Free The Undocumented Mark Steyn by Mark Steyn Page B

clear glitter on the tiny pomegranates?
    But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before you can organize anything, you have to organize your list. As Rick Rodgers says, “A series of lists will help you breeze through the process.”
    And don’t worry, it’s not boring! As Rick Rodgers also says, “Every time you mark a chore off the list, you will get a rewarding sense of accomplishment.”
    But what if your list is simply too extensive? As Rick Rodgers further counsels, “If you look at a list and feel overwhelmed, pick up the phone and get a friend to give you a hand!”
    But, by this stage, Rodgers knows he may be pushing the joys of list-making a tad too far and that it’s time to get on to the actual lists. “Here,” he writes, “are the lists that I use again and again.”
    And the first one is . . . “Guest List”! “If you are having a large holiday season party, send out invitations as early as possible.” But when should one have a holiday season party? A good tip is to hold it during the holiday season. “We usually give our holiday party the week between Christmas and New Year’s,” reveals Mr. Rodgers.
    Ha! What a piker! The true secret of successful Christmas planning is not to schedule it in December. As Vickie and Jo Ann recommend in Old-Fashioned Country Christmas : “Rather than having your annual party in December when you’re too overwhelmed to enjoy it, host a cookout in July with a Christmas theme, everything red and green!” Bright red watermelon, green salad, but with Christmas decorations! “White twinkling lights, Christmas napkins and a small artificial tree decorated with take-home ornaments make for a very festive atmosphere.” And in Canada in July we may even have real snow!
    Christmas in summer, huh? That doesn’t sound much like an “old-fashioned country Christmas,” unless the country in question is Australia. Yet it makes perfect sense, and not just because nothing says “dreary convention-bound loser” like holding your Christmas party at Christmas. After all, if you schedule your holiday season for July, it’ll free up a lot of time in late December to work on your coxcomb topiary.

LAST DANCE
    The Wall Street Journal , April 11, 1997
    LIONEL BART , COMPOSER of Oliver! , once told me that he did so many drugs in the late 1960s that he came round in the early 1980s and realized that he didn’t have a single memory of the 1970s. “Did I miss anything?” he asked.
    “Not really,” I replied. For Lionel and the similarly situated, Anthony Haden-Guest’s The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night (Morrow) and John Heidenry’s What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution (Simon & Schuster) are here to fill in the missing gaps.
    If you can remember the Sixties, so the old gag goes, you weren’t really there; if you can remember the Seventies, chances are you aren’t here. For Mr. Haden-Guest, researching his “culture of the night” is now an act of archeology: Deep in the basements of Manhattan warehouses, you can discern traces of the physical landscape, but the witnesses are gone. Steve Rubell, Studio 54’s presiding genius, is dead of AIDS; so’s his onetime partner’s sometime lover, Roy Cohn; so are celebrity regulars like Halston and Nureyev; so are their paramours like “the notorious livewire of Nightworld” Victor Hugo—no relation to the author of Les Misérables , though in his final days he wound up sleeping in a park.
    In Mr. Heidenry’s account of landmark victories in the sexual revolution, most of the freedom fighters end the same way: Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and S&M devotee, is dead of AIDS; so’s Franco Rossellini, producer of Caligula , the “first sexually explicit first-run movie in history”; so’s John (“Johnny Wadd”) Holmes, the gifted star of a hundred lesser epics.
    But before it shriveled away to an emaciated cadaver of its former self, what a world it was! Sometimes