Thanksgiving enterntainment (can be anywhere!)
Nov 19th, 2004, 09:53 AM
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Thanksgiving enterntainment (can be anywhere!)
-- Make place cards, surrounding every Depressive with a person of buoyancy (if you must hire the Buoyant, so be it, it's worth it) dividing the couples and seating yourself near the kitchen. If anyone tries to alter your seating plan, threaten to club him to death with a turkey leg and then flash a smile that shows you're not kidding.
-- Time your turkey to be done five minutes before your guests ring your bell. As your turkey rests up in the kitchen, you can get the guests drunk (but not overly so lest some dormant bitterness find itself newly activated) on festive red drinks. The drinks are all to be served from your living room, as you are not just nervous but grotesquely self-conscious and you'll want no one else ever to enter your kitchen. This is why you have forbidden your guests to "bring anything" -- including the mashed potatoes you will no longer cook but which they still imagine they want. The only exception is wine, which, requiring neither a last-minute nuking nor the loss of your mind as you try to locate yet one more serving spoon, can just as well be stored in the bathroom.
-- Since you are not just crazy and grotesquely self-conscious but heinously vain to boot, you need your guests to worship your food. Thus, if any of them plan to eat white meat, you must roast your turkey upside-down, lest it taste like unhappy cotton. The breast bone will collapse unattractively, and it will take decades to lift it out of the pan (an upside- down turkey won't sit on a rack) but since no one can be in the kitchen but you (and, in a pinch, maybe one of the Buoyants), such heinous transgressions will go unwitnessed. Indeed, you can drop the whole meal on the floor, dust it with Pledge and serve it up with impunity.
-- Now that you know that a Thanksgiving cocktail hour should in fact last an hour instead of a month, you don't have to serve stupid appetizers; it's stupid to eat so soon before eating. This means less work for you, which means less stress, which means less cortisol flooding your brain, which is, of course, the whole point of these tips, to help you provide hospitality instead of flagrant, well, hostitality, which, trust me, no one appreciates.
-- Speaking of less work and cortisol, you've not only eliminated mashed potatoes, dinner rolls and creamed peas from your Thanksgiving menu, you're actually retiring some of your food snobbery and using gravy and yams that come out of cans. Not that you're admitting it to anyone. You'll add enough real turkey grease so the gravy tastes great, and strew the yams with great chunks of feta (which your guests will assume to be marshmallow) and garnish them rashly with fresh lime and cilantro.
-- Because you firmly believe that a good stuffing matters, you have made some the previous night from cornbread, apples, onions and walnuts. These and the yams both go in the oven while your guests re-redden their drinks and keep yelling "Do you need any help?" to which you always yell: "No!"
-- Because no one's in the kitchen washing, tearing and spinning romaine while asking you who you're "seeing" right now, you can do the rest without taking more drugs. This means carving the turkey (easy; it's already turned over and smashed) and transferring your eight salades composes (you composed 11 this morning and already ate three) from the fridge to your table, placing one before each immutable place card.
-- The reason nervous wreckage like you would even attempt to pull off something so fraught with peril as a first course is simple: You're stunning your guests. Not the kind of stunning one sometimes has to do with a turkey leg, but the kind one does to elicit good guest behavior. Your salad, pre- dressed and pre-peppered so that no one need reach, lean or speak, is a thing of beauty and exemplified grace: five leaves of endive, two crab legs, one egg stuffed with its cooked yellow self mixed with crème fraiche and capers. A glass of white wine stands ready beside it. As your guests sigh with pleasure and pick up their forks, you will of course forbid them to eat until each one stands up and "gives thanks." This is Thanksgiving after all, is it not? You will begin by giving thanks for your most gracious guests and (silently) for the fact that the man who once yelled at you for using forks that had four tines instead of the more effete three now spends his Thanksgivings going nuts somewhere else.
-- Since even two Buoyants can't quash a Depressive, it is essential you avoid three frightening conversational topics: religion, politics and anything remotely nostalgic or personal. Since sports don't exist in your shattered world (don't even think about football), this leaves you the topic of food. You could mention the recent scientific study showing how obesity leads to stupidity, but since this could be taken as vaguely political, you don't. Then again, your table is blue and you're an effete food snob (your fresh cranberry sauce sports cilantro and chili), so who cares? Then again, you used Princella yams, so how effete are you? Count up your tines!
-- Pumpkin pie (from a box that you've put into orbit along with your hideous cans) and no coffee (never reanimate a Thanksgiving guest) complete your nervous wreck dinner experience. Wish everyone a good night, wash your own dishes, take drugs and sleep.
-- Time your turkey to be done five minutes before your guests ring your bell. As your turkey rests up in the kitchen, you can get the guests drunk (but not overly so lest some dormant bitterness find itself newly activated) on festive red drinks. The drinks are all to be served from your living room, as you are not just nervous but grotesquely self-conscious and you'll want no one else ever to enter your kitchen. This is why you have forbidden your guests to "bring anything" -- including the mashed potatoes you will no longer cook but which they still imagine they want. The only exception is wine, which, requiring neither a last-minute nuking nor the loss of your mind as you try to locate yet one more serving spoon, can just as well be stored in the bathroom.
