Thursday I organized my first Harvard 06 mini reunion at Brinkley’s, aka Martignetti’s. It was awful but amazing because we all just got smashed.
I knew this event was going to be a failure going into it because I had inadvertently organized it on Rosh Hashanah, and half of Harvard is Jewish. Yeah, fucking Shana Tova people. This is when I really wanted to pull a GET A LIFE JEWS and wave my swastika pillow sham at them. Ugh, whatevs. As an honorary Jew, I should have known. It was really my fault… actually, I fully blame this on my Jewish friends who should have told me.
Needless to say, the only people who showed up to the event right at 7pm were myself, because as the organizer I had to, and M, because as a best friend of the organizer I forced her to and she wasn’t Jewish. And S who showed up a few minutes later because he too is a good friend. So with nothing else to do, we started drinking heavily by ourselves. For the past few years my “thing” at Brinkley’s has been getting dirty martinis in a tall. I can’t remember when, but one of the times I was there, they served me a dirty martini in a tall because they had run out of martini glasses, and I fell in love. I loved how the olives floated around in the tall glass, and ever since then, that’s all I’ve ordered at Brinkley’s.
Thursday I started out with 2 dirty martinis in a tall before my other friends started to show up, both of which S bought for me because he felt bad for how pathetic this event was turning out to be. W, N, F, and my roommates showed up a little later (clearly since this was my event I didn’t just invite “Harvard 06” people — obviously I invited 05-09 and my non-Harvard friends)… and some other 06 people I didn’t recognize.
Some lessons I learned for my next event:
- Don’t call it a Harvard party — it’s an oxymoron and no one will come
- Make sure I make it clear that these events aren’t actually organized by the “Harvard Activities Committee” — the “Harvard Activities Committee” = just me, and was just a term I made up to make myself sound legit… that obviously backfired
- Don’t organize it on a holiday
- Start event later so people get that it’s supposed to be “going out hard on a Thursday” vs. happy hour
Despite points 1-4, my party did get HOPPIN” around 10pm and tripled in size when the entire Harvard 07-09 football team in NYC showed up. They always know how to have a good time. It was pretty much like being back at the Kong again. By this time I was definitely on tall martini #5, none of which I had paid for at this point (not sure how I pulled that one off). Everything gets blurry after that, but I’m pretty sure I had at least 2 more tall martinis after the boys arrived and, before I knew it, started engaging in some shameless heavy petting action at the bar with an 09er. None of us can remember what happened after this.
Apparently we all blacked out because the next morning I got at least a dozen emails from friends being like “GREAT PARTY.” I guess any party can turn into a great party when you’re on 10+ drinks and in a room full of football guys.
Poverexic in NYC 