Party Time!

Parties: An opportunity to stand around in uncomfortable shoes among strangers, wondering what you’re going to talk about and drinking too much to get over the awkwardness.

The Invitation: A fun-sounding callout to a Monty Python-themed birthday party, in costume. Costumes are entertaining to make, and give you something to talk about, and maybe aren’t as uncomfortable as fancy shoes with high heels. We’ll meet a whole lot of new people, too! Great idea when you’ve just moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Thinking: What can we go as? Can we get coconut shells to be the horses from the Holy Grail? Sackcloth? A rabbit?

Or should we try Life of Brian – But I wasn’t going near the full-frontal nude “We Are All Individuals” scene. Maybe we could both bring a cross to bear?

But wouldn’t actual lumber, or even cardboard imitations, be awkward in someone else’s student apartment? We definitely don’t have sackcloth/hessian or any lumber, or a rabbit, lying around in our student apartment.

More thinking: Perhaps I can be the fat guy who explodes in the Meaning of Life? Then Craig can be an accompanying waiter with a wafer saying “Just one more little waferrr, monsieur?”.

An exploding costume might not be popular, though, in someone else’s apartment.

For a summer barbecue, maybe.

Sudden realisation: Craig has lots of Australian-dust-impregnated khaki bush gear from travelling in the desert! Better than sackcloth/hessian! We can be Bruce and Bruce, Professors from the University of Woolamaloo, a running gag in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Cheapest costume ever, perfect for a student budget!

Result: We dag ourselves up thoroughly in khaki shorts and shirts with lots of safari-looking pockets, bush hats, long white socks and boots. This will be so funny, being able to both introduce ourselves as Bruce! Everyone will laugh! Woohoo!

Beginning of Uncertainty: Short sleeves in a Michigan midwinter. Back for the outdoor puffy coats for tramping through the snow and clomping up the stairs to the party apartment.

Arrival: Slight blankness on the face of our host as she greets us. She’s not in any costume I can recognize. Umm. Neither is anyone else. We take off our puffy jackets and expose our goose-pimpled khaki-clad arms to a group of people we’ve mostly never seen before. We pour drinks and nibble on very un-Pythonesque crackers (not wafers). People edge away from us.

Worse: Each time we explain that “We’re Bruce and Bruce from the University of Woolamaloo” guests continue to look blank and seem to think that’s actually who we are. And that this is how we normally dress. Apparently the “All Australian Philosophers are called Bruce” joke is only amusing to Australians, and Americans have never noticed it.

And Worse: We don’t find out anything about anyone else as they’re too busy staring at us. There are also too many pauses in the conversation allowing time to for me to think “Why didn’t we wear bedsheets and come as philosophers playing soccer?”

At least people would have recognized it as a costume, probably, even if our sheets are bright blue, and one of us would have to use the fitted one. And we don’t have a soccer ball. Or, like all the other guests, and the host, we could have NOT COME IN COSTUME AT ALL.

Ultimate Awkwardness: I laugh with someone who’s moderately friendly, about the tendency of Monty Python fans to recite whole chunks of dialogue endlessly. The TV is then turned on the for the evening’s main entertainment which is: watching along with the Monty Python videos, starting with "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", while the whole group chants the lines just moments before they’re said on screen.

Slap On the Side of the Head Needed: How could we have forgotten the American tendency to take enthusiasm to a new level, but just not in the way foreigners like us would expect, such as memorizing statistics about baseball, but not actually playing it. We’d brought our enthusiasm in spades, but got it horribly wrong.

How to Get Out of This Situation: We sidle away after the second video (Life of Brian), leaving the chanters behind for a third film (Meaning of Life), having rolled our eyes at each other frantically.

No one notices as we find our puffy jackets and creep down the stairs. Toes continue to curl with embarrassment for weeks afterwards. Could we have blended in with this group successfully if we hadn’t come looking like Crocodile Dundee wanabees? Maybe. I probably still would have made the comment about people who recite entire Monty Python scripts.

Advice for Young Players: Be very wary of costume party invitations. Don’t let yourself be pulled too far into a rabbit hole before you know that others are going down there with you – and preferably it’s not the Monty Python Killer Rabbit Hole of Death where a whole apartment full of people think you are just weirdos while actually clearly being weirdos themselves.

And remember: You can leave. And if they never speak to you again (which they didn’t), that’s maybe actually a good thing.