Famous People #17: a dinner party for Matt
As in, I bought a bookshelf at Target in February, and for three months I had been afraid that if I tried to hang it up I would damage the basic structure of my home and be evicted by the lackadaisical landlord who lives in Malibu and doesn’t yet know that juice bars and day cares are moving in all around my extremely affordable three-bedroom. The night before the party, I made pie crust with my bare hands and Stephanie said “You’re making the butter too warm.” I bought two packages of goat cheese and accidentally left one on the counter all night. I went to three supermarkets and each one was sold out of rhubarb. I started to get worried, but I didn’t tell Lizzie. I mean, I really wanted Matt to hang up my bookshelf.
Lizzie: It feels like years ago that Kaitlyn first told me about this shelf. The convo went like this:
KAITLYN: “Lizzie, I have an $18 shelf I need to hang up. What should I do?”
LIZZIE: “Oh, Matt can hang it up. He’s deeply attached to his power drill, which is probably tied to his sense of masculinity in a way I don’t feel like investigating.” [Ed. note: Matt says, “I look at it more like the father I never had.”]
KAITLYN: “Cool, I’ll cook a six-course meal to thank you, and then possibly get wine-drunk enough to try and convince you we can call the whole shelf thing off.”
Later, Kaitlyn really does tell Matt he doesn’t actually need to hang the shelf. After all this.
Kaitlyn: The only other time I have hosted a dinner party was for my college boyfriend’s 20th birthday. Because it was November I made an entire Thanksgiving dinner, including a turkey, for everyone we knew. I spent my entire grocery budget for the month and in the end my boyfriend spent the evening in a fraying armchair in the corner, eating cranberry sauce straight from the serving dish, making eye contact with no one. There was zero chance, I thought, that this dinner party would not go at least noticeably better.
Lizzie: Famous People Party Rule No. 397: Always set the bar almost unreasonably low.
Kaitlyn: Under the guidance of Martha Stewart, I cooked pork for the first time in my life. Then I cooked mushrooms in butter and told Lizzie to dress for a Phantom Thread theme party. She replied that she was wearing a leather jacket.
My college roommate’s father got a parasite in his brain from eating raw pork, so she used to cry and scream when she saw people lick the spatula while mixing cake batter. I remembered this, and cooked the pork very carefully. As a treat for me — because I was being so maternal and because I got my period on the way to the fourth store that might sell rhubarb — I bought Sheila Heti’s new novel at the bookstore near the gym. I underlined “Isn’t it stupid my body did this again? Who is it doing all this for, if not for me? And what do I do for it? I mop up its blood. Then I mop it up again. I never feel grateful.” I drank two glasses of wine before anyone else got there!
Lizzie: On the way to the mysterious pork-and-shelf-themed dinner party, we stopped at the wine store, because Kaitlyn had said to bring wine “and nothing else!!!!!!” I got one white and one red, each for around $12. At first, I accidentally brought a $20 bottle up to the counter, and the cashier generously pointed out that it was $20, as if he could tell I’m still at the part of a new job where I haven’t gotten paid yet. So I had to sheepishly admit to him that the $20 bottle was, in fact, a mistake, and swap it out for something a little harsher on the palate.
Kaitlyn: Lizzie and Matt wore identical checkered Vans, which was perfect because Stephanie has an Instagram Story series about couples who wear matching shoes. We sat on step stools and folding chairs and raised a glass to Katie’s haircut and Stephanie’s Instagram victory and Tamar’s general resilience.
Lizzie: Matt bought me sneakers because he got free shipping and because now it’s easier to find him in a crowd (I’m always looking down at the ground).
Kaitlyn: The pie ended up being strawberry-apricot — no rhubarb — and the crust ended up being fine. I showed everyone how to make a pile of whipped cream the exact right shape and size to fit under the domed lid of a frappuccino cup, which is one of hundreds of useful things you learn in a mall food court. We ate so much maltodextrin I thought we were all going to grow extra limbs.
Lizzie: Kaitlyn is being extraordinarily modest — the pie was a triumph! It was tangy and sweet, but not too sweet, and the crust tasted just like Martha’s probably tastes. After I finished sharing a slice with Matt, I continued to rudely scoop new bites straight from the pie tin while squirting whipped cream into my mouth and saying “Oh gosh, oh my, I couldn’t eat another bite.”
Kaitlyn: At the bar, I bought beers with ginger in them to calm my stomach. Once, on a trip to Nicaragua, my sister couldn’t stop throwing up, so an old lady stole a piece of ginger from an outdoor market and handed it to her and she gnawed on it all day. She hasn’t vomited even once since then, not even in the backseat of mom’s van, which used to be her favorite place to do that in, though it turns out the old lady was also stealing underwear from all of our suitcases. Anyway, the ginger worked for me too! And Matt was a really good sport about the conversation topics we chose, which if I recall correctly were hormonal birth control and media Twitter personalities.
Lizzie: As I mentioned earlier, I’m in-between paychecks right now, so I asked my keeper Matt to buy me a cider, which he did loyally. I think he also realized he owed me, since we kept talking about the abdomens of pregnant women tearing apart.
Kaitlyn: On the way out of the bar, Lizzie hugged me and said something nice. I don’t remember what it was, but I know it was pretty good, and functioned similarly to a hunk of ginger handed to you by an old pervert.
Lizzie: :-)
PARTY REVIEW METRICS
Did anyone bring a dog?
Kaitlyn: No, but my cat Ghost jumped on the table and put his face in the goat cheese, which made everyone even less inclined to eat the hors d'oeuvres.
Lizzie: I didn’t eat the Ghost Cheese but Matt did and he seems fine.
Did anyone get engaged?
Kaitlyn: It would be weird, in my opinion, to take any attention at all away from the passable pie crust.
Lizzie: Can you imagine?? To get engaged during a good friend’s Pork Shelf dinner party?
Did we hear any good secrets?
Kaitlyn: We talked about two media personalities who might be dating, based on their tweets. But tweets are kind of the opposite of secrets, so I guess no. We also learned that there’s a rhubarb shortage in New York City at this time, but it’s possible absolutely no one cared.
Lizzie: We learned that an unnamed man in the publishing industry has had some recent clothed sexual mishaps.
Did anyone get famous?
Kaitlyn: Matt hung up my bookshelf in under four minutes, which is much less time than it took Rob from Vanderpump Rules to hang up a television, as we know. Get Matt a recurring program on HGTV!
Lizzie: Take that Scheana!
PARTY SCORE
Kaitlyn: Noticeably better than at least some people’s Thanksgiving dinners.
Lizzie: Worthy of a West Elm shelf.