Editor’s Note: A longtime journalist, Margo Howard went into the family business (her mother was the fabled Ann Landers) in the 1990s as Dear Prudence. Her broad experience and understanding of human nature provide answers for the troubled — and entertainment for everyone else. Margo’s advice column, Dear Margo, appears twice a week — on Thursdays and Fridays — on wowOwow.com.

It would not be too strong a statement to say that I am the anti-Martha. I have no desire to make place cards from pinecones or sprinkle edible gold on gingerbread people. What in the world is wrong with her that she needs to make everything? And where does she get all that time, anyway? To be perfectly candid, I am loathe to entertain – the reason being there is just no end of things that can go wrong. “Party on” was never my motto. Au contraire, entertaining for me is like Outward Bound. Dinner guests make me exceedingly nervous. OK, they terrify me. I have, in fact, been so rattled on the few occasions when I’ve said come onna my house that I have forgotten people’s names.

I also feel incapable of having the green beans ready at the same time as the roast, and I don’t know how to figure out how many heads of lettuce it takes to make salad for ten. And then there’s the problem of menu planning. I have no nutritional information, having grown up thinking a balanced diet was a cookie in each hand. My confidence level as a hostess hovers around zero. The only thing I’ve ever felt comfortable with is setting the table … maybe because it has a pristine, festive air, and no food is involved. Not to put too fine a point on it, you’ll never find me in the Homemade Bread wing of the Betty Ford Clinic.

I have long imagined that every woman but me knew how to put together a company dinner with one hand tied behind her back while playing chess and mapping a treasure hunt. This mistaken notion was blessedly shot down when a girlfriend e-mailed me a
hostess horror story. (She’d let her granddaughter “turn on” the oven and the kid turned it to “clean,” thereby locking in and atomizing the hens therein.) It was with a feeling of sisterhood rather than glee that I was hearing about this. Dear Goddess, it wasn’t just me!

I’m sure you are way more accomplished than I, and I salute you. Let’s put it this way: if I were to plan a July 4th party, I would have to begin now. And of course I would see to it that all the food was meant to be served was cold.