THE VICARIOUS PLEASURE OF EAVESDROPPING IN NEW YORK CITY: AN IMAGINARY SEMI-FICTIONAL REPORT OF WHAT NEW YORKERS MIGHT HAVE SAID TO EACH OTHER WHILE BEING OVERHEARD BY A STRANGER IN A PUBLIC PLACE

 

---"Do any of the Embassies allow private citizens to crash their Embassy parties? I would love to attend a Swedish smorgasbord party that I assume the Swedish Embassy hosts every year, but I don't have any Swedish ancestry. I need to do some research on whether any of the Embassies permit American citizens with currently valid New York State driver's licenses to attend their parties without an invitation."

--"If you can prove you have British or German ancestry, that should help you to get into a Swedish Embassy smorgasbord party. Sweden maintains close ties to Germany and The United Kingdom."

---"Maybe you should write a non-fiction guidebook entitled 'The Art of Crashing Embassy Parties in New York'. I'm very sure it would make the New York Times bestsellers list."

--"Is you crash a party in Manhattan, remember to never carry a weapon on your person. This is how you can prove to the party host, if you're frisked, that your intentions are completely honorable."

---"Do you really think that crashing a party in Manhattan will enhance your social life? Don't you know that if you crash a social party, you get treated like a pariah by 95 percent of the guests at that party? The other 5 percent have very low moral standards and are persons you wouldn't want for friends or dating partners, anyway. You are allowed to attend the party you crashed only because the host doesn't want NYPD to arrive on the scene with handcuffs and put everyone on the defensive."

---"I sometimes wonder how many total combined hours I have spent attending dinner parties and cocktail parties here in Manhattan. My total is probably close to 500 hours, and those 500 hours translated into 50 hangovers and one or two personal friends who actually send me greeting cards during the Holiday Season. I sometimes wonder if the 500 hours I spent at parties here were a productive use of my time."

--"The advantage you have when you crash a party here in Manhattan is that New Yorkers love chutzpah. If you make a statement about being bold, the other party guests will clap with admiration  when the host lets you stay because she doesn't want to make a scene at her own party."

---"Maybe you should approach the host ASAP after you crash a party. Just tell the host that you weren't invited but you feel very confident that you will be the life of the party, since you are so entertaining that friends of yours told you you remind them of the famous comedian Johnny Carson."

---"Whether you crashed the party is not the issue here. It's whether you crash the party but are so stylishly dressed that you dazzle all the other guests with your presence.  If you can make the right fashion statement, the host will forgive you for being brash, intrusive, and flagrantly unethical."

--"If you do crash a cocktail party here in Manhattan, be prepared to offer a clever response if one of the invited guests accuses you of trespassing. If you can be witty about the crime you committed, this will convince everyone that they want you there to keep them entertained at all times."

---"Whenever I see someone crash a party here in Manhattan, I am thinking to myself that's the kind of person who also commits the felony crime of home-invasion crimes. They see a welcome mat in front of a bolt-locked apartment unit, so they interpret that as an invite to break in with a smirk on their face."

---"The percentage of those who crash parties here in New York who also have felony-conviction records is appallingly high. Never trust a party-crasher. That's my credo."

---"Party crashers here in Manhattan remind me of a Batman episode in which the Joker makes a very sudden, outrageously rude, and violent appearance. I get a creepy feeling whenever I see anyone crashing a cocktail party here."

---"I try to ask each of the party crashers for their full legal name, so I can add their name to the list of persons I put on my 'NEVER INVITE THEM TO A PARTY OF MY OWN' LIST."

---"I'm very sure that a high percentage of the party crashers here in New York have sexually assaulted someone and are either a recently released inmate or someone who had the best possible criminal-defense attorney and somehow managed to get a 'not-guilty' verdict from the jury."

---"A lot of the ones who crash parties here on a habitual basis are frustrated actors who haven't landed a role in a Hollywood movie yet. They figure they can rehearse for their role in a future movie if they make a big splash that shocks all the invited guests at a cocktail party here in Manhattan. They imagine their name suddenly appearing on the big screen at a theater to confirm that they had just made their presence known in a very memorably dynamic, charismatic, irresistible, and captivating way somewhere in the Hollywood Hall of Fame, if there is such a place. Maybe I'm getting Hollywood institutions mixed up with the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, which is another category of fame altogether at that place."

