Cocktail Parties...

With a nod to Jackie and JFK (as well as Lerner and Lowe), the early 1960’s has often been referred to as the “Camelot” years.  The greatest generation was reaping the much-deserved bounty of a flourishing job market as well as almost unlimited opportunities for urban living and home ownership.  Suburbia was thriving. WWII had taken boys fresh off the farm and brought them back home, several years later, as hardened men.  The country was more than ready to celebrate the successful end of the big war and was eager for the veterans and everyone who worked so tirelessly in the war effort, to have their own car, a freshly mown lawn, a facade brick house, a pretty wife who became mother hen to her brood, a white & tan spotted Beagle. By the 1960's, many added a color TV so they could watch the "Bonanza" map consumed by flames that looked real enough to warm the screen.

Recently, as often happens on the electronic highway, Facebook paths crossed, and common ground rediscovered for two people who never really knew each other but whose parents were the best of friends back then.

Just hearing the name of my new Facebook buddy resurrected memories of her parents, my parents, and all of their group that gathered at the lavish cocktail parties which alternated house to house, week to week. Everything was very respectable and well deserved, but the burbs often became party central on Saturday nights. That button-down generation of white-collar professionals had a need to blow off steam, and in those days, alcohol was the drug of choice.

The more the better.

I wrote to my new friend with whom I shared common memories… “I remember your Mom & Dad very well, mostly from epic cocktail parties at our house. Your dad was dark & handsome with movie star good looks, your Mom petite and cute with a lot of Jackie Kennedy fashion going on. That “Leopard skin pillbox hat”, long dark hair and a mini skirt.

Mother made me pass the platter of hors-d'oeuvre around in the crowd just because I was the youngest child and easiest to manipulate. Your Mom and Mrs. Nelson used to comment jealously about how long my eyelashes were, the envy of any woman. What young boy wants to hear that? I hated such talk. Things went from bad to worse when Mrs. Barnes, eyes rolling in opposite directions and hot breath blowing straight out of the Old Grand Dad distillery, moved in for a kiss wherever she could plant one.  

Bobbing and weaving, I usually managed to slip away with little more than a lipstick smear on my forehead.

That was a time when it was a point of pride to get everyone cross-eyed plastered before they drove home at the end of the night. It was the mark of a successful party. Drinks were mixed 1-part soda to 3 parts straight booze. 

Things got crazy. 

One particularly cold, overcast January night, I had shoveled a recent heavy snow out of our driveway in anticipation of a cocktail party that Mom and Dad had planned. Bliwise Liquors was always a few hundred dollars richer when Dad drove away. I helped pack the cavernous trunk of our ford Fairlane 500, a winged booze runner flying back home.

An ice storm started coating everything just as the last guest made it safely to our house. Tall mountains of shoveled snow already flanked the entrance to our driveway. They became heavily encased in ice.

Your parents drove a brand-new T-Bird. Beautiful, but at the end of the night, somewhat unfamiliar with the new car, jammed roughly into reverse, going backward too fast, it wound up as the cherry on top of the peak of one of those snow mountains. The ice storm had stopped, but everything was covered in an inch or two of clear ice, frozen solid and hard as steel. 

That hardened peak acted as a fulcrum for the car. I was giddy with excitement when revelers came outside, slipping and sliding without coats or winter gear, all quite inebriated, to help get the new car with your Dad inside, off of the mountain top. They did, but not before everyone spent too much time illustrating just how perfectly balanced the car was up there. You could see-saw it up and down or spin it in any direction with no more than a thumb and forefinger. A very cool party trick and end-of-the-night crowd pleaser for a bunch of drunks and a young boy. I don’t think your dad enjoyed that part very much, he just wanted down.

They managed to get the car off the fulcrum and onto the road.

No one died.

Over the next week, stories circulated about your folks drive home after that ice storm, how their car went off the road a few blocks away and slid side wise, slowly down the hill of a neighbor’s side yard, winding up in the bushes under their bedroom window. Fortunately, the Andersons weren’t home.

It was said that escape from the useless vehicle, and from the Arctic environment itself, was only made possible by the ingenious use of your mom’s stiletto heels as ice spikes. Rumors spread like wildfire when another neighbor heard a car horn blaring away and spotted a barefoot, mini-skirted Jackie Kennedy clinging to the ankles of Montgomery Clift who was digging blue-sequined high-heels into ice while clawing his way up that side hill at the Anderson house.  

The rumors were never confirmed but it was generally agreed: that was one hell of a party.