If You Need Booze To Have Fun

[talon]

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/12/03/2010-12-03_booze_shot_down_at_health_dept_bash.html

If you need booze to have fun, then I think you are a very boring person.

The best parties and the most interesting people I know are fun and interesting and exciting - and booze-free.

It's not that booze wasn't there, it's that we often didn't think about it, we were so busy having fun.

The best parties I've hosted were booze-free because we were too poor to buy booze, but we still had scads of fun - talking, playing games, dancing, eating food (cheap food, often scrounged from the wilds or the garden or both), swimming (at the lakes), listening to music, watching news events (shuttle launches, the moon walk), balloons, confetti, and lots of hugs going around.

The best weddings and rites-of-passage parties I've been to were virtually booze-free (some had a cash bar, and a few people got stupidly drunk, but most imbibed lightly), and the dancing was fun, the conversation scintillating (hard to be coherent when you're helplessly giggling at a flickering shadow), and the people delightfully engaging.

Some of the worst parties I've been to were boozy affairs where people got stupid drunk and thought they were funny when they were just dull and boring and smelly.

I prefer parties where booze, when it's serve, is served as an enhancement not as the focus of the event.

And I think government agencies ought not to be spending tax dollars on boozy parties anyway. Parties, sure - the employees deserve that break and mark of appreciation for a good job done well. Appreciation doesn't need to come with drunkenness, though, and if government employees want to get snockered, they can do it on their own dollar (I know, I know - their paychecks come from my taxes, but the difference is they earned the right to spend that portion they receive as pay, so if they want to booze it up with their money on their non-work hours, let 'em).

Private parties can be boozy if that's what the host and participants want.

I just like parties with moderate amounts of booze so people retain their faculties to have fun.

I'm kind of down on the diet sodas bought with tax dollars, too. That stuff is vile.

I don't quite agree that booze is unhealthy and I kind of dislike that as their reason for not serving it. I do agree with the "drain on the budget" philosophy, though. Booze should not be a standard budget item for a government agency.

I realize there are exceptions - state dinners served to foreign dignitaries, or high dollar fund-raisers for supporting and preserving historical sites, for instance, but those are not boozy parties.