---"Speaking of Canton, Ohio, it is probably one of two or three smaller cities in Ohio that I could recall if quizzed on that subject. There is a Kenyon, Ohio, I assume, since there's a Kenyon College in Ohio so there's probably a town called Kenyon that hosts that college. And there's probably an Oberlin, Ohio, that serves as a permanent host city for Oberlin College. So that's three total small towns in Ohio I could cite in television quiz show under the American Geography category. But if they wanted me to cite four small towns in Ohio, I would probably flunk that question on the quiz show."

---"The ones who crash parties assume that everyone there is identifying them as 'Intriguing' with a capital letter "I". I do agree that the capital letter 'I' immediately comes to mind for invited guests like myself. But the 'I' word that pops into my head when I see the party crasher walking toward everyone is 'Imbecile!'. I am thinking to myself, 'How Can Anyone Be Such an Outrageous Imbecile that They Would Crash a Party In this Flagrantly Vulgar and Rules-Breaking Manner?'"

---"I bet that the majority of party crashers here are persons whose father or grandfather crossed the border into the U.S. illegally. Or maybe the party crasher himself was the one who crossed the border without a Visa."

---"Where does etiquette begin for these party crashers? They seem hellbent on violating each and very rule of good manners at social parties such as this one! Party crashers are a lot like Fascists; they are violently opposed to obeying the rules. They are as reckless as anarchists, and God knows we already have too many anarchists here in New York!"

---"Whenever I see a party crasher at a social event I'm attending, I try to approach him and ask him what his quip for the evening will be. If they take pride in spontaneously violating the rules of good manners by crashing the party, they should have some type of clever quip I can quote back later to all my friends whenever we're getting cynical about the future of human civilization."

---"Maybe he's a party crasher because he believes he is God and can make up all the rules as he sees fit. I just hope he doesn't try to test his belief about being God by jumping out the window of this penthouse apartment while shouting that he is Christ All Mighty!"

----"Ask me which of the single men in this party are violent, and I will reply by asking you to tell me which of the men at this party are here uninvited."

--"'Brash' may sound like the word 'crash', but it is not a synonym for 'crash'. New Yorkers are expected to be brash; it's in our genes, in fact. But New Yorkers are not supposed to be crashingly brash. A lot of the ones who crash parties get ejected by the party host. The party host will hire a bouncer, that's the trend these days because so many people are trying to crash private social parties here."

--"One question I would have asked Joe Biden, if he had attended this party, is what is his all-time favorite Irish culinary dish. Now that he's our President, we need to know the answer to that question. So if we ever host Mr. Biden at a dinner party of our own, we would of course feature that favorite Irish dish of his at our social event."

--"He's a walking antonym for the word 'Decorum'. Fred crashes parties like it's his favorite pastime. He has no sense of decorum, he is determined to be as audacious and outrageous as possible at all times."

---"Have you ever noticed that 99 percent of the party crashers of New York are adult men or under-age male youths? As for the remaining 1 percent, I generally assume they are women who just filed for  divorce and want to take out their rage against everyone for having been stuck with that bastard as long as they were."

---"The women who crash parties tend to be African-American, from what I've observed. The African-American women want to prove they won't take orders from anyone---not even from their pimp, I assume."

---"When I host my next social party here, I plan to have 10 T-shirts available that declare, 'I'M A PARTY CRASHER SO DON'T TALK TO ME!' I will then insist that anyone who crashes my party must wear one of those T-shirts for the entire party."

---"A lot of the party crashers like to wait until the last hour of a party to crash it. They see crashing the party as a great American tradition like going to a bar just before last call. They want to look over each of the female party guests and undress them in their imagination to decide which of them they try to do a one-night stand with."

---"You should never shun a party guest unless you are completely sure that they're a party crasher. Some guests get incorrectly labeled as a party crasher, when they just arrived late but were on the invited guests list. Being late to a party is very different from barging through the front door without an invitation."

---"Fortunately, I have a spy camera focused on my front door so when I host a party all of the party-crashers get immediately videotaped as possible suspects if anything illegal ever develops at the party. One of the first things NYPD detectives will ask me when they investigate a felony crime that occurred at the party site is, 'Did anyone crash your party, and if so, were they white, black, or Hispanic, and can you describe what they were wearing?'"

---"The type of book that might make the Times Bestseller's List might be entitled, 'Confessions of a Manhattan Party-Crasher'. It would be the talk of the entire town after that book gets published."

