You all remember those few stand out parties, whether you injured yourself or hooked up with your flatmate, it was memorable and that was what made it good. Seeing as we are currently in that beautiful beginning period in our flats we will soon embark, if we haven’t already, upon the institution that is flat warming. This all-important first party can make or break the social reputation of you and your flat. It can potentially set the standard for parties to come. From my vast experience of good old outrageous parties I have been able to piece together some key ingredients to having a good party.
A theme is always a winner, though not always essential. It is a good way of picking out the randoms, which comes in handy later in this list. One of my favorite themes from past parties was “Drink your height night,” inspired by the taller of my friends. This is the more risky/messy of the party themes for obvious reasons. For the less experienced party thrower I recommend some kind of mundane dress up theme. Pirates perhaps, or good verses evil for the more formulaic event.
A scandal is absolutely essential. Usually if you get all the rest of the party ingredients right then the scandals will arise of their own accord, but on the occasion that they don’t this is where you come in. It’s nice and easy to take matters into your own hands and create your very own scandal. I recommend from experience hooking up with a flatmate in front of his ex girlfriend. (It just goes down a treat) Or hooking up with someone of the same sex, and who is preferably homophobic. This way you create a stir and broaden this person’s horizons all in one hit.
Ensure that you have invited a sufficient amount of: your more hyperactive, funny, drunken type friends; your quiet yet surprisingly frisky when drunk friends and of course your geeky friends who are inclined go wild when alcohol’s involved and mummy’s not.
As for Randoms… Randoms are a fundamental ingredient at any good party. But the defining point of a really good party is just how random your randoms are. One fine party we were able to attract the best possible randoms, one of whom had an outrageous accent and used to live in our flat the year before us. Not only did they show up hideously drunk and make a good entrance, one proceeded to make it her mission to crack into the boy who was now living in her room. What a find! You won’t always be this lucky with your randoms though, quite often you will find they are simply the extremely stoned, drunk or a bit of both passers by who will quietly integrate themselves with no fracas at all, damn them. This is where having a theme comes in handy – a dress up theme in particular. Once you’ve got your randoms ostracized and uncomfortable they are yours to laugh at and do with as you will.
Sometimes it is necessary to engineer the arrival of these randoms, though beware: never tell your flatmates about your efforts in case these randoms turn out to be excessively random. I once engineered the arrival of randoms by writing an invitation on one of their bank statements and sticking it to their door. I felt it was more personal being able to address my randoms by at least their last names.
If your generally anal retentive flatmate is going to be around then I recommend choosing wisely who you invite for maximum entertainment. If you happen to be aware of a friend that drinks red wine on a regular basis then this type of person is well worth inviting. It is inevitable that it will get spilt and equally inevitable that this will turn your obsessive compulsive flatmate’s world into a mess on so many levels. This brings me to the next point.
It is very important to achieve or at least appear to achieve the perfect level of drunkenness in order to assume no responsibility for any of these events that you may or may not have set up yourself. And the other reason for assuming this drunken state is so you can fake a hangover the next morning in order to dodge the big clean up.
It always makes for a good story if someone hurts themselves, and to be fair the good stories are the tell tale sign of a good party. Setting this up doesn’t necessarily mean that you have willfully harm or maim one of your guests, just pick one of your adventurous outdoorsy type friends and encourage them to climb up and or jump off something. The alcohol will do the rest of the work for you.
The most appropriate drink for you to pull off your best party ever is Tequila and red bull. After this you won’t be able to sleep or account for what you’ve been doing for the next 2 days but keep in mind one must make sacrifices to reach this level of immortality.
For the perfect end to the party you will need an extra virile Italian man, who is prone to bed hopping and has a special talent for spooning. This just adds that surprise factor to the enjoyment of waking up to a hangover in the morning.
It seems now you all have no excuses, go forth using my recipe for success and have cuntastic parties of your own.