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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
	Anne Tyler She makes a mean crab cake. Her best ideas come when she’s vacuuming. She reserves Fridays for buying groceries and cleaning the bathroom. An ordinary woman’s life? Not exactly. Anne Tyler, like many of her characters, only appears to be ordinary. One of today’s most extraordinary writing talents, Tyler has won dozens of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. Yet she shuns the spotlight and lives a quiet life in Baltimore, where many of her novels are set. Born in Minnesota in 1941, Tyler spent her early childhood living in rural Quaker communes. By age 11, when she first entered a traditional school, she had never used a telephone and claimed she could strike a match on the soles of her feet. “I hated childhood,” she recalls, “and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books, I made up my own.” At age 19, Tyler graduated from Duke University with a degree in Russian studies. She held various jobs, including working in a library and scrubbing decks on a boat in Maine, but turned to writing full-time in 1967. Back When We Were Grownups is her fifteenth novel.
Beyond the Book Party Time! In Back When We Were Grownups the character Rebecca Davitch throws parties for a living. That was all we needed to know when the time came to go beyond the book and see what the Internet had to offer for our enlightenment. Let the revelry begin. We first decided to see about throwing our own party, so we asked Jeeves, “How do I throw a party?” The results were not disappointing, and we were immediately directed to Party411.com, the perfect starting place for the prospective celebrant. Party411 is presided over by the Party Girl, who told us that she was at our disposal and who immediately began giving us tips on how to do this thing right. First of all, she told us, we needed a theme. A birthday or a graduation or a bat mitzvah is merely a birthday or graduation or bat mitzvah, but Party Girl has over 250 themes to make each event much more memorable. Check out Betty’s Beach Blanket Bingo or Mardi Gras Madness or the Basketball Bar/Bat Mitzvah. (On a personal note, we’re hoping that someone here at the office throws us that Blank Check Appreciation Awards Luncheon.) Of course, once you have a theme—which, by the way, isn’t absolutely essential, just sort of fun if you like that kind of thing—you’ve got to get organized. The Party Girl offers planning guides for everything from the budget to the seating to the decorating to the drink calculating. And there are also offers of personal advice—you can e-mail the P.G. directly—and professional services. All in all, we felt we were in good hands here. There are some basic parties where the theme is pretty clear going in, and some sites devoted solely to those themes, like CasinoParties.com. We had high hopes for Ron’s Toga Party Page, but it turned out that the eponymous Ron apparently had a great toga party once and merely wanted to show us what we had missed; the site didn’t deliver any of the Animal House antics we were looking for, although Ron did offer some advice on how to wrap a toga. The hub sites like Netscape and MSN drilled down quickly to their party tips pages, with resource links plus their own content. (We had to wonder if the cocktails on the MSN sites are the one Bill Gates drinks. Come to think of it, when it comes to parties, Mr. Gates is definitely somebody we wouldn’t mind getting some blank-check appreciation from!) Not surprisingly, considering that Halloween is now one of the most popular holidays in the country, throwing Halloween parties is high on the list of favorites. It seems like only yesterday when trick-or-treating was going out of style and the whole holiday seemed to be on the outs, but now it’s back with a vengeance, and as many neighborhoods are lit up the night before All Saints’ Day as are lit up on Christmas Eve. Connoisseurs of this holiday, with its mixed Druidical/Roman/Christian roots, have an embarrassment of Net riches to choose from, with such sites as halloween.com, halloween-online.com, holidays.net/halloween, halloweenmovies.com (if you haven’t been following, they’re up to number 8 in the series) and, if we could have only one Halloween site to entertain us, let it be Ben & Jerry’s, where, when the haunting is over, one is still left with a serious bowl of New York Super Fudge Chunk. Now that we felt pretty confident that we could throw our own party, we began to wonder about other people’s parties. For instance, why hadn’t Ron invited us to his toga party? Were there any other parties we’ve been missing? Searching the Web for the word “parties” brings up mostly