When The Politics Get You Down
Me with fellow TA Bob in Jimmy’s apartment before the Nancy Party, Spring 1981.
I don’t know about you, but I’m at the point where I can’t listen to the political gabfests any longer. It’s all so — disappointing. I summon a time when my friends and I forged a solution to our disillusionment with American politics.
The year was 1981. I was in law school. Ronald Reagan, not yet canonized, was president. The Southern Democrats had glommed onto his concepts of trickle-down and welfare queens. Helpless to affect policy, a lot of our trash-talk in the Legal Writing Teaching Assistant Office was cultural, how appalled we corduroy-wearing, lentil-eating, loan-bearing students were at his rich California friends, flouting their wealth now that he was elected. Nancy Reagan’s focus on selecting china. Nancy’s admission that she kept a pistol by her bedside (in the White House!), saying it was “only a tiny little gun.” Her name for the president — “Ronnie” — and her omnipresent glassy, adoring gaze. His name for her — “Mommie.” These developments begged for activism. We had to DO SOMETHING.
The something was a party. We called it The Nancy Party; everyone was to dress like Nancy or Ronnie or one of their rich pals. The Goodwill store was raided. I went as Nancy’s best friend Betsy Bloomingdale in a pink “silk” blouse and a floor-length black velvet skirt. At the St. Vincent de Paul store, I found an ancient fox fur that closed by biting itself. Though allergic to the fur, I kept it on as long as I could. My premier accessory, my grandmother’s mother-of-pearl opera glasses, got lost in our hostess Diana’s parking lot during the evening, a significant — but fortunately, the only — casualty of the event.
My boyfriend at the time, a teaching assistant named Jimmy, rented a black tux along with several other guys. Jimmy slicked back his hair Reaganesquely and drank bourbon all night. Several men wore Colonel Sanders-style white suits in honor of the Southern senators. One came as a Secret Service agent. Women wore lace dresses, formals, and large bouffants. One, Mary S., did a remarkable hair-and-makeup job in vintage clothing to become Nancy Davis, the B-movie ingenue before she became Nancy Reagan. The Nancy Party required serious costumes.
Mary S. won the Best Costume prize. We also fashioned prizes for Best “Tiny Little Gun” (the winner carried one the size of a Cracker Jack toy) and a previously unannounced award to the person carrying the most cash. To our amazement, a partygoer from student government who was not a teaching assistant and who, to the best of my knowledge, had not been invited, had almost two hundred bucks in the pocket of his white, Southern Senator suit. He beat the next closest competitor by over $150.
As the evening progressed, the music grew louder and the dancing, wilder. Wine, weed, beer, and spirits encouraged the frenzy. Perhaps it was inevitable that a neighbor in Diana’s apartment building would call the cops. They arrived as we dance-marched around the living room led by the Secret Service agent, pounding on the ceiling to a Rolling Stones song. (I think it was “Brown Sugar.”) Someone —a cop? Diana (a former cop)?— directed us to sit on the floor in a circle and be calm for quite some time. In our costumes it created the appearance of adult trick-or-treaters at a Montessori school. Eventually, the music began again, and we Nancy-partied once more, but with less noise and frenzy. Astonishingly, I thought nothing of Jimmy, deep in his cups, driving me home sometime in the wee hours.
Despite the danger we believed Reagan’s presidency posed to America, the Nancy Party had been a damn good evening.