4 Things Not to Say at a Dinner Party
I'm not known for my decorum, but sometimes I outdo myself. Last night, with eight friends over for enchiladas, I was talking about a cute hippie girl I met. One by one, the girls around the dinner table asked if I would be turned off to find out she didn't shave.
- "I've never seen her pubic hair," I said to a stunned room. Looking out at a wall of blank and horrified faces, I realized I had misread the level of their interest in hippie grooming.
It's not the first time I've silenced a dinner table, and it runs in the family, as these examples prove:
- At Thanksgiving dinner with our close family friends, who happen to be ethinically Armenian, my father once tried to change the subject with "You know, I just read that the Armenian genocide was a hoax."
- Then, a year later, when I was still living on the East Coast, and was invited to Easter dinner at a friend's house, their 65-year old father joined us. A retired doctor, he told a story about a fellow physician who claimed that he only read his own medical journal articles. I blurted out, in a quick effort to mock such gross vanity, "I masturbate a lot!" Again, silence.
- "This tastes like dog food," my brother, at three years old, announced to a table of more than a dozen relatives, including my great-grandmother, who made the roast. Confronted by the silence, he happily added, "That's okay, I like dog food!"
