The other night I realized that the guy who runs a blog about Syria that I read frequently is actually the very same person I maintained an eight-hour-crush on at a dinner party in London in 1995. He had long, curly red hair then, and knew about the Middle East, which was part of the reason for the crush.

The other reason for the crush was the party itself, which still stands out in my mind as a model for a brilliant night at home. I don’t remember the food, except for the fact that the blowsy British hostess was cheerfully serving us canned Tesco tomato soup, and she got so drunk that she actually fell down in the kitchen while she was doing it. Actually, I suppose I’ve conflated those memories, because what was nice about the dinner was the slow pace–the hostess got up to cook the next course only when we were done with the current one. So I guess she probably fell down while she was fixing dessert? A technicality.

Falling down drunk and canned soup are horrific dinner-party no-nos in the US, and I do try to avoid them myself. But when I feel myself getting a little too uptight about cooking dinner for people, I actively remind myself about this particular British dinner, which was so much more about a bunch of grad students sitting around bullshitting by candlelight and drinking wine until our teeth were deadly gray than it was about the tastiness of the food.

An even earlier formative dinner party came when I was just a sophomore in college, and my not-really-anymore-because-he’d-graduated-boyfriend invited me to NYC to spend the weekend at his friends’ apartment in Brooklyn with him. This was in 1991, before a lot of people had gotten used to saying “Hoyt-Schermerhorn” out loud. I took the train up with another not-yet-graduated friend of the larger crew, and followed her off the subway, down the shady block in Boerum Hill and up the winding staircase in the old brownstone. Dinner was delicious and eaten in a cramped dining room with a happily-reunited crowd packed around a tiny table–as the youngest and most peripheral of the bunch, I felt lucky to be there.

I still make the salad we had that night, with slices of red pepper and dried currants, and it still makes me think I’m adventurous and grown-up. Never mind that the next day was technically a reversion to college–White Castle hamburgers while watching Dune, the movie–we also consoled my not-anymore-boyfriend about his car getting broken into, and that felt edgy and grown-up.

Truth be told, the really formative dinner parties were the ones my parents had, which were exactly the same kind of thing. Candles would melt down into waxy pools on the table, the grown-ups would starting talking extra loud, and I do remember one person falling down, while carrying about twenty plates–not easy to forget. And the food was always special in some way.

But I couldn’t just spring into the world and do exactly what my parents did. Everybody knows that would be totally lame. I had to follow in the footsteps of people just slightly older–and a lot cooler–than me.

And fortunately I had that model, because I guess a lot of people don’t. Or they have their own brief phase of wine drinking and kitchen experimentation, and then it slips away when the primary crew disperses. I’ve been fortunate to have always had friends who got this general concept of fun (duh–that’s why they’re my friends), but I guess that’s not surprising, since I hung out in grad school for a while and then was pretty broke for a long time in New York. Just like it took me until last year to buy a piece of actual firsthand furniture, I still have not shed the habit of saying, “Let’s just stay in for dinner–it’ll be cheaper.” Even though at this point it wouldn’t kill me to pay to eat in a restaurant.

Of course the friend who liked my style and ran with it most has been Tamara, and Sunday Night Dinners are very often an exercise in “Oh well–there’s always wine” but with the best possible results. I don’t think anyone has even been injured in four years!

So, a belated toast to Ariel K., whose idea I think that red-pepper salad was, and to Name-Forgotten Tesco-Heater-Upper. You made me the (sloppy, in a good way) hostess I am today.