jen corace! make me a manhattan!

i had a plan, an idea: every saturday from january to the end of march invite three people over to my house, five to seven every saturday. they bring the snacks, i make the manhattans and at the end each participant has their portrait taken with my dog, leonard.
i take an odd pride in what i consider our family’s legacy: retail and social entertainment. long story short, i would never have been here if it were not for strawbridge and clothier. my day jobs leading up to full time freelance work were always retail involved and nowadays i cooperatively run a diy gift store in downtown providence rhode island.
retail: done and done.
i consider myself a social hermit. i’m a homebody with a wandering eye. bringing people to me seemed like a natural step and a good way to feed the cocktail party loving side of me from the comfort of my own home. also, not so secretly, i’d love to be a bartender and what better way to hone some skills than to practice on my own turf?
‘jen corace! make me a manhattan!’ was born out of the arbitrary new year feeling of ‘anything is possible!’ and wanting to make more intimate the interactions of social networking. i have a good amount of friends on facebook … some people who i am dear friends with, some passing friends, acquaintances, folks i know around town, folks i want to know better, folks i suppose i don’t care for but how can you know until you spend time with them thusly making them human vs. “them” … and it wasn’t enough anymore to have these hilarious, wry friendships not based on real experience. given any larger social situation where we might all be thrown together…a show, a potluck… more often than not i (and i am assuming most people) would stick with the familiar … friends i usually hang around with, in comfort, while nodding across the room to people i knew but didn’t know.
i also felt like i knew enough people from different circles that maybe either knew each other in passing or maybe not at all but might benefit from knowing one another. so there is a bit of social experimentation in there as well.
the invite i sent out explained it this way:
why?:
because this town is small and i want to make it smaller, because i am a social hermit, because it will help balance out my in all day working to staying human to people ratios, because it’s winter and everyone needs to be shaken up a bit, because leonard loves people, because i love leonard, because maybe we are both on this site and don’t know each other very well, because i said so, because you like free booze, because i like free food, because you are a busy body and want to sneak around my house, because maybe maybe i won’t feel like talking that day and i will find it funny to make you feel uncomfortable, because because because.
what’s the worse that can happen?
so firstly i will post photos of previous ‘jen corace! make me a manhattan!’ followed by tonight’s episode of ‘jen corace! make me a manhattan!’