Social Fumbling

Six Months of Free Wine, Tiny Soup and Meltdowns

Prelude: As I wrote this article, back in the middle of 2009, Steph and I were a single day away from our three-week holiday from On Dit. We felt more like we were three weeks away from getting committed to some sort of mental institution, quite frankly. The weekend just gone was one of a Pete Doherty proportion meltdown, one that actually kicked me hard enough to re-evaluate how I was going about life arse-over, but that’s what unknown chemicals will do to one’s conscience as you lay in a bed, insides cramping and afflicted with fever-sweats, but that’s another story for another time.

The social life of an editor is a strange one. With deadlines constantly overlapping, nights become long and friends and family are soon left behind in lieu of first of all the business at hand of creating a student publication, and then later for the heady world of red carpet events and after-parties. It is these that truly skew one’s life into a sort of strange caricature of how ‘important’ people live.

As an On Dit editor you begin receiving invitations to various events sch as the Adelaide Big Pond Film Festival opening night, Cabaret Launch Party and so on. You stop paying from tickets to concerts and sporting events, your name perpetually inhabiting door lists, admitted with a mention of credentials and a knowing nod.

Having never been to this sort of thing before, we snapped up our RSVPs and dived in feet first. There’s the fun of getting needless haircuts, dressing up in dapper outfits and the polishing of shoes, and then there is the mingling and schmoozing. The most fun thing about this is that you never really feel like you belong here at first, so it’s all a big game, playing grownups so to speak.

The after-parties themselves were a world like I’d never encountered before. Important old people in dresses, suits and jewellery more expensive than my first car flitted to and fro. They threw back their heads and laughing at inane witticisms, sipping on seemingly bottomless glasses of champagne. Waiters wove their way through the crowd of cackling bourgeois yuppies, carrying trays of tiny, tiny food.

We were proffered shot glasses of a thick green liquid, which I assumed to be some sort of organic liqueur, and threw back what tasted like blended lawn clippings, nearly choking on the tiny prawn floating in the miniature swamp I held in my fingers. The snooty waiter promptly advised me it was chilled cucumber and dill soup. “In a shot glass?” I asked rhetorically, before grabbing another 8 or so and downing them in rapid succession. Food this small you can’t eat fast enough, at least not fast enough to counteract the copious amounts of free alcohol sloshing around one’s stomach, a vile mixture of beer, and wine both red and white, with bubbles and without, the cocktail added to as each sort of free alcohol slowly but surely runs out.

Eventually you meet people you probably shouldn’t ever meet, let alone under the influence of too much drink and too little food.

Through bleary eyes you seen Margaret Pomeranz standing proudly out front, a defiantly cracked laugh issuing from her mouth as a sophisticatedly length cigarette hangs from her lips. You say something inane and slightly slurred and you get a smile, the polite sort a world away from the face you saw upon approach. Her hand feels like the bark of a tree and she says how lovely it was to meet you and she turns away and goes back to laughing uproariously with her friends. You’ve just made an arse of yourself and realize you’re out of your depth, socially. No one else is as drunk as you, knowing that the alcohol is free to spare them of the petty act of exchanging moneys rather than so you can drink to the point of social, if not physical impairment.

You’re not meant to drink all the beer, and all the sparkling shiraz, and the champagne, and the regular shiraz and the chardonnay. Next thing you’re appearing half-cut in the social pages of a dozen Adelaide publications, slamming booze like a frat-boy. That’s what office parties are for. Two days later my house was inhabited by 60+ editors, subbies, student pollies, friends and family members. We drank and danced like we’re meant to, with reckless abandon, $500 woth of advertising-funded alcohol sloshing about in our bellies, full of real food, dancing to real music with real friends, exactly as it should be.

Fuck red carpets. Fuck after-parties. This is how we roll.