political parties, which weren’t exactly the fun things we were looking for, so on a whim we tried entering “the party of the year” into the Google engine. In a word, Bingo! “Everyone knows the Ranger Party is the party of the year.” Sounded good to us until we found out that the Rangers are Clemson University’s Army ROTC, and the party apparently welcomes new recruits by, to begin with, shaving their heads. RSVP? Non, merci. The biggest party of the year for farmers in Thailand takes place in Chonburi, and the highlight is buffalo racing. Last year about 3000 folks gathered to celebrate the end of the rainy season by racing buffalo in four different-sized categories. Some of these animals weigh more than your family sedan, so this must be quite an event. And what makes for a good racing water buffalo? According to CNN, “Somsak, a former jockey and now a trainer, thinks it’s all about heart: ‘You need a buffalo that likes to run.’ ” Makes sense to us. Closer to home, we discovered the Calle Ocho Street Festival in Little Havana, Miami, held the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent. This 21-year-old dance party gathers a few hundred thousand of your nearest and dearest and essentially makes one great big convivial conga line out of them. Food . . . cigars . . . salsa music . . . We’re going! Mention of the beginning of Lent reminds us of Mardi Gras, and perhaps the best overview of this occasionally over-the-top event is MardiGras.com, which will get you all the information you need and book your hotel and concert tickets. We’ll probably miss this year’s Mile High Mayhem, however. It’s not that we have anything against Denver, but it looks to us as if owning a motorcycle will be, if not a requirement, at least a longing, and we prefer our vehicles to have wheels in all four corners—which, for that matter, is why we would prefer to be spectators rather than participants at water buffalo races. There are certain things you just can’t get us on. Which brings us to the annual Jump & Freeze in Westendorf, Germany, where “participants will jump with skis, boards, or with crazy self-constructed vehicles, wearing fancy dress, into a huge pool of ice-cold water.” Thousands of spectators show up, making it quite the event of the winter. Maybe it’s not so bad that nobody ever invites us to these things. Another one we weren’t invited to, and this time we really think we might have liked to go, was a four-day cruise through the Alaskan fjords hosted by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Those MSN cocktails probably came in handy when he served his invited guests, who included George Lucas, Robin Williams, Michael Jordan, James Cameron, Penny Marshall, Dan Akroyd, and Candice Bergen, jam sessions including Peter Gabriel, Lou Rawls, Mick Jagger, and Debbie Reynolds. (Although come to think of it, what songs do Mick and Debbie have in common that they could perform together? That’s a tough one.) In all of our searching for the party of the year, because the Internet doesn’t necessarily clean out its old news too often, the most frequent result we found was for parties celebrating the millennium. Some people thought the world was going to end that night: Remember the Y2K bug? Others argued interminably that the millennium would begin on 1/1/01, and not 1/1/00; they were right, but they were also insufferable. In this Web-search detritus of galas past, we saw more parties we had missed than we would ever attend, but to be honest, we didn’t feel that we had missed all that much. When all is said and done, probably the biggest party in America (by which we mean formal party, as compared to the biggest informal party celebrated in America, the Fourth of July) is the presidential inauguration. And we mean formal. Parties are held all over Washington, D.C., because no one venue is large enough, and the newly inaugurated President drops in on one after the other so that no one is slighted. (The Vice President does likewise.) First Ladies have been known to change their gowns between venues, providing a measure of democracy vis-à-vis clothing designers. The bad news is, of course, the 2001 inauguration is over (there were eight balls), and we missed it. So did Al Gore. At least we can get together with Al and pore over the pictures of everyone else enjoying themselves. The good news is, we can celebrate the party’s memory with a little inauguration memorabilia from PoliticalGifts.com. Republicans may wish to purchase the Bush/Cheney inaugural button. Democrats might prefer one of the other choices, such as the LET’S FLIP A COIN button. Al, we’re pretty sure, will be going for the AL GORE IS MY PRESIDENT magnet. —Jim Menick

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