Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

I present the birthday cake

To celebrate The Gryphon's 39th birthday, we invited a few friends to a potluck dinner party. Remembering how overcrowded it had been at our housewarming last fall, we restricted the guest list to some of The Gryphon's oldest friends and a handful of our mutual friends. We held the party a couple weeks early, due to scheduling considerations.

Rather than risk winding up with seven pies or six bean casseroles, The Gryphon suggested our guests sign up to bring a specific course: appetizer, salad, entree, side dish or dessert. We would provide the cake and the drinks.

The plan worked out beautifully, and our menu included: a cheese platter for appetizer, brought by the Dormouse; a green salad brought by a friend of The Gryphon's I'll call The Traveler because of her globe-trotting job; a fruit salad brought by The March Hare; several types of chicken brought by a friend of The Gryphon's I'll call The Wiccan and her boyfriend; chili brought by The Editor; and Neapolitan ice cream brought by The White Rabbit, which went well with the chocolate birthday cake with chocolate icing I'd ordered from the local grocery store (after discovering, to my chagrin, that most bakeries shut down in early July for the owners to go on vacation).

We shared a couple bottles of wine, which we'd purchased at the wine festival a couple weekends ago. We also provided soda, water, Mike's Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice.

I wore a skirt I'd picked up at a cool consignment store in Media, along with a white top and a red-beaded necklace that used to belong to my grandmother.

Now that we have a baby gate (which we'd purchased when we brought our cat, Luke, home in order to initially keep the animals separate), we used it while guests were arriving to keep our dog, Una, in the upstairs bedroom. She found a way to push the gate aside, however, right before our last guest, The Editor, arrived. Una greeted her, all wiggly, with a huge doggie smile on her face. I must say, though, I was partially pleased that she was relatively calm and didn't try jumping up on our guest. I guess she really has learned something from obedience class. Next time maybe we'll allow her to greet our guests as they arrive.

I had hoped to introduce Luke to our guests, since many of them are cat lovers, but when I tried to carry him downstairs, he dug in his claws, climbed over my back and dashed away. So I made it known that if they wanted to meet Luke, they'd have to visit him in my office, where he was hiding.

The March Hare took me up on it and came up to see Luke, who promptly hid behind some black storage boxes. "Luke, I am your father," The March Hare intoned, but Luke didn't seem to believe him.

The Gryphon examines a cook book received as a gift.

All of the food was tasty, even the grocery store cake. In fact, I was so impressed with the cake that I stopped in the grocery store the next day to compliment the bakery workers.

Amusingly, three of our friends, The White Rabbit, The Dormouse and The March Hare, showed up wearing identical shirts. They all wore their black short-sleeved Otakon polos. This, of course, meant that The Editor asked them lots of questions about their involvement in Otakon and how this year's event is shaping up.

The conversation also turned, naturally, to pop culture, with subjects ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Pirates of the Caribbean to Monty Python (ho, yes!).

At one point, The Editor jokingly threatened to leave because I admitted falling asleep while watching Ocean's 11. She's a big George Clooney fan and seemed to find this unfathomable.

We had some nice conversations with the Wiccan's boyfriend, whom we hadn't met before. He fit right in, getting into a long conversation with our male friends and seemingly reluctant to leave at the end of the night.

Our party guests engage in conversation.

All in all, I think the event went well and everybody seemed to enjoy themselves. Except Luke, who refused to come downstairs for two whole days.

Luke relaxes downstairs after the guests are gone.

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

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