A few weekends ago, I was invited to something called a “running dinner” for my good friend Monika’s 50th birthday. Running dinners were all the rage in the early aughts here in Europe, and Monika’s been carrying the dinner candelabra ever since. I can imagine that even when she turns 80, it’ll probably be a running dinner with all her septuagenarian and octogenarian friends motating around town in their wheelchairs and walkers.
Running dinners are a strange hybrid of the games we thought we’d relegated to our childhood and young adult years: Imagine a scavenger hunt crossbred with a group blind date and then with musical chairs spliced in. The purpose? Perhaps an attempt to recapture that “zany-spontaneity-of-our-youth-albeit-with-more-expensive-wine-and-impressing-strangers-with-our-mad-creative-grownup-gourmet-cooking-skills”?
We all had to RSVP months in advance of the actual running-dinner birthday party to allow Monika ample time to compile our individual, running-dinner dance cards. Her mission? To organize 75 party guests into traveling “running pairs” – sets of two people who don’t know each other but who will be spending most of the evening together eating and drinking at “running dinner stations” dispersed from one end of town to the other. Remember those three-legged races where you were tied – in full preteen mortification – to some other random nine-year-old at summer camp and then the two of you had to perform the miracle of instantaneous mind-meld and motor-skill coordination if you wanted to tripod-hop your way to the finish line? Yeah…
I got assigned to a dude named Juergen – a friend from another part of Monika’s life whom I had never met who lived in Berlin and would be traveling in from out of town for the occasion. I discovered just a week in advance of the party that Monika had volunteered me together with Juergen to host two other running pairs at my apartment for the starter course and aperitivos/drinks. With my microscopic European apartment and kitchen and still working on my hostess skills so that I can be reincarnated as Martha Stewart in my next lifetime, the prep required to wine and dine six people was the same as for 20. Based on a few emails and one short call ahead of the party to coordinate what we’d be doing for our course, I already had a bad feeling about Juergen – especially when he got miffy when I told him I needed him at my place two hours prior to the other guests arriving, so I wasn’t stuck doing 95 percent of the work myself.
[Read more…]