I’ve had some crazy highs from MCing parties and banquets in the past. However, Saturday night was just not one of them. It was a Christmas party for the local expat magazine that I used to write for (but quit last month!). I’ve gotten a little dubious of the parties the magazine has put on as of late as they’re becoming notorious for doing these sit-down dinner things, overloaded with speeches and acts that no one really cares about because they all came for the free food and alcohol that’s all cold and flat by the time it gets served at eight or nine o’clock. However, this particular event was advertised as being a family thing, and believe it or not, I actually like spending time with my family. I was looking forward to watching Nico chase and harass other kids, and there were supposed to be some friends attending whom we hadn’t seen in a while.
I learned my lesson about being too optimistic, though, when I received a “desperate” call, asking me to MC the whole thing. By the time they finished stroking my ego, I found myself committed to far more than I wanted to be. Christian wasn’t exactly thrilled either when he found out our nice little family evening (we’d been planning on bailing early, when Nico got tired) had turned into me spending the evening working for no reimbursement yet again.
Things only went downhill from there when the party got overbooked and turned from a family affair into two separate parties: one for adults and one for children with the children only paraded briefly around the adult party like peacocks. As things grew further, the speeches from sponsors and magazine-related peeps grew and grew until the program started to resemble a press conference more than an actual party.
Christian and Nico still came with me, but after the dress I was forced to wear freaked Nico out to the point that he wanted nothing to do with me, they both headed home to a take out dinner and some movies, leaving me behind with the ruins of my own doing. I sucked it up and played it out.
Dinner was actually served early for once and I managed to get the entire thing wrapped up forty minutes before planned, which I felt was a pretty awesome feat (on paper, the party was intended to be FOUR hours long, which is a really long time, especially if the majority of the people you’re throwing the party for bail directly after dinner, which they, of course, did).
Yet when it was all done, I wasn’t exhilarated nor even relieved. I was just tired. Too tired to relay the events of the evening in a suitably scintillating manner, or so it seemed, as Christian’s attention couldn’t be kept for more than ten minutes before he started complaining about wanting to go to sleep.
Such was Saturday night.