LIFE BY LOUIS: A party like no other

My nightmare was not over yet. He pulled me up to dance with him. ILLUSTRATION| IGAH

What you need to know:

  • The party was kicking. The new generation would say that the party was lit, but I reserve that vocabulary for a rainy day.
  • The girls were resplendent in full colour themes for the party.

Blessed are the humble, for they shall be exalted. I mused on this verse from the Holy Book as I selected a sitting area reserved for old men and nursing mothers.

I was attending a midweek party, and I suddenly realised that I have not been meeting the demands of the 21st century.

First, I totally missed the dress code. We were supposed to be in black tuxedos and bow ties.

But I was not even surprised, because my wardrobe has never hosted a black tuxedo, or any tuxedo for that matter.

I would have wished to be in a bow tie, but when I asked my personal dresser Man Kamaa if he could get me one from the big open air exhibition, he drew a blank look and informed me that those items have since become extinct.

I therefore ended up attending the party in my normal casual wear, at the high risk of being turned away at the gate.  

‘KICKING’ PARTY

The party was kicking. The new generation would say that the party was lit, but I reserve that vocabulary for a rainy day.

The girls were resplendent in full colour themes for the party.

Either they have extra sources of money or their commitment to parties supersedes anything else, but how else would you explain the fact that they can afford a new dress for every wedding, dowry ceremony, office party and bridal shower?

I went and sat next to a docile-looking gentleman. We engaged in polite small talk about the Kenyan politics and the impending rains.

The drinks were flowing freely because this was a party for adults and not just a tea-tasting party.

I was on a drinking sabbatical so I was just toying around with a single malted beverage so as to maintain my mind and body into the party atmosphere.

My friend’s table, on the other hand, resembled the warehouse of a fast- moving consumer goods specialising in adult beverages.

As a way of giving back to the community and being my brother’s keeper, I kept him company and prevented him from swallowing a bottle top going by the way he was throttling.

I also keep rescuing him from a preying waitress who was applying a strange formula for computing his bill similar to the algorithm that is used to count votes in a tallying centre during disputed elections.

 

A boy band on stage was playing some modern day hits. I could only identify one song to which I nodded vigorously and intoned the chorus loudly while facing the next table that had girls in full party colour theme. I know I struck the sight of an old man who had just stumbled on a party on his way from the cattle dip annual general meeting.

Then it happened. My erstwhile reserved table mate rose up to dance.

Although the songs beats followed a simple harmonic motion, he danced in a positively skewed style with a 90-degree displacement. He reverberated along the Z axis, creating a perfect semblance of an engineering masterpiece in robotics. I could see that soon he was going to step on someone’s toes at the dance floor and cause a severe injury.

My nightmare was not over yet.

He pulled me up to dance with him. Although dancing with a fellow man is not the biggest crime so long as you maintain a reasonable distance between the two of you, it is not exactly my favourite thing.  

He was however decent enough to ask for the dance, because I would have been more offended if he had just pulled me away from the seat without any form of proposition.

I have never experienced this kind of proposition before and I was not sure how to respond to his advances, and any minute I expected him to go down on one knee and propose to me.

I was quiet and pensive throughout the dance. I told him that he has smooth dance moves, just to let him know that I had not passed out.

As heaven's reward to me for helping old women cross roads, the song came to an end. He thanked me for the dance, another first for me.

To avoid a repeat of the uneasy scene, I changed tables and avoided him like the plague for the rest of the night.

***

Do you have feedback about this article? Please email [email protected].