7/30/2023 0 Comments When does party animals come outI found a spot out of the crush, where I could watch the dancers and stash my bottle of Springfield behind the espresso machine. Jen joined the action straightaway, she’s quite happy to dance on her own, while I slunk along the patio, dropped the presents we’d been urged not to bring on the designated table, and headed for the kitchen. The message was clear: if you don’t feel like dancing, turn around now. There was Snuffy D (or G) behind the decks, haloed in light like a priest at the altar. The music was pumping when we walked up the drive and the dance floor was already full. The transgenerational jol arranged by the Gilberts made nonsense of my theory. As the night wears on, the keen dancers turn up the volume and a few partners are pulled away from their conversations, but the action might fizzle out in half an hour if the talkers hold their ground. The hosts try their luck anyway, they move the chairs out of the TV room and rig up some speakers, they might even put a red bulb in the fitting. Then you’re pushing 50, or God forbid pulling it, and your dancing shoes start to pinch. Some want to talk or eat, the drinkers want to drink, the young parents want to get home early (the babysitter has already called), but you can still rely on the singles to dance, the ones who think they might get lucky if enough bodies bump together, and the new mothers who’ve got themselves back in shape and want to show it. Call it natural exuberance, an excess of hormones and energy, the mating ritual. My general theory of party dynamics goes like this: everyone wants to dance when they’re young. You need actual friends to fill a space this size. There’s a huge glass-walled lounge and dining room, with a showy kitchen at one end and a bar at the other, and it all opens onto the patio and pool. The Gilberts live in a house with a magnificent open-plan entertainment area (as the estate agents say). If she can drag me onto the floor, we’ll do the frenetic tickey-draai that we’ve devised over the years. Twenty minutes of David Guetta and then some Talking Heads to keep the old folks moving. You can’t dance to this doef-doef stuff unless you’re 22 and full of Red Bull. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect of the Gilberts, they’re a close family, but it seemed like a bad idea to me. A transgenerational jol, the invitation said. It happened that her daughter, Amber, had just graduated with a BA in psychology and so they decided to celebrate together. When she turned 50 our friend Steph threw a party. He lives in Johannesburg where he is a Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2015, he was awarded Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. His latest novel The Distance is forthcoming from Archipelago in 2020. Ivan Vladislavić’s books include The Folly, The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View, Portrait with Keys, Double Negative and Flashback Hotel. The following is an extract from a story by Ivan Vladislavić featured in the 54th issue of Harvard Review.
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