at 4am.
When I awoke the next morning, Jonathan was the last girlie standing, flipping pancakes in our kitchen. “It was on the schedule,” he asserted. “Want some?”
Closing Thoughts
If you have any ideas for a party, let me know. If you replicate any of these ideas, let me know how it goes. If you would like to be invited to future parties, let me know (invitation subject to approval, terms and conditions may apply). TLDR; let me know. I like to know things.
Editor’s Note:
If you’re a loyal raw & feral reader, you may be interested in some developments from previous stories. Lately, my life has become too absurd to not be some sort of Truman Show-style sitcom, and let’s just say, the writers must’ve been doing perilous amounts of ketamine this season.
Beancoming the World's Preeminent Beanfluencer: I sent a lucky winner a one-way ticket to Chicago to see The Bean and then stay there forever. He sent a lovely message back. What a beautiful, serendipitous moment - to share this wholesome exchange with a human I will never meet. I wished him a wonderful rest of his life. We were simply ships passing in the night...
Wrong. A few weeks later, I attended a summer camp for creative technologists, and he happened to be one of the organizers. I led a workshop on Mischief 101 and he was like “aha you sent me to Chicago” and I was like “aha yeah.” Later we’d go with a group of new friends to see Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live. Life is beautiful that way.
Hunk o’ Mania: You may remember The Reporter, who was trying to date my friend really hard, who I played a game of cat-and-mouse with, concluding with her attending my party. So she’s now a regular at my parties, and at our Handcuff Party she met and went out with a friend, so you could say I have a 3/3 matchmaking success rate. Also, she no longer works for the SF Standard, and is moving away, so at her going-away party she gave me her old SF Standard sweatshirt. I wear it all the time - like a hunter wears their prize-fur, I imagine. Cool Alex also came to The Reporter’s going-away party, and The Reporter was shocked to learn that we didn’t know Cool Alex prior to the Alextravaganza, but met him through that event. Truly, I have made friends in the most ridiculous ways possible.
I am 68 and recently widowed. You are my hero, so we can never meet. But when I am ready, I will have you find me a date.
My partner and I had a “Applebee’s Grand Opening” housewarming party (our house is from the 80’s and came with a huge apple stained glass lamp in the breakfast nook) where the dress code was “Midwest fancy” and everyone had to bring a random tchotchke from their house to do show-and-tell with in lieu of a housewarming gift. We made everyone take a number when they arrived and when your number was called it was your turn to give a random guest the house tour for us. We served root beer floats and had a baked potato bar. I made custom coloring pages of our dog and we had a coloring contest.