hummus party digestion

We had a party yesterday!  We made hummus at it.

Morbidity and mortality (is this more camp jargon?  the internet suggests que yes.):

A.  There were more people present than I think many of them expected---around 20.  It's not logically possible to let them decide whether to come with the knowledge of how many other people will come, but maybe it would have been helpful to send a rough count after they RSVP'ed but before they actually came.

B.  People brought a lot of food.  There is not a need for so much food in the middle of the afternoon.  There was a lot of juice and soda consumed, though.  Probably a much smaller fraction of the people should have brought anything, but the amount of beverages should stay the same.

C.  Temperature control seemed great!  Thanks, Yasha!

D.  The foods and beverages came in at very different levels of fanciness.  A lot of people just bought something ordinary at the store, but some people brought things that they would have been proud of selecting and would have liked other people to enjoy.  I'm not sure how to put these next to each other without making the less fancy things look like a waste, and I'm not sure how to make sure the people who bring more fancy things receive feedback.  In particular, I probably should have promoted the white wine and the za'atar myself.

E.  Very few people were willing to take charge of making a batch of hummus, even though there were instructions on paper.  Then they still needed my help, in one case to decide whether the texture was okay and in another case to put together the parts of the food processor correctly.  Maybe I should have supervised the first batch all the way through, to make sure some hummus actually appeared and to make changes to the recipe if necessary.

F.  People made way less hummus than I planned for.  Clearly, the amount of hummus does not just scale by the number of people.  I think when it's crowded, it's hard to move from one room to the other, so people who might have liked to make hummus didn't necessarily end up near the hummus-making setup.  I didn't think this was a problem, but I didn't need to buy so much of the ingredients!

G.  I did a lot of hovering and seeing what was going on, rather than actually talking to people.  I felt guilty about this because maybe they came to the party expecting to talk to me.  One strategy would be to talk to each new arrival for a while myself, rather than immediately showing them toward everyone else.

H.  It was good that we had the 10-year-old guest, because it prompted me to plan that we could play telephone pictionary if she didn't have anything to do.  When I mentioned this to her and explained what telephone pictionary was, she said, "Oh, I want to play that!  Let's play that."  She was extremely effective at recruiting other people to play---this was useful because I might have been too shy, even though I knew everyone---and they really seemed to enjoy it.  This led us into a game of celebrity, which was also lots of fun.

How to play telephone pictionary:  Everyone sits in a circle and holds a piece of paper.  They write a sentence and pass the paper to the right.  They draw a picture corresponding to the sentence, fold over the sentence, and pass the paper to the right.  They write a sentence corresponding to the picture, fold over the picture, and pass the paper to the right, and so on, until there's no more space on the page.  Then people read the sequences of sentences aloud.

How to play celebrity:  Everyone thinks of perhaps 6 people that are commonly known of, and writes their names on slips of paper and puts them in the hat.  They sit in a circle and divide into two teams so that the teams alternate around the circle.  There are three rounds, in which people take turns (going around the circle) drawing names from the hat and having their team members guess them, as many as possible in the time limit.  In the first round, you can describe the name in any way you want.  In the second round, you say one word as the clue.  In the third round, you do charades.  Each round goes through every name once, so the clues for the later rounds refer to the clues from the earlier rounds.