The last real party I threw was in 2019, back when I’d sometimes have odd groupings of women over to my tiny New York apartment. At that final one—after everyone was fumbling and drunk, overheated from proximity—I cracked a kitchen window so that one of my friends could smoke, and we all clust ered around her to feel the air. There was such joy in bundling together like that. I made a new friend at that party. I learned a secret that was truly bizarre. Someone left her watch, and I still have it in a drawer because then the pandemic struck, I became a parent, I moved cities, and I never saw her—or hosted a party—again. Lately, there’s been talk of the decline of parties, how Americans today are gathering far less than a couple of decades ago. Loneliness is on the rise, teens aren’t drinking or canoodling, nobody is going out. A post-pandemic social malaise has conspired with crippling tech addiction to atomize people and trap them in their homes. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 4.1 percent of Americans hosted or attended a social event on an average weekend in 2023—a 35-percent decline since 2004. In 2024, after years of circling the drain, Party City finally went bust. Those latter facts were reported in the Atlantic, back in January, under the headline “Americans Need to Party More.” “Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them,” the writer, Ellen Cushing, reflected, citing polling that while almost all Americans enjoy birthday parties, fewer than a third planned to host. She urged readers to “create the social world we want” by throwing two parties in 2025. That seemed doable. I resolved to comply. But instead, my marriage collapsed and my little brother died and I spent much of the year holed up in a sparsely furnished starting-over apartment alternating between sobbing and feeling catatonic. Yes, friends came over, but just one or two at a time. We’d eat dinner at my water-stained table, sitting on stiff folding chairs that I’d bought online. How could I possibly host a party? I couldn’t. I was grieving and ill-equipped. Still, the zeitgeist hounded me. “It’s time to Make America Party Again” was a midsummer declaration from the Substack of former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Two weeks prior, journalist Derek Thompson had published a long piece bemoaning the death of the party, the fact that of any period in recorded history, Americans currently spend the most time alone. But one could also glimpse a resurgence: the reissue of Martha Stewart’s extravagant 1982 book, Entertaining, and the flurry of startups devoted to throwing parties so that young people can flirt and find friends offline. This fall, I took particular note of the chef Samin Nosrat’s book tour, where she described clawing her way out of a brutal post-pandemic depression by hosting a standing weekly dinner party with friends. Alone in my quasi-empty apartment, I envied Nosrat. I longed for warmth and levity and fun. I wanted to feel less bad, to see my friends more, for none of us to spend our nights scrolling endlessly through junk-strewn platforms or engaging in subhuman, empty-calorie banter with ChatGPT. It began to seem like throwing a party might be a gift to myself and others. And somehow, I decided that the best way forward would be to invite the most intimidating possible guest, the grande dame of Washington hosting: Sally Quinn. The party recession has also come for Quinn. “I keep calling my friends trying to find out if there are all these fabulous parties that I’m just not invited to,” she told me on the phone in September. On that call, I explained that I was rusty—that I hadn’t hosted in years—but I hoped to throw a dinner party that she would attend and critique. Quinn called me “very brave,” told me she would absolutely come, then added, “I always say that to be a Washington hostess, you have to have nerves of steel.” A journalist of illustrious professional achievements and author of the recent novel Silent Retreat, Quinn also has quite the party résumé. In the late ’60s, she began her career as the social secretary for the Algerian ambassador, a much-sought bachelor known for his smashing embassy fetes. Then she covered parties for the Style section at the Washington Post. Once she coupled with the paper’s longtime editor, Ben Bradlee, they became hosts of much renown. In their Georgetown mansion, Quinn has entertained senators and billionaires and movie stars and vice presidents. She’s had sit-down dinners for 60 people. And at 84, she’s still hosting. Last winter, she had seven parties in seven weeks. To prepare for my dinner, I read Quinn’s 1998 book, The Party: A Guide to Adventurous Entertaining. She writes that a party should be held “someplace that’s too small,” so that people are pressed together and the event seems “oversubscribed.” The food should be good but not so good that it distracts from the socializing, and as long as there’s “plenty of booze on hand,” it can’t be “a total bomb.” Bad lighting, however, “can literally ruin a party.” Quinn prefers soft pink halogen bulbs, because they lend faces a “postcoital flush.” Also, she wants you to buy the store out of candles: “Your house should look like high mass on Christmas Eve or Barbra Streisand’s bathtub in A Star Is Born.” As for the table, it’s best if it’s round or square. That way, everyone faces each other and it’s easier to converse as a group. And while the tablescape should be lovely (candles, flowers, cloths), why “make cranberry wreaths until your hands bleed” when it’ll look just as nice without? For maximal “sexual energy,” Quinn insists that the seating must alternate genders, with romantic partners placed apart. It’s dated, for sure. But as one friend put it, “We live in bisexual times, so you can have a bisexual seating chart. Putting two hot people next to each other is always going to do a lot—I don’t think she’s wrong.” Quinn feels strongly that the point of a party is fun. Yes, she believes that every table should have “at least one live flower”—its height not more than nine and three-quarters of an inch—but she’s not, in the end, all that fussy. To her, a good party is not about having a perfect table or the most elegant decor. It can be friends