Tomorrow night, Joanna and I are hosting our first real, grown-up dinner party. We’ve joined the community gourmet club, which means that in just over thirty hours our house will be overrun by eighteen of our neighbors, each of them bringing his or her contribution to the predetermined five-course meal. Our only responsibility is to prepare enough seats, enough plates, enough water glasses and wine glasses and cocktail glasses, enough napkins and silver and ice and soda water and lemons and limes. And music.
We have a five-disc changer in our living room, where we expect most of our neighbors to congregate during the cocktail hour. Because I don’t have the time to program a mix of music, I’m just going to drop five CDs in the player and hit “Random.” Keeping in mind that, in our early-30s, Joanna and I will be twenty to thirty years younger than anyone else in the room, what music would you play? Here’s my first draft:
- Blow-Up: The Original Soundtrack by Herbie Hancock
- Our Man in Paris by Dexter Gordon
- The Heart of Saturday Night by Tom Waits
- Anything Goes by the Brad Mehldau Trio
- Lady Soul by Aretha Franklin