Entertaining impotence
by Jon Worley

Every young couple faces it at one time or another. If you're even the slightest bit upwardly mobile, you have to get used to inviting people you don't like over to your house, plying said invented friends with food and drink and kissing the asses of people important to your careers. Martha Stewart has a word for it: entertaining.

As this is the Christmas (or more generic "holiday") season, lots of people are throwing parties. There are three basic models to chose from. The most obvious is the "Christmas" party, complete with presents, hors d'ourves from the top caterer in town and lots of Tanqueray. At this party, a person is expected to get utterly crocked and end up making a pass at someone who is not his or her spouse. Easy enough for the guests, but an awful mess for the hosts to clean-up. A variant on the Christmas party is the "decorating" party, whereby each guest is expected to bring an ornament to bestow upon the tree of the hosts. I like to refer to these events as "cheap bastard" parties, for obvious reasons, though in the few months I've lived here in not-quite-Amish country, I think "tree-raising" party would work just as well, without imposing negative connotations.

A second party is your basic dinner party. This is probably the most work for hosts, but as each guest is expected to contribute a bottle of hooch, throwing such a bash can have miraculous consquences for the wine cellar (or, more accurately, the wine bottle pile in the cabinet). Yes, at a couple of these events it has been necessary to resort to Monty Python-style conversation menus, but once we broke into the liquor, the discussion always found its way to oral sex techniques and other appropriately interesting subjects soon enough.

The final, and most informal holiday get-together is the open house. My parents are throwing one of these for their 30th anniversary. Please don't slap me with any guilt over not organizing this thing myself. My family is a firm believer in contracts. My brothers and I signed ours soon after birth (affixing our footprint as proof of identification). Us children are expected to arrange the 50th anniversary party in 20 years. Anything else is considered above and beyond the call of duty. And as of yet, duty hasn't come calling. In any case, with an open house, the hosts are expected to provide for all comers. They may (or may not) provide cheesy combestibles and inhibition-releasing libations. The guests are expected to have a good time and avoid soiling the carpet.

In college, all the parties I attended were of the open house variety. Indeed, people generally filled every room in a given house, with brew on the back porch and the herb corps in the basement. I rather enjoyed these parties, probably to an excess. There is apparently a picture of me in bed with a dog (of the canine variety, that is) which is still in circulation in Columbia, Mo. But now that my wife Barbara and I have decided to act like a civilized couple from time to time, we have graduated to some of the more sophisticated forms of social intercourse.

Which brings me to the problem, one that is overshadowing most of the good parts of our marriage. I can't perform any more.

Cook. For parties, that is. And as I am the chef in the family, I am the one expected to crank out goodies for houseguests. I have been incapacitated in this regard for some time, causing us to cancel not only our Christmas party but even a highly anticipated Halloween party.

I'm not some overanxious stud who's bummed about a single failure. No, this dates back to a couple incidents. About a year ago, we had a little shindig in St. Pete. Broke out the crystal bowls and dumped potato chips and M&Ms into them. Served up this fine cuisine with beer and wine. All was going well until I had to open the thirst magnum of white. Now, Orvieto is a rather fruity Italian wine, given, but this bottle exploded as soon as I opened it. The stuff was pretty much champagne, and I hate champagne. A horror, indeed.

While the rational being inside me understands that this is the fault of some vineyard ruled by the Northern League, I must say that I'm still shaken by the event and cannot open a bottle of wine for anyone other than myself. Hey, picking wine is brutal sport.

But that incident pales in comparison to a dinner party we threw a couple months ago. I almost killed one of our guests with my cooking. That sort of thing puts a whole new spin on performance anxiety.

I like Chinese food; Barbara likes Chinese food. I made hot and sour soup, followed by a main course of Kung Pao Chicken. I should have recognized the problem when most of our guests couldn't finish the soup because of its spicy content. Now, I'm a person who uses Tabasco like most folks use water. It goes on everything I eat, from pancakes to ice cream. I'm with Dan Akroyd on the use of distilled pepper essence. And while I didn't use Tabasco per se in the chicken, suffice it to say I plopped in enough chili garlic paste and dried chili peppers to give a bit too much Pao to the Kung. So while I was merely hiccupping (as I always do for the first minute or so while eating spicy food), one of our guests was on the floor, gasping for the breath of life itself.

She happened to be lactose-intolerant, so she couldn't drink milk (the most useful antidote to spicy cooking). We tried stuffing her mouth with bread, but that didn't help the burning in her throat and esophagus. After about 10 minutes of screaming and convulsions, she calmed down. None of us finished, which is a shame. It was damned fine Kung Pao.

So whenever I even think about plotting a menu for some dinner party, I freeze. I remember Susan writhing on the floor, gasping "Aaghplthfphaagg." And I put down the cookbook. Maybe someday in the future, I'll be able to enjoy a full and exciting entertaining life, but for now, my prospects are limp.

Jon Worley plans to follow his personal tradition and roast ribs (slathered in Gates and Bryant's barbecue sauce) for Christmas dinner.

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