I crashed a dinner party on New Year’s. Pretty impressive, huh? It wasn’t on purpose and I did apologize as I sat on the couch nibbling on the left-overs while watching six 20-somethings eat and make polite conversation while they pretended to either be from the movie Barcelona or “Sex and the City”.

It happened like this.

Our friend was here from out of town and our mutual friends came over to drink some with us. Two beers turned into three, and three beers turned into four, and suddenly one of our friends felt sorry for us invited us to her friend’s dinner party. We protested, but not really that much, imagining that a dinner party was supposed to be casual, which by very definition it is not.

We drove over to the party, knocked on the door, and a very frazzled and very pretty young hostess greeted us with a hidden “WTF is happening?” in her eyes. It was pretty apparent that we were not the honored guests at the party and were in fact, not invited to this very private and very formal little dinner party at all.

The three of us walked to the couch and hunkered down with our Session beer. The friends who invited us gave us the food that was intended for them, or at least that I what I came to believe later. I tried not to watch them eat, but had the strange feeling that I was watching the imitation of a dinner party because the reality that of my situation had not quite hit me yet, more than likely because of the beer I drank before I got there.

After what seemed like an immeasurable amount of time, the eating portion of the dinner party wound down and the guys came over to say hello while the women cleaned up the kitchen. Again, I was faced with a dilemma. Should I stay and try to make chit-chat with the guys or should I help clear the table for a meal I didn’t eat?

I chose neither option and instead made a move for the bathroom where I compared myself rather unfavorably to the young fashionable women in the kitchen. I then introduced myself, but was too stupid and too embarrassed to really apologize for crashing the party in the first. Abruptly, the hostess announced that she was off to dance in twenty minutes and that we were all invited to come if we wanted to, which I thought was overly generous given the circumstances.

What should I have done? Should we have immediately left? (Keep in mind that we had no car, no place to go, and it was New Year’s, which is not the best time to get a taxi.) Should we have asked for a bus schedule and been on our merry little way?