SOCIAL ANXIETY:Smile. Make an effort to listen to what the other people say before and after you've said something. Try to keep it relevant, and for God's sake don't forget the smoky eyes and cocktail sausages. MAEVE HIGGINSbraces herself for party season
I USED TO BABYSIT for a woman who threw a big Christmas party every year for her tennis club and book club combined. Can you imagine a more sophisticated bunch? She couldn’t. She would go all out to impress. I heard her lying about having done a cookery course in Ballymaloe, and I think she used to tell people I was a maid. On the morning of the party one year, she took me under her sequined wing and said, in a low, urgent tone, that the reason cocktail sausages are important at a party is that men love cocktail sausages.
A make-up lady let me in on the second secret of the universe a few years later. Apparently all around the world, men love a smoky eye. A smoky eye is a way of doing eyeshadow to make it seem like you’re simultaneously brazen and sleepy. It’s different to a smoker’s eye, which is rheumy and clouded and constantly darting around in search of a lighter.
Smoky eyes and cocktail sausages. Let us all remember those two facts this party season. Oh God. Party season. Those words fill me with dread. Like a deer with low self-esteem who’s just found out that rutting season is back on, I am filled with anxiety at the idea of putting myself out there in that way.
Fretting about what to wear, wondering who else will be there, apologising to the dog for not having time to walk him, and then going out into the dark, cold night to interact uncomfortably with strangers is not my idea of a good time. My idea of a good time is sitting in my house with all my bits and pieces around me and the radio on. I resent the person who has invited me out and away from all of that. My so-called friend. Why are they having a party? What is wrong with them? Such a babyish impulse, to long for everyone to be in one place for the night – chatting, laughing, dancing and generally living it up. Talk about needy.
There was a time when I loved to party on down. I’ve seen photos of me with a big smile on my face at my sixth birthday party. I don’t remember it. I assume it was a flurry of overeating followed by a game of Electric Fence like every other party back then. Electric Fence is a uniquely rural pastime where children touch an electric fence and try not to cry, then, crucially, deny everything to parents wondering about their widened eyes and staccato movements.
As a grown-up, I am willing to admit that I sort of enjoy getting ready for parties. It’s the only time I permit myself to listen to outrageously bad R’n’B music, I mean the properly misogynistic stuff that’s massively popular these days. I brush my teeth to a tinny-voiced David Guetta assuring me he doesn’t mean to be disrespectful, insisting that he’s not comparing me to the neighbourhood ho but explaining to me that I am, in his eyes, a sexy bitch. That somehow puts me as close as I can get to a party mood. Without fail, that mood evaporates in the taxi on the way to the party, because I know that the first half an hour of a party is always the worst.
Humans are social creatures. That’s how I begin my pep talk as I face the doorbell or stall outside the pub. No man is an island, I grimace to myself as I linger there, steeling myself. Alone we fall. It’s crummy events like this that ensure the survival of the human race. Just smile, make an effort to listen to what the other people say before and after you’ve said something. Try to keep it relevant.
I am not sure which I fear most, being stuck with a bore or realising that I am, in fact, the bore. Eyes supposed to be fixed on me but instead flitting over my shoulder send me into a panic. My voice gets louder, my temperature rises and my stories become more inappropriately personal in an effort to captivate them back again. Nobody wins.
For better or worse, something unusual is happening more and more frequently; a friend says they’re having a party but they actually mean they are making dinner for some people in their house. Everyone must sit down in the same place all night and discuss food intolerances and the crisis in the euro zone. Those are just examples of the type of hot, spontaneous gossip you’ll be exposed to at one of these events, known as a “dinner parties”. I never agreed to go to one, but they have crept up on me, in that peculiar dull way that they do. Sometimes dinner parties are such hard work that the evening becomes an image from a graphic novel in my mind, all of us sitting there with a collective thought bubble hanging over our heads asking “Is this it?” If the first half hour of a regular party is the hardest, the last half hour of a dinner party is definitely the most exasperating. Saying goodbye is painfully drawn out by politeness on all sides. The dream scenario is to high-five the host and leave immediately after dessert. Doesn’t the word tiramisu literally translate as “let’s get out of here”? No? What about banoffi? I think it’s from the Latin “and off he goes”.
You may wonder why I go to parties at all. Why don’t I just come clean and reject everyone, like the giant in the fairy tale who buried his heart in the garden? I’m sure, if you think about it, you know the reasons already. I go to parties because of my overdeveloped sense of duty, a near constant feeling that I should “make an effort with people” and, of course, because of the small but ever present possibility of something actually exciting happening.
Maeve Higgins’s album
Maeve Higgins Can’t Stop Doing Comedy
is available now on iTunes and at maevehiggins.com
