I understand what they mean. They
like/want to host dinner parties or plain old parties or just have
friends over for drinks. Just say what you mean. As far as I know,
I've never received an invitation to a night of entertainment, but
that could be because I'm very boring. I've been invited to parties
and dinner parties and although they have been fun, I wouldn't
necessarily consider myself to have been entertained.
So in case you are not sure if you are
entertaining or just having friends over:
A good rule of thumb is if you think
you could charge a cover charge or guests should bring a wad of
dollar bills, then yes, you can consider yourself an entertainer.
If you sing some songs, you're friends
will probably smile and politely applaud. If you put out a tip jar,
you're an entertainer.
If you give a ten minute monologue of
jokes, it just means you waste a lot of time on the internet. If you
provide a backing laugh track, you're an entertainer.
Hosting a game night is not
entertainment. I'm a sore loser so if I win, I might have been
entertained; if I lose, I've just wasted a night of my life. And I
probably won't come back.
Cooking dinner in an open kitchen does
not make you an entertainer, especially if it involves Brussels
sprouts. Flipping food in a pan over massive flames, hand tossing
pizza dough, and/or juggling bottles of liquor does not make you an
entertainer unless you charge me $100 to sit there and watch you. And
I'll probably want a refund at the end of the night.
Now that we've settled the difference
between entertaining and having friends over, I would like to
announce my new career: Power Broker!
We were lucky enough to watch a new
show on HGTV last night called “Power Broker.” Now I'll admit we
missed the first fifteen minutes of the show, but essentially the
Power Broker is a guy who gives a list of homes for sale to a young
couple and helps them pick an offer price. Now this may vary by
state or country, but the thing that's still great about realtors is
that they handle all of the contact with the seller or buyer so you
don't have to.
But the Power Broker doesn't do that.
He tells the buyers to make an offer and let him know what happens.
When the offer isn't accepted, he tells the buyers to write an
emotional letter to the sellers. After the deal is done and the
contractors start remodeling the house, he stops by and takes the
head contractor out to dinner.
This would be like calling myself Power
Surgeon then going into the operating room and telling the real
surgeons: “yeah, the appendix is somewhere down there in the gut.
You might want to start with a scalpel. Good luck. Hey, who wants
to go out for pizza after this?”
But why be a Power Surgeon when I can
just be a Power Broker? So if you're looking to buy a house, give me
a call and I will:
- Give you a list of three houses in your price range. And they just might be somewhere in the area you want.
- Suggest a good starting offer after examining the market and randomly picking a number out of my head.
- Wait for you to let me know what happens with your offer
- Tell you how stupid the sellers are when your offer is turned down.
- Forget to tell you that you'll be on television and maybe you should take a shower and wash your hair (this would have been good advice for last night's episode)
- Advise you to go vandalize the house as the sellers will then have to lower their price.
- Advise you to write and record an emotional song plea to the sellers then tell you to stand on their lawn with a boombox over your head blaring the song over and over until they break down.
- Take your contractor out to dinner.
- Collect my fee from you including reimbursement for taking the contractor out to dinner.
The show wouldn't bother me so much if
they didn't call it Power Broker. That guy's about as powerful as my
cat picking out houses by deciding where to poop on the newspaper.
But I guess it was easier than calling it “Some Guy Off the Street
Whose Bald Head Makes Him Look Powerful and Once Bought a House so He
Sort of Knows What It's Like.”
