Dear Miss Manners:
My husband and I have been invited to dinner at a friend's house who is very "green" conscious. After accepting her invitation, we've been asked to bring our own dinnerware since she is not sufficiently equipped as she has recently moved into the city.
She says that because she is very environment-conscious, she shuns disposable dinnerware. Although I respect and admire her efforts at being "green", I am surprised that guests will be asked to get their own dinnerware when invited to dinner.
I almost want to take my own disposable dinnerware because the idea of carrying my plates, bowls, and glasses to her house, eating in them and cleaning them and bringing them back makes me feel uncomfortable.
One's contribution towards a greener planet is their own personal choice and in this case I feel pressurized into following her ideology of being green. Will it be bad etiquette for me to take disposable plates when the hosts shuns them? Am I making a big deal out of it?
My first thought was to bring disposable, but Miss Manners vetoed it. However, a surprisingly wide assortment of other passive-aggressive responses came to mind. In order from most to least productive, (and without presuming that any of this is consistent with etiquette), they are:
1. Buy her a set of dinnerware big enough to accommodate the party as a housewarming gift.
2. Bring your own and leave it behind, leaving her with all the annoying clean-up work (and saving yourself from having to schlep dirty dishes home).
3. Bring your own, but have them accidentally get broken in transit. You get there, greet everyone, open up the bag they're in, and find shards.
4. Bring your own, but have them accidentally get cracked in transit without your noticing. So you go to pour red wine into a glass, and it leaks out of the glass through the crack that you didn't notice and dribbles all over her rug.
5. Cellphone call at the last minute: you got bumped on the subway and broke your dishes and now won't be able to come.
Me, I'd either get dinnerware as a housewarming gift (at about the Kitchen Stuff Plus price/quality point), or I'd say "I'm terribly sorry, I won't be able to accommodate you" when she asks me to bring my own dinnerware, or, if I was together enough to carry it off, I'd go with "Oh no, I can't possibly impose on your hospitality before you've finished setting up housekeeping. We'll reschedule for sometime after you're settled in, I insist!"
What I can't fathom - as in it doesn't compute at all and I cannot even begin to imagine how a person thought of it - is how the hostess came up with the idea of having a dinner party when she didn't have the equipment. Why doesn't her brain process the number of plates in her cupboard or forks in her drawer (or the number thereof that she can reasonably acquire by the date of the dinner party) as the maximum number of people she can have over for dinner?
2 comments:
Do all the responses have to be passive-aggressive? Would it be possible to say, "Perhaps you should wait to have a dinner party until you have enough plates for everyone. People aren't really comfortable transporting dinnerware." ?
It is kind of unfathomable, absolutely does not compute, as you said. In addition to what you mentioned, if you have a dishwasher, quality disposables can be reused many, many times. We've been using the same disposables for our wmtc party since the first one in 2005. Some break or tear every year, and we toss those, but 90% are still like new.
They don't have to be passive aggressive, these are just all the things I thought of when reading the letter, and passive-aggression seems to be the uniting theme.
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