BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER PARTIES

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 139, 2 September 1927, Page 5

BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER PARTIES

How well I remember, when mamma was making out her party lists, the despairing exclamations that punctuated the pernicketty process of roping them all in! “If I don’t invite So-and-So, she’ll be hurt. Yet she doesn't mix with the rest. And Mrs. Blank is Mrs. Brown’s pet aversion, but they’ll both wonder how they’ve offended me if 1 leave them out! What is a poor soul to do?” We know exactly what to do nowadays, Lind without wounding feelings or raising false conjectures. For we have all sorts of delightful excuses for giving only small parties, and inviting only a chosen few at a time. Lack of space-accommodation, the servant question, the simultaneous pursuit of a career and domesticity—all are our allies—and help us to keep our entertaining end up, so to speak, with unruffled bonhomie. Birds-of-a-feather parties enable us to maintain our reputations as hostesses, for they permit us to gather chosen spirits of the same genre round our limited but festive board. And we can enjoy the easeful company of a succession of different types, and so keep in touch with our jolly old world at various angles. Wo can have our tea parties for the womenfolk we cherish in our hearts, but who would be lost in the more Bohemian atmosphere of our business or professional friends. And the latter, sorted out in their turn, can come along in small sections—since there are Bohemians and Bohemians—nut necessarily akin. W r o have grown wise and discreet and far-sighted in our generation. We have not the same optimistic philosophy as our feminine forbears, who trusted to luck that the most diverse elements would “mix” iri a party atmosphere. and ail would be merry. YVo are more adroit philosophers because we are more confirmed sceptics where human nature and its limitations are concerned. We know better these days, when so many of us live the sort of life that inevitably engenders certain tastes and predilections, and that sets us a standard, as it were, whereby to judge of the interests and points of view that appeal to our fellows. We know the birds of a feather that will flock together. And we do not attempt to mix the parrots and the sparrows; the black swans and the white. That is why parties, these days, are such real good fun without any fussing. What they lack in numbers, and in surface boisterousness, they make up abundantly in individual kinship, and in the deeper rapprochements of natures fundamentally attuned. B.S.