Brunch Is Hell: How to Save the World by Throwing a Dinner Party

by Rico Gagliano

Weekday dinner parties must begin after 5 p.m.

Begin the party a half hour later than your town’s typical rush hour ends. So, for instance, in Los Angeles, that’d be about midnight.

Dinner parties must NOT be held on Sundays, Mondays, or Tuesdays.

2. Fridays and Saturdays are the optimal nights for a dinner party.

Parties held during the week preceding a major national holiday are not dinner parties. They are holiday parties (see part two, subsection “Holiday Parties”).

To summarize thus far: A dinner party is a gathering held on Earth, after 5 p.m., Wednesdays through Saturdays, in someone’s home, at which pterodactyl is served.

A proportion of the food at a dinner party must be homemade.

The preparation of food also serves as the narrative spine of your event: cooking, serving, and cleanup are the three acts of your gathering.

At a true dinner party, all non-homemade food is removed from its packaging.

Remember, dinner parties are a respite from advertising.

The table’s purpose is to force the entire group to converse together; therefore, attendees must actually be seated around it while dining.

All audiovisual electronic equipment within twenty-five yards of a dinner party must be switched off—except for the minimum amount necessary to play music.

To qualify as a dinner party, your guest list must include at least four people but no more than twelve. That’s including you, the host.

A potluck or buffet is almost a dinner party. But it is disqualified because the dining table is typically completely covered with platters of food. This forces guests to eat while standing, in violation of the Environment rule (part one, subsection “Environment”).

Note, however, that if there are two tables present at the buffet—one upon which food is placed, and another around which guests sit and eat—then this is not in fact a buffet. It’s a dinner party with too much food for one table. Well done!

Being brave enough to invite people over, weird as they are, is an act of RIGHTEOUS DEFIANCE and SOCIAL GOOD.

So how do you invite people over? Step one: ASK THEM. You’ll be surprised who says yes. Who knows? Maybe the Obamas were gonna spend the night chilling at home, but now that you mention it, hanging out with you over peel-’n’-eat shrimps and banana cream pie3 sounds like just the thing.

But asking for an RSVP regardless covers your ass, so if they show up anyway and have to eat the last remaining chicken wing while sitting on the floor, it’s their own dumb fault.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, dinner parties have no set end time.

When the U.S. Defense Department created email, they were probably unaware it would be used mainly to transmit ads for Viagra and send dinner party invitations.

Giving homemade food to your guests is a metaphor for sharing and openness. Gathering around a dinner table to consume it is a metaphor for community. Eating it in unison is a metaphor for mutual understanding.

Our friends at the public radio show StoryCorps put a more positive spin on this: “Listening,” they say, “is an Act of Love.” Hippies.

In other words, dispute the value of a political policy. Not the value of the human being who supports it.

Luckily, acclaimed author George Saunders—who according to the MacArthur Foundation is a genius—once told us about his favorite tactic for maintaining civility: asking for specifics.

Getting someone to change a fiercely held belief can be like trying to convince a cat to drop a dead mouse from its jaws: They will cling to it even more intensely.

If you can get someone to empathize with you—showing how a political issue affects you personally—you can potentially alter their outlook, or at least get them to hear you out.

Keep hosting and attending gatherings where one or two of the guests are people you don’t 1,000 percent agree with. Even if politics isn’t discussed, you have shown by example that those of your political persuasion do not hate or fear those of opposing views.

DISINGENUOUSLY INTERRUPT by uttering the magic phrase “I don’t mean to interrupt.” Then explain that the Bore just said something that reminds you of a story another guest recently told you.

That feeling you feel—that feeling is joy. It’s what Aristotle felt when he learned that Plato didn’t copyright his ideas. It’s how Einstein felt when he realized he didn’t have to comb his hair anymore.

Dancing is like vertically having sex with one or several people, in public, while fully clothed. You should do it as much as possible.

EXQUISITE CORPSE: In this game, a sheet of paper is folded into sections. Each guest draws part of a body on a section, without looking at the other sections, to create a weird mutant beast. Exquisite corpse was invented by the early surrealists—thus the MFA snob guy will probably recommend playing it.