Artful Dodging

Reader, we did it: we hosted the Artful Dining event last evening. This was a fundraiser for the Lancaster Museum of Art. A board member had asked us to be a host last spring. Each host chooses the artists, theme, and date of their event, and then invitations are sent out to the museum's list and hosts' own invitees. Guests pay a fee that goes straight to the museum, and hosts donate all the food and drink. We decided to do it as part of our initiative to get more involved with city institutions beyond the college and broaden our circle. But I'd been nervous about it for months, feeling awkward about inviting our friends to our home for a fee and worried first that too many strangers would come expecting a lavish spread and then that not enough people would come.

The best part of the whole thing was what you see above: the collaboration with our artist friends and the way their work looked installed in our house-- beautiful. All the sculptures are white and the drawings are black ink on white paper, which looked great against our colored walls.

But I'm annoyed and disappointed by the whole event. I'm embarrassed that we had a small number of people who signed up, and then several of them didn't wind up attending, including the museum director. Maybe we picked the wrong weekend, or time of day? Or we priced it too high, or didn't write a very inviting description? But we had never done this before and didn't get much guidance from the museum staff. I'm annoyed at the museum for asking us to take this on and then leaving us to our own devices. It ended up being a lot of effort, for us and for our artists (not to mention my mom), for pretty few attendees.

But I'm most annoyed at myself. Why did I exert so much mental effort on this paltry party? I'm quite used to giving parties. With this one, I worried about the guests, who they'd be, what they'd expect, what they'd think of us. When we went to the organizational meeting last spring, we sat in a fancy living room in someone's fancy house and looked around, realizing we were the youngest, dumbest (least-experienced), poorest people in the room. Somehow I thought all those people and their ilk would be coming to my house. But of course they didn't; they're probably going to each others' events. A few of our acquaintances came, but they tended to be the group among whom we are the oldest, stodgiest, least-tattooed, and, again, poorest. (There is a hipster-mama circle in town that I don't quite belong to. They tend to be married to rock-n-roll show designers and producers. No joke! There's a firm here that does all the biggest rock tours. So these people are both rich AND cool.) So I felt wrong no matter which direction I looked.

But really, why should I care? I'm annoyed that I let all this get to me, and consume my and my family's energy at a time when we really don't have that much left over. Reader, all I can say in summary is that not all new initiatives work out as you'd hoped. Sometimes doing things that are outside your comfort zone results not in broadening the comfort zone but rather in reaffirming its boundaries. It was good that we tried it. And now I'd like someone to invite ME to something for a change, okay?