I Just Got Invited to My First Depression Party

Times are bad, so let's party on. Last month, Business Week reported:

In New York City, twentysomethings are throwing Depression parties, where the clothes are '30s vintage and the playlists favor Big Band numbers and Dust Bowl ballads. Evite, the online party-invitation service, says such bashes are on the rise nationwide.

Now some friends of my wife have just invited us to a party featuring an FDR imitation and songs like "The Sunny Side of the Street." In addition:

Depression-style refreshments will be served - stone soup, radiator cocktails, and spam (vegetarian and non-vegetarian).  

A true sign of hard times - vegetarian spam. 

Comments

[Herman Goering]

Vegetarian SPAM?

I'm reaching for my Browning....

[Lefiti]

These unbelievers will go to any lengths to trash free markets, the salavation of the entire world. We know that the so-called Great Depression was entirely the fault of FDR and his socialist lackeys. The free market is perfect in every way and needs no help from benighted statists. Let them throw their parties and laugh it up. They will burn in Hell!

[P Brooks]

Wear your top hat and spats.

[Bingo]

Flappers!!! Twenty-three skidoo!

[joe]

"Last month, Business Week reported:

In New York City, twentysomethings..."

See that bit right there? That's when you turn the page.

Were they all wearing their tea shades?

[cunnivore]

Herbert Hoover is rolling in his grave.

[kleinfan92]

fucking hipsters...i mean cosmotarians

[Mike M.]

"Brother, can you spare a few billion? A dime isn't what it used to be."

[R C Dean]

If they'll top off the party by jumping out the window, I'm all for it.

[Jennifer]

In New York City, twentysomethings are throwing Depression parties, where the clothes are '30s vintage

Aaaigh! If I'm already suffering from depression, why the HELL would I want to make it worse by wearing dowdy 1930s fashions?

[Lester Hunt]

A money-wasting party always helps to stimulate the economy, some I'm for it.

[Episiarch]

Wouldn't 80's coke parties be a lot more fun to emulate?

"Now this is the high life; watching apes mangle each other near celebrities."

"In my day we went to coke parties, but the principle's the same."

[Warty]

I can't wait till hipsters start living in ironic shantytowns, and start getting ironically dismembered.

[Warren]

In another six months, they'll be reduced to throwing Rent Parties.

[Jeff P]

Goth kids have been throwing depression parties for years...

[Cool Cal]

So, during the early months of the Great Depression did hip urbanites initially react by throwing the aptly themed "1857 Panic Parties"?

[Colonel_Angus]

Those indie kids and coffee kids are fucking gay.

Saw some tv news shit this morning about how "times r tuff". The human interest example they picked was some yuppie family cutting back on x-mas gifts and skipping their yearly disneyworld vacation.

[Beaker]

Why bother digging up old music and clothing? Just throw a 2008 economic crisis party. They could dress up like federal reserve members and then throw food at each other like at the end of Dr. Strangelove.

[ed]

If they'll top off the party by jumping out the window, I'm all for it.

Win.

Free-marketers here already know it, but by this time next year those stupid twenty-somethings will be kicking themselves in the ass for bailing on the market, and lamenting how they didn't buy all they could at fire-sale prices. Silly rabbits.

[Travis]

Let's have a T-party.

[Gilbert Martin]

"If they'll top off the party by jumping out the window, I'm all for it."

Only if the party isn't on the first floor.

[Kwix]

Jeff P | December 8, 2008, 3:24pm | #
Goth kids have been throwing depression parties for years...

Uberwin!

[The Wine Commonsewer]

and skipping their yearly disneyworld vacation.

As long as the poorest Americans are walking around the malls with nose rings and cell phones you can't rightly say that we're hurting too much.

[JW]

Saw some tv news shit this morning about how "times r tuff". The human interest example they picked was some yuppie family cutting back on x-mas gifts and skipping their yearly disneyworld vacation.

Why, just the other day, I was forced to turn the power on the microwave down to 70% to warm our pre-prepared meals and to add insult to injury, we had to have the organic, fair-trade, whole bean coffee for our french press ground in one of those awful commercial grinders at the store!

[JLM]

Jesus, Spam without the cholesterol is like a day without a sunrise. It just ain't right!

[Lefiti]

New York City is even more chock-full of dumb fucks that even I realized.

[Dave T]

Do they confiscate your gold at the door?

[Cool Cal]

"Do they confiscate your gold at the door?"

Dave T - Winner of the post

[alan]

If Bailey didn't mention that his wife got an invitation for one of these things, I would have assumed Stephen Glass got hired at Business Week, but then again I hate theme parties* (dorkfactories) and parades so I don't know what the post-post Xers are doing these days.

* If I can't show up in a gay leapord print worthy of Tyler Durden and with a fifth of So Co in hand, I'm not interested.

[Colonel_Angus]

"...we had to have the organic, fair-trade, whole bean coffee for our french press ground in one of those awful commercial grinders at the store!"

You know, according to the FDA, the coffee can no longer be considered "organic" after it has passed through the commercial grinder because it may have come in to contact with non-organic coffee.

[John C. Randolph]

Do they confiscate your gold at the door?

Yeah, and near the end of the night they throw your Japanese friends into concentration camps.

-jcr

[JW]

In New York City, twentysomethings are throwing Depression parties, where the clothes are '30s vintage and the playlists favor Big Band numbers and Dust Bowl ballads. Evite...

**Cringe** Can't they just pick up the squawkbox and have Mildred ring up the gang at Klondike 5-4923?

That aside, does this mean that we can go back to wearing blackface at these parties?

[R C Dean]

You know, according to the FDA, the coffee can no longer be considered "organic" after it has passed through the commercial grinder because it may have come in to contact with non-organic coffee.

So, its kind of a homeopathic effect? One non-organic coffee granule in a million means the whole batch is non-organic?

Does it work the other way? If I throw an organic coffee granule into my non-organic coffee, does that make the whole batch organic?

Do the same rules apply to fair trade coffee, too?

[Hazel Meade]

Here in Arizona, my friends threw a "post-Apocalyptic potluck".

You dress as either a survivalist or a character from a post-apocalyptic or dystopian film (i.e. Mad Max). Bring your canned goods, MREs, and/or whatever you can loot from the Trader Joes.

We watched Cherry 2000 and Zardoz. An overlooked gem of the dystopian genre, imo.

[Dave T]

Another fun game you could have at a depression party is where you show up, buy all the food, throw it away, and let everyone at the party go hungry.

We have to keep the price of food up, after all.

[ed]

Or you could toss a grenade. Same effect, intellectually.

[Voton]

Jackasses. What we have now is to the Great Depression as a fart is to Hurricane Katrina. When the real thing happens, it'll be worth it just to see the stupid smirks wiped off their faces.

[Kaiser]

I heard in the Great Depression they through parties and spent extra money just to get some wicked cool refreshments and wear special clothes.....oh wait....

[economist]

Lefiti,
Could you, for once, not sound like a computer programmed to mix words to imitate an idiotic little crap? Or is that what you are? Then again, you wouldn't be able to answer.

[Paleo Pat]

Hell, I'd take Hendrix's song "Manic Depression"
to fill out the mood.

Depression Parties... Oy!

-Pat