We threw a party for Juniper’s birthday on Saturday. I am happy to report that the soiree was a success. We pulled a few dozen stunningly dressed heads through our doors and into our labyrinth of live music and martinis.  I tended bar, serving up a selection of Ethersmithy drinks, including one smash hit, The Kill Shot, which consists of Grappa, Hibiscus Tea, and a double whippet, sipped and whiffed simultaneously.

But truly the success of any party is due to the quality of the guests who deign visit. Thank you to all those who graced us. Thanks to a couple members of The Gilded Rooks for tonguing our brains with oh so soulful melodies. Thanks to everyone who dressed up as spies, or femme fatales,  or serial killers and dwarfed the night’s theme: “Dress To Kill”.

I was, however, woken with a surprise a little too early this morning (considering that the party went to 5:AM) by an interesting phone call. It was a friend – a previous night’s guest – who was in near panic over what he may have said while being recorded on video. Throughout the night I was indeed taping (can it even be called that now that it all goes straight to flash?) video at the bar. For the most part the camera went unnoticed, but this particular person saw me making an adjustment to the cam, and knew he was being recorded. Evidently that didn’t stop him from speaking with me all about the work he is doing, and the various projects he is involved with in finance at a company that shall here remain nameless. The call I got this morning was this very man, terrified about what he may have said, that may perchance end up online.

I assured my friend that I would never post vids of him without his permission if it seemed sensitive, and this calmed him. But it did highlight the unique learning curves we are climbing, trying to sort out the new rules and how they apply to old habits of casual conversation. We are all redefining our behaviors to match the new criteria, which are, to live in an era where even in the most casual and comfortable settings – where women in evening gowns are clinking martini glasses with gun totin cowboys (all “dressed to kill”) – one can no longer afford to act as if there is a separation from the world outside.

I talked to another friend, Alex Gorelik, about this at length this morning. He has a 4 year old daughter who is, along with all of her peers, entirely documented online. She will grow up in a world where one never speaks “in confidence” casually at a party, because that confidence simply does not exists. To quote her dad, she and her generation are becoming “political creatures” far earlier than we ever had to. I really liked this choice of words. These are in fact the same skills that politicians have been forced to learn, knowing, at the cost of their careers, that a camera could be around any corner. Such perception of the world is no longer relegated to these special few. We all are gaining this sense. Or trying very hard to.

I like to imagine that we are in the hardest part of the adjustment presently.  That the new rules are confusing to those of us who have indulged in many public, and yet private situations; where we felt freer to be those people we would never let our bosses see. I like to think that soon, within the next decade maybe, we will start to have these new rules pretty well worked out to accommodate for a vid cam in every pocket. If we don’t, the only other solution I can foresee is the world getting more tolerant with what people do in “private”, and that, as lovely as it would be, is not something I am going to hold my breath for.