FLOODLIGHTS

If you have an old house and it’s not up to par with the houses of your friends and colleagues and you have been in it long enough to fix it up but you haven’t fixed it up because you have no money or aren’t able or just didn’t get round to it yet but can’t use the excuse of having just moved in anymore because you’re in the house five years and people don’t invite you to dinner anymore because you never invite them back and anyway you feel bashful about accepting an invitation for the 4th or 5th time and want to, you know, start inviting people round yourself but don’t want to expose the shortcomings of your living situation I have the solution for you: Floodlights! You can rent them fairly cheap or even invest in a set of your own if you intend to have a lot of dinner parties. You have to have high ceilings of course—did I mention I have an old house? Once installed you just blast that dinner table with 5,000 lumens and believe me, no-one’s going to be commenting on the state of your house. It’s like that Edgar Allen Poe story “The Purloined Letter”: You blind with light. The trick is, of course, to rein it in. You have to control the projection. You want the dining room ablaze but everything outside that shining space sheathed in velvety dark. You do not want the dust bunnies in the corner of the living-room—or in the corner of the living room of your neighbor across the street—to jump into horrifying relief. It’s extremely atmospheric as you can imagine. Your guests will feel like film stars. And there are other benefits. It’s not that you don’t have furniture—it’s that you moved it to make room for the lights. It’s not that you don’t have rugs—it’s that you didn’t want them torn up by the great claw feet of the floods so you rolled them away. And if your guests do stumble out of the magic circle to go to the bathroom or explore the territory, their retinas will be too dazzled to see anything but whirling disks and orbs. They’ll have to feel their way with their hands and when they return the food on their plate will look too real for words. Not only have you restored appetite to the realm of personal responsibility where it rightly belongs you have also more or less determined the topic of conversation for the evening, that is if people can bear to look each other in the eye long enough to talk. You can also rent searchlights with high intensity beams each one of which has over six hundred million candlepower so your guests can easily find your house without GPS or Mapquest—the good old-fashioned way.