In November, a miserable party before the more famous miserable party

It's November, so you're probably expecting a Thanksgiving menu from Cincinnati Celebrates: Cooking and Entertaining for All Seasons (Junior League of Cincinnati, first printing August, 1974, though mine is from the 1980 fifth printing). The menu is pretty predictable, though, and I thought the concept of an election night party sounded much more, well, not fun, but interesting, so we're going with that.

I can't imagine an election night party where "Bi-partisan politics [would] not spoil the conviviality of good friends, food and a sense of humor." Maybe politics were less polarized in the '70s, but maybe the Junior Leaguers were too clueless to catch on to the sarcasm that crept into guests' voices, or maybe everybody was so embarrassed by what actually transpired that they all decided to say it was a good time and try to trap other people into having similarly distressing parties. If the Junior Leaguers had to suffer through an election night party, well then you should too. 

The invitations are uncharacteristically low-key, not needing specialized craft products or hand delivery.

I was more amused by the decorations. The appetizers are speared on cocktail picks and displayed by sticking the picks through a layer of cabbage leaves hiding a styrofoam ball. "Cabbage planet surrounded by canape moons" is as good a theme as any for an election night party, I suppose.

The centerpiece is a hat filled with patriotically-hued carnations and play money, I guess to celebrate the proud history of bribery and lobbying? 

I didn't bother to copy the recipe for stuffed cherry tomatoes, as it just tells cooks to cut the tops off of cherry tomatoes, remove the centers with a spoon, drain, and then stuff them with whatever you want to stuff them with, like crabmeat, cream cheese mixed with grated onion, thumb tacks in a wad of silly putty. Whatever. (Okay, I may have added one of those options myself.)

The Marinated Shrimp are only a bit more interesting.

I just hope that the cook remembers to let the shrimp marinate in the refrigerator for at least two days before serving... although, if partisan politics were not really as easygoing as the writers let on, maybe the server would just leave the appetizers out for a couple of days and then remember not to eat them. Ingesting days-old shrimp will teach Mark and Debra for voting for Carol for the school board!

I am ALWAYS into fresh-baked bread, so the promise of homemade soft pretzels is the one thing that might lead me to briefly consider going to such a party. 

These are just pretzel-shaped breadsticks, though, not actual pretzels, as they're not boiled in an alkaline solution before baking. I'm sure they're fine, but not really pretzels. They're just pretending, the way everybody at the party is trying to pretend they can still be friends after the row about whether Carol was fit for the school board.

The Company Casserole seems kind of like it might be pretending, too. 

The layers of dairy, noodles, and tomato meat sauce sound like a pretend-lasagna. I'm sure it's pretty good, and making this instead of a real, labor-intensive lasagna an easy way to save some time so you can rehearse the whole speech about why Carol is going to be the ruination of the school district, just in case she wins.

The Tossed Italian Salad will give the cook a chance to use up the can of garbanzo beans that has been in the pantry since before Watergate and those last two hard-cooked eggs in the back of the fridge.

And there are no recipes for the onion bread or the "Election Night Cookies." Maybe the invitations should have come with RSVP cards asking guests to vote for their favorite option from a list of cookies. Then the cook would have ignored the results and made whichever one they'd already chosen because it's their house, dammit! Who is going to bend over backwards to humor a fool who would vote for Carol anyway?

I usually think of Thanksgiving as being a meal that is high-tension and high-conflict, but Election Night Party seems like it could be even worse. Maybe this menu is supposed to make Thanksgiving simply seem tamer by comparison? Or maybe it's just practice to help the cook exercise the self-control not to strangle Uncle Bill when he goes on another one of his rants at the Thanksgiving table...