A friend recently hosted a 16th birth­day party at her home.
Plan­ning was mil­i­tary. There would be no alco­hol and she and her hus­band hired three burly body guards to check guests at the front entrance.
Sev­eral adults were also on hand to peruse the periph­ery of the prop­erty check­ing for oppor­tunis­tic gate crash­ers.
The cos­tume party was by invi­ta­tion only and sixty young guests were expected.
The hosts admit to being con­trol freaks, so they cov­ered every even­tu­al­ity. The police were informed about the party before­hand, as were all the neigh­bours in the quiet, upmar­ket Bris­bane street.
What could pos­si­bly go wrong? Noth­ing did, for a while. The teens enjoyed danc­ing and enjoy­ing each other’s com­pany, seem­ingly con­tent to enjoy the hired disc jockey’s music and act like 16-year-olds. Things turned rather sud­denly.
At around 10pm, the first fleet of taxis arrived and out spilled teenagers – many of them with bot­tles of alco­hol and clearly under the influ­ence.
By now there were around 60 imposters milling around the street. Next, they began scal­ing the fence of a neighbour’s yard to try and gain access. Another neigh­bour phoned to say he’d seen young men and women stream­ing along the road from the nearby train sta­tion. A few gate­crash­ers had been expected, but cer­tainly not on this scale.
After a brief delib­er­a­tion, the par­ents did the most sen­si­ble thing they could under the cir­cum­stances and much to the dev­as­ta­tion of their teen, shut down the party. In the after­math, they found ‘around $300 worth of alco­hol’ – bot­tles were hid­den in bushes and much of it con­fis­cated from guests who were implic­itly told ‘no alco­hol’.
My friend even dis­cov­ered two bot­tles of vanilla essence smug­gled inside by invited guests. “How des­per­ate is that?” she asked, dumb-founded.
So what went wrong? How did all these teens know about the party if it was closed and by invi­ta­tion only?
It seems that no mat­ter what extremes they went to in order to cre­ate a con­trolled envi­ron­ment, imposters came. The rea­son, my friend dis­cov­ered, was sim­ple – with the help of mod­ern tech­nol­ogy, guests could invite all their friends within min­utes of arriv­ing at the party. Those friends in turn mes­saged their friends who in turn sent mes­sages to their friends – and so it snow-balled.
As a mother of three – two of whom are teens, the tale of this party put me off for life. I informed the fam­ily that sorry, par­ties (unless asso­ci­ated with tea and cake), were for­ever banned in our house­hold.
I men­tioned this fact to another friend – one who is a sea­soned host of sev­eral teen par­ties.
She reminded me that all cel­e­bra­tions had pro­gressed with­out inci­dent. The most recent was her son’s 18th birth­day party. There was alco­hol; there were 60 invited guests and no bounc­ers — just a few par­ents and the hosts. Her son even invited his friends via Face­book.
“They had a great party and at 12pm, every­one was ready to go home,” said my friend.
So what was her secret?
“We were for­tu­nate – we never had any prob­lems and I can only put that down to my son’s friends – if you can’t trust the friends, don’t hold the party.”
Per­haps there is a faint glim­mer of hope for my deprived teens — am quite sure we could rus­tle up a deploy­ment of army reservists just in case…