I feel trapped at every cocktail party I go to.

Trapped?? Oh aaaarrrgh. SOOO often but never in a permanent context, and I have learned how to avoid most contexts that give me claustrophobia. Except European trains. Twenty-five years ago, my late husband and I were on a train overnight. The bunks were really claustrophobic and the ceiling was about six inches from my nose and I started panicking and spent the rest of the night standing in the corridor.

I am trapped by illness, mine or someone I love’s illness. My creative mind shuts down, my emotions simplify and drown me and I have to fight them as well as do what it takes to deal with the illness. I would be the world’s worst professional nurse, but when my husband was ill for a very long period, I was a good administrative nurse without thinking. There was no choice. His illness was life. Later it was a difficult adjustment to become me, Mary, again.

I used to cover official parties in Washington. Enough said?

Listen, kiddos, I’ve spent my grown-up life trapped at charity dinner parties and other “must attend” events, being nice, talking first on the right, then on the left to people I will probably never see again — and also, there is always the person who asks me, “Do you know any gossip?” I have led a social life of such qualified entrapment that I probably could have busted out of that German POW camp with Steve McQueen if only I’d been there. I am now an expert at wiggling out, at interrupting conversations with big bores by saying, “Oh, say, I have to get a drink!” or “I have to call my mother” or something like that.

But by attending these ongoing social events I have managed in return to raise millions of dollars for charity and, occasionally, even to get a good story I can actually write down and use in my column.

There is no escape from a certain amount of boring entrapment in the life I have chosen.

Oh yes, I forgot. Then there is my early first marriage. I had hardly said “I do” and “I will” when I realized I didn’t want to be married, didn’t want to “belong” to another person, and had made a huge mistake in personal judgment that was going to hurt a lot of people.

Like everybody else, I’ve felt completely trapped at dinner parties, especially at ones in New York where the sharing of VERY SERIOUS THOUGHTS seems the order of the day — or night, as it were. Once I was at a dinner where everyone was made to go around the table and speak to a variety of current events and it came time for a man who had recently made a trip to the Gaza Strip to speak. (This same man, who shall remain nameless, had previously been my dinner partner at another party and regaled me with jokes he read from cards taken out of his wallet.) Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts on the Gaza Strip myself, all wildly different from this guy, who is an ardent supporter of Israel. But even if I had wanted to respond to him, I couldn’t have. He droned on and on until I got busy devising ways that I might surreptitiously crawl under the table. The wine had stopped in deference to the great import of what he was saying — no waiter was allowed to cross into the lofty oratory zone — and I was desperate. Finally, there was a timid knock on the dining room door — a still-very-much-with-it-and-adorable Brooke Astor was also at the table and her minder had standing orders to come and fetch her at 10 PM no matter what. This did not stop the droning, alas. But it did make me wish more than anything in the world I had a minder — and I have never been more jealous of anyone in my life than the happily departing Brooke.

Writing this reminds me of a dinner party a few weeks ago at my mother’s house on the Gulf Coast of Florida where I was the nominal host (but let me hasten to say that I had little to do with the fun of the party). The museum whose board I chair in New Orleans, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, has a “satellite” in a nearby community called Watercolor, and my great friend William Dunlap, the artist and the most unreconstructed liberal I know (or did know, until unreconstructed libs became the order of the day and now Bill has plenty of competition), had just had an opening. His old college buddy, who is way to the right, was there, along with some devoted arts supporters, a restaurateur/columnist/cookbook author, an architect and assorted other friends. The right-winger made one of the arts supporters (a great woman on the board of the Seaside Institute) so mad that at one point she stood up and looked like she might be about to hit him. Several of us pelted Dunlap with napkins after he said Al Gore was a terrible candidate but would have made a great president. We drank a lot of wine — which never quit flowing — and ate grilled Roman steaks and this dish I made up with warm field peas and enormous Gulf shrimp in a sherry wine vinaigrette. I can’t remember what we had for dessert, but afterward we took the wine out on the porch where we sat in the wicker chairs and kept talking and laughing and listening to too-loud music until late into the night.
Apparently it was so memorable that the restaurateur/columnist wrote about it. To me it was not all that notable, just the norm — or at least what should be the norm. People should get in good old-fashioned arguments rather than sycophantically – raptly – listen to each other orate. They should fuss at each other, charm each other (effortlessly, of course) and flirt, a lot, for God’s sake, all in good fun, and make their partners laugh without the benefit of wallet-sized prompters. I am firmly against the choreography of conversation — or the “anchoring” of parties, as one long-suffering friend puts it — by someone who makes like (or indeed happens to be) an anchorman.

I know very few people who aren’t under a lot of stress right now. And I can think of no better remedy than to commune at the end of the day with good food and drink, to kick up your heels (or at least take them off under the table) with people you already love or might really want to get to know. And if napkins get thrown, so much the better. It is a way more desirable alternative to being held hostage during what has come to be known in certain august circles as “table talk.”