sitting on the floor eating takeout. Food can be served on fine china or paper plates. As long as people are laughing and carousing and enjoying one another’s company, the rest is mostly a wash. In fact, Quinn believes perfection is bad. In advance of my party, she gave me some lovely advice: that “any mistakes you make will be a gift to your guests,” because messing up relaxes people, makes the whole thing feel more human and down-to-earth, which only enhances the mood. I felt totally capable of following Quinn’s advice, until I reached page 167 of her book. There, she writes that the primary entertainment at a party is conversation, and conversation “is the responsibility of the host.” Quinn advises steering dinner guests through five or six topics that “everyone might be interested in,” a mix of high and low: celebrity gossip, the decline of democracy, dysfunctional families, conflict abroad. (“When all else fails,” she instructs, “talk about sex.”) I knew immediately that I’d encountered a problem. I do not enjoy attention. I blanch at anything resembling a “leadership role.” So I blocked out that aspect of hosting and simply hoped for the best. It was a surreal thing to see Sally Quinn in my living room on a Thursday night in October, wearing white, sitting on one of the stained, mismatched chairs I’d bought secondhand the week before. She told stories of the Nixon years and Jackie Kennedy’s life in Georgetown, then chatted about celebrity facelifts while sipping seltzer from a hexagonal glass. My friends—crowded into my apartment, smashed together in chairs, on the floor, on the couch—seemed awed. We’re mostly in our thirties. Quinn was an emissary from an era and stratum of Washington that we’d never encountered firsthand. To attempt to seat 11, I’d first pushed together a table and a desk, but that was insufficiently large, so I borrowed an additional table and threw two matching cloths over the whole stitched-together mess. Then I cooked for days. A friend brought flowers and lit an aggressive number of candles. By party time, the room looked reasonably nice. There wasn’t enough light, the dishes didn’t match, half the chairs were desperately uncomfortable, and our legs barely fit under the table—but all of that was actually fine. The struggle, as I feared, was social. My friends and I are quite capable one-on-one, or even in a smallish group of six or eight. But 11 felt intimidating and unwieldy. There’s a barrier to talking about yourself in front of that many people, a sense that to ask for everyone’s attention, you’d better offer up something good. It felt safer to hang back—to let others talk—and that is, in general, what we did. Quinn advises preparing topics: celebrity gossip, dysfunctional families, the decline of democracy. “When all else fails, talk about sex.” Quinn is far too polite to say so, but she essentially had to host my dinner party herself. At her own parties, she explained, she’ll rap on her glass and summon the crew for “GenCon.” That’s “general conversation”—the thing she describes in her book where the host leads the table in discussion. I watched her do it, fish around for topics that might engage us. And once she began steering, the dynamic changed. People started to talk. GenCon yielded intriguing results, some things about my friends I hadn’t known. “Where do you think this country will be in five years?” led one friend to describe his family’s experience of the Iranian revolution. Asked about spirituality, another talked about drifting from his childhood megachurch. Prompted to recall the “worst dinner party you’ve ever hosted or attended,” a friend who was once married to a Marine told us that years ago, a bunch of officers’ wives came to her house at Camp Lejeune, and one of them got too drunk. She holed up in the bathroom, and my friend assumed she was sick. But once everyone left, she realized that her guest had looted her toiletries: her makeup, her toothpaste, her deodorant, even her soap. None of it was ever returned. After a few hours, my party broke up. I got a lot of appreciative texts. My friends liked the food, the company, the novelty, and they especially liked hanging with Quinn. “This was my first capital-W Washington, DC, dinner party,” one said. Nonetheless, I fixated on my failures—particularly, our struggle with GenCon, which I discussed with various guests. They thought that the issue might be generational, that big dinner parties are a status symbol inaccessible to many people our age, a cohort with much less wealth than generations past. We aren’t used to being at a table of 11, to speaking with that many people at once. Who has a big-enough apartment for that, anyway? Who can afford to serve that much food? Quinn is far too polite to say so, but she essentially had to host my dinner party herself. Once she began steering, the dynamic changed. But when I debriefed with Quinn, she did not seem swayed. Eleven guests is no different than five, she said, then pivoted to waxing philosophical. She appreciated my dinner party because “it just makes such a difference to be able to be together and talk and feel like we’re not alone.” Yes, the point of a party is fun, but the purpose is broader; Quinn believes there’s civic value to assembling friends, diverting them from their difficulties, and providing a forum to collectively make sense of these confusing and frightening times. And besides, parties have a salubrious virality, in which attending one incurs obligations of reciprocity, which means that a single event might then spawn a swarm. I did not throw a phenomenal dinner party. I threw a fine one, but that was enough. My friends had fun. We’re all still discussing it. And it’s inspired a few others to host. Recently, an invitation arrived in my inbox: a dinner party for raclette season, hosted by a new-ish friend whose home I’ve never seen. He was at the Quinn party and seemed to have learned from my experience. On the email thread, he sent a menu of GenCon topics—aliens, the demolition of the East Wing—just so that everyone could prepare. This article appears in the December 2025 issue of Washingtonian.The post I Invited Sally Quinn to Judge My Dinner Party first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less