Pink of Perfection

When I read Elsa Maxwell’s informative romp How To Do It or The Lively Art of Entertaining earlier this summer, I doggeared approximately 47 pages for future reference. One of these pages contains advice on invitations for “the city woman who entertains often, at home, and with some degree of formality.” Let us say that this city woman is me. According to Miss Maxwell, it would serve me well to have 4×5 inch cards engraved as fill-in-the-blank invitations: Miss Sarah McColl requests the pleasure of [so-and-so's] company [for cocktails, luncheon, etc] on [such-and-such a day and time.]

Though this advice is about sixty years old and somewhat irrelevant to my current salary and stage in life (there are higher priorities than having custom cards engraved for my impromptu — though with some degree of formality — entertaining, if you know what I mean), the advice is still basically sound. Invitations set a tone for your party and are the first impression your guests receive about exactly what kind of fete they are getting themselves into — in my case, a party with good intentions that’s ultimately a bit rough around the edges.
Because they are charmingly unexpected, invitations are perhaps the best kind of antiquated relic, especially for a low-key affair. For such a gathering, with perhaps only a week’s lead time, only a hostess with a death wish would blindly drop informative bits in the mailbox hoping they arrive in the right place at the right time. In this modern age, email seems faster, safer, and surefire.
Now I’m no technology whiz, so I like to make my humble, hand-scrawled invitations as if I were sending them by post (perhaps adding some snazzy clip art — I’m so old school!) on good old fashioned paper with honest to goodness ink. Then, at the last moment, I drop them in the scanner and zap them off to my guests with the click of a button. Then, respondez-vous-ing is a snap.