The Party to End All Parties - Literally

Weekend Assignment #44: Recollect for all a humorous story of a party gone wrong. Emphasis on humorous -- Don't bring the room down with a stories that lead to divorces or the loss of a toe or anything (well, maybe the toe one would be okay, so long as it was your toe, and you can laugh about it now). Also remember that here on AOL, we do like to keep things in the "PG" range. You know what I'm talking about here.

Extra Credit: Party pictures, of course! (not necessarily of the same party you write about for the Weekend Assignment. Just, you know, you having fun in a party setting.)

Once in a while, John Scalzi comes up with a Weekend Assignment that, on first glance, seems to have no applicability to my life.  That's when I have to dig a bit, and find a way to write about it anyway.  Sometimes when I do, I come up with something that is meaningful to me, something that I might not have remembered were it not for my stubborn determination to do all the assignments.

This is one of those.

I'm not a partier. I'm shy, I don't drink, and the people I consider my friends tend to live far away. This is not a recipe for hanging out at parties with any frequency at all.

But for ten years or so, I was a member and sometime officer of the United Whovians of Tucson, a local Doctor Who fan club that now exists only as an email list (and a loose collection of people who occasionally contact each other in one way or another). We would meet every two weeks to chat and drink soda and possibly eat jicama (oh yeah, we were a wild bunch). Sometimes, for holidays, those meetings would be parties,whichbasically meant more food and maybe costumes (for the Wholloween parties) and decorations.

Eventually it got to be too much trouble to host these things, and as the club wound down we got into the habit of getting together at public places for a couple of hours.  Sometimes it was at Coffee Xchange at Grant and Campbell, other times at Coffee Etc. at Campbell and Glenn, sometimes someplace else.  (I bet you can already guess where I'm going with this.)

I think it was at the New Year's 1999-2000 party at Coffee Xchange (John and I were at Disneyland at the time--and here's an amusingly terrible photo to prove it) that the Whovians in attendance had practically a ringside seat for the shooting of some dangerous loony at the corner of Grant and Campbell by the future Surgeon General, Dr. Richard Carmona.  But it was probably for Christmas 2002 that the already-defunct club made its most memorable attempt at a Christmas party and reunion.  The response seemed to be good, so my friend Kevin and I set off for Coffee Etc., full of hope and Christmas cheer.

Total attendance: five. Or was it only four?  Well, anyway, not more than five.

We had a good time, though. We ate together, chatted, and went our separate ways.  That was it.  The club was well and truly dead.

Within a day or two after that, several emails went out to the effect that "We were there. Where were you?"

Where, indeed?

I think there were five Whovians at Coffee Xchange that evening, one light away from the rest of us.  Or maybe there were four there, too.

Fortunately, Dr. Carmona did not show up at either venue that night.

Karen

Top: Cover of the final issue of TARDIS Time Lore. Art by Sherlock. Photos by KFB. Actually, the TARDIS door one may be Linda's.  I'm not sure.