I was in Berlin with my friend Anna. We were walking around a bookstore, and I picked up a book, skimming through the pages. It wasn’t really my type of book, and I was about to set it down when I found a chapter on dinner parties, behind the recipe for The Seducer's Sole Meunière. It was silly, self-effacing, and sort of indulgent. It listed all of the characters Dolly Alderton was going to invite. I set down Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir and turned to Anna.
“Anna,” I said very seriously. “We are going to have to throw a dinner party at Oberlin.”
So you can see, this was months in the making. We decided in Berlin that in our narrow, maroon house with creaky floors and a weird Jesus painting, we would be throwing a dinner party full of all of our Oberlin friends.
The critical part of this is that it wouldn’t just be any dinner party. It’d be fancy––no, classy––and it’d have the very upper crust of Oberlin society (I’m joking). I’d invite an eclectic mix of my first-year friends (thank you, Kahn Hall), my co-op friends (thank you, Pyle Co-Op), and the plus-ones would be a wonderful surprise. In planning our first party, it was a choreographed dance of, “Oh, but we can’t invite X and Y,” or, “Did we remember to buy gluten-free flour for the gluten-free and vegan chocolate cake?”
We wanted the party to be perfect. It couldn’t just be dinner. It had to be more.
Last week, we hosted our first dinner party. It was prom-themed, and every attendee had to dress fancy. I wore a purple dress I picked up from Oberlin’s annual city-wide yard sale, along with a tiara I found at the Free Store. My entire outfit cost $2.
In our household, I made the focaccia (with some assistance from Anna), and Anna, ever the chef, prepared a spread of risotto, paired with garlic and pine nut oil, a salad with roasted shallots, and to sweeten the evening, tiramisu and chocolate cake. How decadent. How French.
We were nervous to host all of our different guests.
“This is the easy guest list,” I assured my housemates, Elyssa and Anna. “I could have invited much more eclectic people.”
It was important to us that everyone meet someone new, that everyone find a friend or join in discourse over how warm it was or what we are all going to do after graduation. At seven o’clock sharp (I’ve made punctual friends), our guests began to trickle in. We had fourteen guests, a small smattering to start, and they all took up cocktails and hung up coats, revealing dress as fine as one could expect at a college prom-themed dinner party.
Our guests surged into the kitchen, admired the cooking, and then collapsed onto our broken living room couches, praising the cool air from our open windows. Summer stays long in Oberlin. As evening came, we talked, gossiped, and enjoyed dinner, then nudged Anna after, begging her to cut the tiramisu. We began at seven o’clock, and our last guest left at midnight. Afterward, we lay on the couches, staring at the ceiling and the Jesus painting, a little bit intoxicated and full of good food, the air warm with laughter.
In Berlin, Anna and I had decided to throw this dinner party. We made it come to fruition, and after three years at Oberlin, this was the first time many of my friends met many of my other friends. It was a very meta moment, an Avengers: Endgame sort of gathering. And the best part? All of my friends got along so well.
This is what I love most about Oberlin, these gatherings that make us feel all the more human and connected. A dinner party on the outskirts of campus. An autumnal walk through the Arboretum. Swinging our legs off the side of a colorful bridge, surrounded by trees. Laughter with friends.
What more could anyone ask for?