---"A lot of times you never even notice who the party crashers are. They are experts on how to look as low-key and inconspicuous as possible. They wait until they develop a good rapport with an invited guest, then they will tell everyone that they had been asked by their friend to attend the event with him in order to keep him entertained."

--"The party crashers know from the very start that they are the individuals most likely to get ejected from the party. If I were a party crasher on a habitual basis, I'd get my health insurance policy through Lloyds of London. My chances of getting smashed in the face by a party host would be very high."

---"There's often a 30-minute or hour-long delay in identifying a party crasher here in Manhattan. Most of the guests and the party host are getting drunk, so they aren't paying as much attention to the front door as they would if they were sober."

---"Maybe there should be a Party Crashers Club for New York's Brashest and Most Brazen Violators of Social Etiquette here. They probably would hold their meetings in restaurants without making a reservation. They would just demand a big table for their club members, since additional members are expected to crash their meeting in the middle of their meal."

---"I like the idea of a documentary movie profiling the Habitual Party Crashers of New York and the kind of hospitality they get when they enter private social events without an invitation. Many of those party crashers end up with bloody noses, and it would look very dramatic on the big screen in a movie theater."

---"If you are going to crash a party in New York, you should at least have the common sense to introduce yourself to the party host and explain that you are upwardly mobile so it is a wise choice on their part to let you stay at the party without any invitation."

---"I hate to use the word 'chutzpah' to describe that Jewish guy who likes to crash parties, but that's the only word that comes to my mind. He is the walking definition of the word Chutzpah. He's also a Schlep. He's the kind of Jewish guy my mother warned me about. She said never waste your time with the ones who aren't Nice Jewish Boys."

---"When I learn that anyone at the party is an uninvited guest, I feel like walking up to them and asking, 'So What do you Plan to do for your next outrageous act of audacity here in Manhattan?'"

---"A lot of the ones who crash parties here are ignorant about the undercover police officer present at the event as a security guard. The party crasher ends up getting fingerprinted and handcuffed and taken to Rikers Island within a matter of minutes of his very bold Party-Invasion Crime, as I call it."

---"If you crash a party, make sure it's a party where you might actually benefit in your career pursuits from meeting the invited guests. There are a lot of parties here where the invited guests couldn't offer you much in your career networking. If the guests are retired or semi-retired, their connections to the corporate hierarchy are only minimal at that stage of their life."

---"The shorter ones tend to be less disruptive and more successful at party-crashing, from what I've observed---as long as they can pass for adults. If they look under-age, they might get immediately evicted from the party. No party host wants to wake up the next morning and read a headline in the 'Post' declaring that they had sponsored an infamous spawning ground for Pederasty!"

---"The successful party crashers have mastered the art of studying the facial expressions on the invited guests in order to figure out who is going to be the last judgmental about it. Those non-judgmental invited guests are the ones the party crashers try to cozy up to as soon as possible, in order to blend in and avoid getting kicked out of the party."

--"What motivates a party crasher? I think they are hoping that the ladies who are invited guests will find the party crasher so charmingly bold that they are completely turned on by him."

---"So do you know any famous people who crashed social parties in Manhattan on a frequent basis? That information would be helpful to me. I could cite that example to explain that my own conduct is in keeping with that famous gentleman's great tradition for boldness."

---"The first thing that runs through my mind when I see a guy crashing a party here is this, 'Is this guy a terrorist or a Mafia hit man, and how can I get through this part without a hand grenade being thrown at me or bullets being shot at me?"

---"Anytime I see a party crasher here in New York, I immediately know that he rebelled against authority in his childhood. If his mother asked him to brush his teeth, he would throw his tube of toothpaste into the trashcan so he had that as an alibi if she demanded to know why he hadn't brushed his teeth."

---"I would love to attend a documentary movie here that features each of the great party-crashing scenes from Hollywood movies. I rebel against rules, so I can totally identify with these guys who are outrageously inconsiderate and rebellious in everything they do, including when they attend parties. In their diaries they may even gloat that 'I just had the greatest party-crashing experience of my entire life, and it was like Nirvana for me! It feels great to be the most offensive jerk at the entire party, I love being infamous!"

---"I wish there were a special photo exhibit at the New York Public Library that highlights the most intriguing party-crashing moments from the New York social scene through the decades."