PC Party Princess

And now back to our regularly scheduled party blog update, a continuation of my PC party themes entry from a ways back….

So on the Arabian Nights theme party invite, I asked guests to dress up, thinking veils, turbans, harem pants, the works. You know, “I Dream of Jeannie”-style kitschy, fun, right? But then I started wondering if anyone could take that the wrong way. Did I seem like I was making fun of the Middle East somehow? I asked my Indian friend Jay (a sensitive man), and he thought maybe it wasn’t, uh, in the best taste. I was reluctant to admit maybe I’d crossed the line. After all, weren’t some communities banning Halloween now because of its quasi-religious origins? Maybe we all just needed to relax. So I went home and Googled “offensive party themes” to see what the Web had to say about it. I ended up finding a post from some college kid who’d thrown a costume party he dubbed “The Most Offensive Party Ever”; guests dressed as Hitler and members of the Klan. His post was an effort to defend himself (he’d gotten in trouble with the school), but I had to conclude that yeah, maybe there was a line, and maybe I had walked over it. So I changed the invite to specify dressing as a specific character, rather than as some vague, you know, other. I learned a bunch of stuff about the Arabian Nights stories and about the culture and made regionally accurate dishes and set up a pretty amazing Bedouin-esque-ish tent. Still, I couldn’t resist putting on the harem pants and the coin necklace around my head with a scarf veil, even though it was pretty clearly a more Hollywood than Cairo take on the look. Despite my efforts to share cocktail party tidbits about the tales and pour generous shots of raki (a licorice-flavored liquor made from raisins popular in the Middle East), I’m pretty sure at least one friend wasn’t entirely comfortable with the whole thing. It sort of sucked some of the fun out of the evening, worrying about this stuff. In a way, I mourn the loss of the ability to wholeheartedly embrace the exotic (is it okay to use the word “exotic” here?) without totally knowing what you’re doing…but on the other hand, I do kinda get it. No one wants to be marginalized or to feel like they’re being made fun of, even if that’s totally not your intent. Sigh.

And then weekend before last I went to a birthday party for a five-year-old with, you guessed it, a princess theme. She was Jasmine, and almost all the other girls came in their own Disney Store costumes–Ariel, Belle, Cinderella, Snow White…. Let me tell you, if they had come up with this whole Princess thing when I was a mere slip of a girl, this Barbie-lovin’, pink-bedroom-livin’ little lass would have been all over it. But when my husband and I babysit, his inner hippie can’t resist indulging in a little counter-culture movement in the midst of suburbia. So he plays dolls with “Jasmine” all right, only he has her Bratz get ready to go to the awards ceremony for the Nobel Peace Prize instead of the prom. I appreciate (not to mention crack up at) the effort, but as I, er, mentioned, I looooooooooved  that stuff when I was a kid. There does seem to be something intrinsically girly about girls. And maybe that’s fine. I’ll say it again: Sigh.

Math is hard (to quote a talking Barbie from the ’90s). But so is nonpolitical party-planning. Good luck out there, princess.

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