Misguided Dinner Parties
Ranting Again
When you’re invited to an amateur poetry reading, you probably do what I do: you don’t attend.
But there are moments in life when fate twists against you—conspiring, it seems, with the Gods themselves—and you end up sitting in a circle with 25 people, each of whom has something Very Personal to share.
That’s what happened to me a couple weeks ago. In my case it was a bait-and-switch. I was told I’d be cooking for a normal, poetry-free dinner party.
I love dinner parties. I view them as laid-back affairs that include three essential ingredients: a tableful of food, good wine, and compelling conversation. I also love cooking for other people, so when the opportunity arose, I was quick to say yes to it.
I planned a simple menu: hummus, fresh flatbread, saffron tahdig, a beet and goat cheese galette. Dessert was a bit more elegant: a nutmeg custard tart and a topping of strawberries roasted with mint, lime, and vanilla.
It was the kind of food that begets a relaxed evening. Everything could be made ahead of time and it would all sit well, allowing guests to graze on their way to get more wine. Plenty of people were coming, many of whom hadn’t met each other before. I was excited; it seemed to me that all the elements of a good dinner party were in place.
That’s when things began to mutate. A few days before the evening in question, the host reached out and told me, delight in her voice, that her friends had had a series of good ideas. They were adding three events to dinner: a breathwork session, a poetry reading, and a group meditation. She said it would be a chance to connect and get to know everyone on a spiritual level.
Normally I would have canceled on the spot. I don’t think I need to explain why.
But I was in too deep. I’d promised food and bought ingredients. People had already RSVP’ed. There was no backing out now.
And to be fair, a small part of me wondered if I was being close-minded. I tend toward cynicism and I’m suspicious of new things—and there’s a reason I feel that way. Los Angeles is an odd city.
In my time here, I’ve attended a luncheon that turned into a New Age pyramid scheme pitch. I’ve had coffee with an acquaintance who slipped several doses of LSD into my cup (he called them “soul drops”; I would call them “hallucinating in a grocery store at noon”). I’ve even gone to a meditation class that ended with full frontal nudity—the institution putting it on was later outed as a predatory sex cult.
After all my bizarre LA experiences, the words “breathwork” and “group meditation” set off mild alarm bells for me.
But these people seemed okay. A little breathing, some casual poetry, a few minutes of meditation, and a bunch of good food. Doesn’t sound so bad, right?
In hindsight, I think I’d take the sex cult demonstration again. I didn’t realize just how devastating amateur poetry can be.
The evening started with a far-too-brief dinner. We ate a bit and started to talk to each other, but before long, the host gathered us all in a circle. She thanked us for coming, encouraged us all to sit, and announced that it was time to do breathwork.
The woman who led us was very sweet, although I’m not sold on her methods. She said she’d just spent two months on her breathwork certification, and when she mentioned the person who taught her, there was collective oohing and aahing. I’m not sure why the training lasted two months, because as far as I could tell, she just told us to close our eyes and breathe slowly (“Five seconds in…aaaaaaand five seconds out. Amazing. And again…”).
Once we were in the right headspace it was time for poetry. We were asked to snap our fingers after each poem; clapping was deemed too aggressive. We went around the circle and, one by one, shared what we’d written.
There were themes. Many people wrote about their connection to the Universe, or Source Energy, or Buddha, or Destiny. Others ruminated on the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship. There was abundant speculation about the nature of love and the power of acceptance.
A troubling number of people, when it was their turn, started with, “I actually wrote three poems for tonight, but I promise they’re short.” These poems were the longest.
All in all, the reading lasted close to three hours. It included many slant rhymes and a not-insignificant amount of weeping.
After all 25 of us bared our souls, we concluded with a group meditation. There was spiritual sighing. Someone read a quotation from the Buddha.
Only then, mercifully, were we released back to the food and wine, free to talk to one another outside the context of stanza and verse. Alas, at this point I had come to a firm conclusion: I never wanted to talk to these people again.
In fairness, dinner did have one bright moment. It happened right at the end of the night, as I was leaving with two friends of mine. One of them had been drinking steadily for a couple of hours. As we walked out of the host’s apartment, she borderline shouted, while still within earshot of everyone, “Jesus Christ. That was fucking terrible.”
Now that—that made me pretty happy.