It started in the 1950s with all those housewives having Tupperware parties, then came the Avon get-togethers, but now it has just plain gotten out of control, ladies! Everywhere you turn some friend is having a home party of food, lingerie, make-up, kitchen supplies — you name it. So to be polite you say you'll go but you think in the back of your mind that you are absolutely not gonna buy a thing. By the end of the night you've spent $100 on crap you really don't want and the representative is trying to talk you into hosting your own party as well. You know I'm right!

Let me just start by dissecting everything. You all know about my skewed background with cooking so let's just say that Pampered Chef is not my bag. Do I really need to buy a whisk for $85 dollars when I can get one at Shop-rite for two bucks? How many times am I really going to use that whisk anyways, since my main staple is Lean Cuisine and Oreos? That stuff is for the professional chef and more than likely I'd wind up using that whisk to comb my daughter's hair when she's late for the school bus and I can't find the hairbrush.

Let's see — who else can I roast? Avon and Mary-Kay seem to be on the list. I'm not a big fan of make-up to begin with but do feel it's necessary at times — like when you have a big date or important work meeting and suddenly the largest crater pimple in the Guinness book of World Records decides to grow on your chin. So you dig through all the hundreds of dollars of crap you got talked into at the last Mary Kay party that made bold promises of banishing such things from your face, the planet, and possibly killing local wildlife only to discover — they lied! Next, you turn to good old Avon, the heavy-hitter, only to discover you have a whole purse full of those little tiny lipstick samples that your daughter used up on her dolls and the cover-up is just nowhere to be found. Why? Because if there's ever been an unspoken rule on this earth it's that you can never find something when you really need it the most. So in desperation you stop at the dollar store on your way to work to buy some cover-up and mascara hoping that maybe one or the other will distract everyone's attention from the obvious tumor on your face. Let me just comment that there are reasons why you don't buy those items (and also deodorant) from dollar stores. Trust me — you will have people handing you pamphlets on domestic violence and asking how long you've been a beaten housewife.

The latest craze appears to be "Tastefully Simple" parties. I went to one recently. I wasn't actually invited — I sorta crashed it. How sad — back in the day I'd be crashing a bachelor party and now I'm crashing a food party of middle-aged women. (Sigh) The horror of it all.

Anyways… I had just dropped off my kids with their father for the weekend, and after listening to my grandmother go on and on about how she wants to introduce my ex-husband to some nice girl because "he really deserves it," I just had to get out of the house. My girlfriend said she needs to make an appearance at a party and I'm all for it since I'd been dipping into grandpa's cough medicine and was finally getting my groove on and thinking it was gonna be a wild time. Suddenly I found myself at a very posh home filled with conservative upper class ladies at a "Tastefully Simple" party. Bad place to be if you're loaded with a bad case of the munchies. After shamefully gorging on all the chip, dip, salsa, bread, and dessert samples they asked what I wanted to order.

"Well, let's see, the salsas were too hot, and I'm going to start my diet so I don't want the brownies but, hey, that dip in the middle with the celery is amazing! I'll take a vat of that stuff," I gushed. The hostess just gave me a dirty look and said that was the only thing that wasn't from Tastefully Simple — it was just some dip from Shop-Rite they put with the celery. Then she asks if I want to host my own Tastefully Simple party and all I could think of to say was, "That would require me to actually have friends and I don't seem to have any of those at the moment." Well, I did just move here five months ago. I don't think I have to worry about being invited to anymore home parties anytime soon.