Having a Stella Dallas Party in Texas

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Hosting and hostessing in Texas is a big, big thing. As the host or hostess you are completely responsible for the welfare and happiness of your guests for the duration. You do not leave people stranded even if it is a public meeting and you have the flu.

So the other night a sick friend asked me to lead a meeting for him. It is a regular meeting of a group of usually about 10 or 15 like-minded people at a nearby restaurant. It is mostly social, and I always go anyway.

I have hosted that meeting for him several times before, and it was no big deal. But this time it was different. It was a Stella Dallas party!

What’s that, you ask? Well, I’m fixin’ to tell you.

My paternal grandmother, Nana, and her sisters were addicted to soap operas. Apparently they started listening when the soaps first came on the radio, whenever that was.

To overhear a phone conversation between any two of those sisters, you would think they were talking about people they knew. “That Lisa! She is terrible! She does not deserve Bob.”

But no, they were not gossips; they were soap fans. And they all three lived in the same tiny Texas town, so they could indulge in soap character discussions without running up the phone bill.

By the time I came along the soaps were on TV, so if one of the sisters was forced to run an errand during an important episode, she would call another sister afterward to find out what happened. Because, after all, you could not follow TV soaps on the car radio.

Friday was the big day on the soaps. Everyone knew that the soaps just lallygagged all week, and the really good stuff always happened on Fridays. On Fridays the sisters would coordinate their schedules to make sure at least one of them would be home to report to the others.

So soaps were a big, big deal in my family, and at least one of them contributed to this Texas family’s lingo. It seems that way back in the 1930s or 1940s, on one of those old radio soap operas, there was a character named Stella Dallas.

According to Nana, the Stella Dallas character was very wealthy but did not have any friends. Stella had somehow come into a lot of money but did not fit in with the other rich people in town.

So when Stella Dallas gave a huge, lavish, expensive party and invited all the important people in town, no one came. No one at all.

Ever since then, if anyone ever gives a party and no one shows up, that’s what my family calls “a Stella Dallas party.”

Whatever you may call it, a Stella Dallas party is the absolute nightmare horror of any real Texas hostess. And wherever you are, here’s hoping that you never have one.

In my case, I decided that the no-show meeting was actually my friend’s Stella Dallas party, because nobody knew that I would be leading the meeting. That was never announced, thank goodness. (Now that’s just between you and me.)

Whew! That means my reputation as a Texas hostess is still unsullied. What a relief!