Our Best Parties Were The Cheap Ones.
What We Lose Upgrading Our Lives.
For eight and a half years, I lived with three friends in an old Spanish house in Silverlake. I spent my thirties there. Over the years, countless guests crashed on the couch. We furnished the place with friends’ giveaways and Facebook marketplace. We caught a rat in the bathroom and I released him in Pasadena (sorry). The backyard looked west over the silverlake reservoir and hills. It was a beautiful house, if crusty. While we were there, we threw the best parties of our lives.
A group of us were reminiscing on those parties last night, and everyone was lobbing stories. When Ameesh fell off the back deck into the bushes. When the stripper came. How many people kissed in the tree house. When it was 97 degrees in the living room at 2am and 30 people were still dancing. The fog machine!
I still go to fun parties. But something about ours back then was different. They were scrappy. There wasn’t a cheese board and a wine pairing. People brought their own tequila and smoked in the doorway. Sometimes I’d walk into the kitchen and not recognize a soul. I’d often go to bed first and fall asleep vibrating from the bass, smiling to myself with pride. I’d wake up the next morning and spend an hour cleaning, discovering little stories as I went. Whose leather jacket is this in the flowers?
I remember experiencing present nostalgia. Knowing the moments were forever, and feeling them stretch out in every direction.
Something shifted in the last few years. People grew up. Homes became precious. Hangouts became luxe. The wine isn’t fifteen bucks anymore. Bedtime moved to 9:30.
What made those parties so special to me? I think it was the energy of the open handedness. Anyone was invited. Friends of friends came and became new friends. Fancy people hung out with dirt bags and shared cigs. The generosity of spirit was abundant in the looseness of everything.
As we get older, I’ve observed some contagious delight in sequestering ourselves. We laugh at how early we go to bed and we love cancelling plans. Which I admit I relish too. But a smallness has set in. I want to foster a bit of loose fun in the margins. I want that dirt bag dive bar cigarette. I want to meet someone new in a doorway and talk to them for an hour. Once in a while, I want to fall asleep to the bass.
<3 Jed.
YASS!!! I was just talking to my friends about this. How we partied at my friend's older sister's house on Florida St. The strangers we've met, the conversations we had, the bushes we saw people YACK in. The dancing, the themed parties, the endless laughter of our youth. Those nights were young and RICH!! Now, I look at my husband, in our Adam Sandler outfit for the night, squealing at the thought of watching Dateline or 20/20. Is this what turning into a Pumpkin feels like? Will Cinderella ever dance again? Will she lose a shoe again at midnight? We are still broke! Sigh....we need to have a night of Wealth soon.
At one such party at my casa back in the wild aughts, before Trump and covid and endless fires legal weed, I met a young guy - friend of a friend of my roommate - who'd come to LA from Ohio to be near his brother who had just landed a job at a studio. We were sharing a joint on the front porch and I asked him what he thought of the city. I, too, was a transplant from back East, though somewhat older and more than a little jaded, and was fully prepared for the usual "LA people are shallow...the traffic...the air quality...etc. etc." But he surprised me and said he loved it here because at parties like this he was meeting people that had come here, like his brother, to realize their dreams, and he didn't get that at parties in Ohio. Nowadays, the people I talk to at parties have mostly gotten to where they are going to get (not a bad thing at all), but sometimes I miss the dreamers and the dirtbags and I wonder what that kid from Ohio is doing now.