-- Since you are not just crazy and grotesquely self-conscious but heinously vain to boot, you need your guests to worship your food. Thus, if any of them plan to eat white meat, you must roast your turkey upside-down, lest it taste like unhappy cotton. The breast bone will collapse unattractively, and it will take decades to lift it out of the pan (an upside- down turkey won't sit on a rack) but since no one can be in the kitchen but you (and, in a pinch, maybe one of the Buoyants), such heinous transgressions will go unwitnessed. Indeed, you can drop the whole meal on the floor, dust it with Pledge and serve it up with impunity.
-- Now that you know that a Thanksgiving cocktail hour should in fact last an hour instead of a month, you don't have to serve stupid appetizers; it's stupid to eat so soon before eating. This means less work for you, which means less stress, which means less cortisol flooding your brain, which is, of course, the whole point of these tips, to help you provide hospitality instead of flagrant, well, hostitality, which, trust me, no one appreciates.
-- Speaking of less work and cortisol, you've not only eliminated mashed potatoes, dinner rolls and creamed peas from your Thanksgiving menu, you're actually retiring some of your food snobbery and using gravy and yams that come out of cans. Not that you're admitting it to anyone. You'll add enough real turkey grease so the gravy tastes great, and strew the yams with great chunks of feta (which your guests will assume to be marshmallow) and garnish them rashly with fresh lime and cilantro.
-- Because you firmly believe that a good stuffing matters, you have made some the previous night from cornbread, apples, onions and walnuts. These and the yams both go in the oven while your guests re-redden their drinks and keep yelling "Do you need any help?" to which you always yell: "No!"
-- Because no one's in the kitchen washing, tearing and spinning romaine while asking you who you're "seeing" right now, you can do the rest without taking more drugs. This means carving the turkey (easy; it's already turned over and smashed) and transferring your eight salades composes (you composed 11 this morning and already ate three) from the fridge to your table, placing one before each immutable place card.
-- The reason nervous wreckage like you would even attempt to pull off something so fraught with peril as a first course is simple: You're stunning your guests. Not the kind of stunning one sometimes has to do with a turkey leg, but the kind one does to elicit good guest behavior. Your salad, pre- dressed and pre-peppered so that no one need reach, lean or speak, is a thing of beauty and exemplified grace: five leaves of endive, two crab legs, one egg stuffed with its cooked yellow self mixed with crème fraiche and capers. A glass of white wine stands ready beside it. As your guests sigh with pleasure and pick up their forks, you will of course forbid them to eat until each one stands up and "gives thanks." This is Thanksgiving after all, is it not? You will begin by giving thanks for your most gracious guests and (silently) for the fact that the man who once yelled at you for using forks that had four tines instead of the more effete three now spends his Thanksgivings going nuts somewhere else.
-- Since even two Buoyants can't quash a Depressive, it is essential you avoid three frightening conversational topics: religion, politics and anything remotely nostalgic or personal. Since sports don't exist in your shattered world (don't even think about football), this leaves you the topic of food. You could mention the recent scientific study showing how obesity leads to stupidity, but since this could be taken as vaguely political, you don't. Then again, your table is blue and you're an effete food snob (your fresh cranberry sauce sports cilantro and chili), so who cares? Then again, you used Princella yams, so how effete are you? Count up your tines!
-- Pumpkin pie (from a box that you've put into orbit along with your hideous cans) and no coffee (never reanimate a Thanksgiving guest) complete your nervous wreck dinner experience. Wish everyone a good night, wash your own dishes, take drugs and sleep.
> Brilliant, indeed!
Nov 19th, 2004, 12:35 PM
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You're braver than me, trying to control where they sit. It'll never happen in my world. They sit were they want to. Papa Corleone couldn't have enforced place cards for my bunch.
We do have a good time, and we pretty much have no topics to avoid except for baseball. Sox/Cubs exchanges make the political back-biting on this forum look like kindergarten squabbles. One year we had an espionage task performed by someone pre-dawn when there were Cubs symbols tinted blue on the waffles upon awakening. They mostly got thrown out.
Happy Thanksgiving, FainaAgain. And one of my tricks is that I DON'T eat the turkey. After smelling it so strongly, I get turned off- and eat salads and drink wine.
We do have a good time, and we pretty much have no topics to avoid except for baseball. Sox/Cubs exchanges make the political back-biting on this forum look like kindergarten squabbles. One year we had an espionage task performed by someone pre-dawn when there were Cubs symbols tinted blue on the waffles upon awakening. They mostly got thrown out.
Happy Thanksgiving, FainaAgain. And one of my tricks is that I DON'T eat the turkey. After smelling it so strongly, I get turned off- and eat salads and drink wine.
Nov 19th, 2004, 01:00 PM
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Oh, sorry, did I "forget" to tell I copied it from somewhere? Yes, I do come up with jokes occasionally, but please don't think I'm THAT brilliant 
Now, having said all that, let me bathe in your compliments O
Now, having said all that, let me bathe in your compliments O
