You're having two couples over for lunch, and then maybe playing a board game...no, forget that, I hate board games, or watching a movie or just talking. It's in the early planning stage that it dawns on you that you only have stuff for four. By stuff I mean placemats, plates, knives forks and spoons, water glasses, coffee cups, and worst of all, wine glasses. Why didn't you think of that when you were furnishing your new home? Maybe it's because there is only the two of you, and you didn't know a soul within 500 miles of your new location and you didn't imagine that you would have friends. So now what?
You've already looked for another four-place silverware setting but can't find one identical or even close to your original purchase. Same goes for the water glasses, dinner plates, and salad dishes. And matching the wine glasses?...forget about it! All your stuff is less that three years old and already the "patterns have been discontinued" and your stuff is obsolete.
You have basically three options; you can uninvite one of the couples (but that would be awkward), you can hurriedly purchase new six or eight place settings of everything (and eat rice with weenies for the next six months to pay for it), or you can, horrors of horrors, seat your guests at the four matched place settings while you and your spouse use the odds and ends pieces we all accumulate over time, knowing that your guests will be on their cell phones even before leaving your driveway, commenting on the "interesting" place settings.
Or.....or.....you could be bold, adventuresome and creative, daring to flaunt the proper etiquette for place settings that has prevailed since we stopped eating with our fingers. Here's how you do that. Go to local antique shops. What you're looking for are one-of-a-kind vintage pieces of flatware, plates, bowls, water and wine glasses. Vintage pieces have history and souls, your guests will become part of a chain of that history and you can tell them that, plus anything you may know about the individual pieces. And you'll pay a lot less than you would for new stuff. And it will be better quality. Forget placemats, go with the 'repurposed' fad...use appropriately folded pages of yesterday's newspaper. They would come in handy during those lulls in the conversation, and you don't have to wash them afterwards. Think about it. Each guest will be dining with their own place setting unique to them. And there will be no confusion about whose plate is whose when going for seconds, or mixing up silverware, or refiling the wine glasses. And speaking about wine glasses, don't get locked into what Emily Post or the glass manufacturers say is a wine glass. At that antique shop you'll see many one-of-a-kind glasses that will catch your interest. It may be a sherbet glass, a martini glass, a large goblet or a small vase, but if you want to say it's a wine glass, then it's a wine glass. If you have the cojones to do what I'm advising, I guarantee that the cream of society wherever you live will be checking their mailboxes daily hoping for an invitation from your address. Brush up on your guest speaker skills.
If somehow your guest list expands to say ten or twelve, that's a different deal and I recommend a trip to Dollar General for paper plates and plastic glasses and flatware. On the way home stop at KFC for a couple of buckets of chicken.
Kind of as an aside and to illustrate that we practice what we preach, below are four matching forks recently purchased at an antique shop. They were laying loose among at least 1500 other forks, knives and spoons in four different boxes. Maribel purchased twenty five pieces in total, being very selective. They are Rogers Brothers silverware and from the stamp on the back we know they were made pre-1892. Each piece has the initial "F" ornately engraved on the bottom front, which we assume to be the family initial and just happens to work for us. A few minutes with silver polish brought them back to near new. The photo doesn't do them justice. They gleam so brilliantly that they almost look white, as quality silver does. The cost?...25 cents each or five for a dollar.
Brilliant improvisation!
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