Jessie: In New Hampshire, missing entertaining guests in the home.
If there is one thing I love to do, it is to throw parties. Big ones, small ones, intimate gatherings and potlucks for dozens of guests. I love to choose a theme, create the invitations, plan the menu and set about throwing open the doors to let my guests come in to be entertained.
I adore the flickering candles, the gleaming china, the beautifully plated food. Music drifting under the burble of cheerful voices, clinking glasses, friends both old and new smiling greetings to one another. Alas, it has been too long.
But, since a real dinner party is not in the offing, I have been dreaming up some imaginary ones whilst awaiting an all clear for merriments to resume. It is not an original game but it amuses me nonetheless. I feel no need to constrain myself to realities under such circumstances and shamelessly imagine an acquaintaince with greatness or timeline impossibilities.
First off, I would invite family. I would like to have known my grandmothers, great-grandmothers and my mother-in-law when they were young women. I would love to invite them all to tea. I would invite my great-grandparents on my mother’s side for dessert fondue as they each had a wicked sweet tooth. I would adore hearing their assorted Maine accents once more. I would have my aunts over for finger sandwiches and lemonade in the screen house on the back deck in view of the gardens and the bird feeders since they loved such things.
I would also love to host a dinner party for famous authors I have loved over the years. I think it likely the party would be boisterous and loads of fun. I love the work of so many authors but from their writng s I think I would love to sit down to a meal with Llyoyd Alexander, E.F. Benson, Charlotte McLeod, Elizabeth Peters, Dorothy Parker and P.G. Wodehouse. I think I would have that one catered so that I could focus completely on the chatter!
Finally, if I could have my druthers, I would throw a party for my own characters. I would love to see what they would get up to if set to spin in my home, milling about with cocktail glasses in their hands, free to get to know people from books not their own. I am certain my sleuth Beryl would admire Aunt Hazel from my Sugar Grove series. Edwina would love to chat about plants with Gwen, the protagonist from my first novel, Live Free or Die. Simpkins would likely try his hand at chatting up the Velmont sisters, Elva and Dovie, from my Change of Fortune books. I’d love to watch my sleuth Ruby do a tarot reading with one of my decks of cards or to eavesdrop on Constable Gibbs and Officer Warren Yancey comparing notes on police procedures on opposite sides of “the pond”.
Readers, which writers or characters would you invite to dinner? What would you serve?