Summer Potluck Items and the People Who Bring Them

You still made this salad despite knowing that it would open the door to several “bean there, done that” jokes. You make your own soap and you can identify the body’s chakras. You feel a profound connection to the films of Tim Burton. You brought embroidery floss to run a make-your-own-bracelet activity with the kids. Shine on, you beautiful light.

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Decades ago, you fell in love in Bordeaux on a European backpacking trip. No one, not even your therapist, knows that you regularly ask yourself, “What if?” and daydream about the life unlived with your might-have-been partner, Guillaume. Quel dommage!

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You dumped the contents into a tupperware container and sprinkled some fresh dill on top in order to pass this off as homemade. If anyone remarks on the similarity between your potato salad and the Walmart version, you won’t back down. You’ll go so far as to make the bold claim that your great-great grandmother sold her recipe to the Walton family back in the 1890’s.

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You believe in letting mayonnaise do the heavy lifting in a dish. Even though you’re financially privileged, you have a spreadsheet breaking down the cost analysis of meals for your family. You get an extraordinary sense of satisfaction from producing meals that are $0.38/serving. You’ll jump at the opportunity to tell picnickers the cost-effectiveness of this recipe and, with it containing only 4 ingredients, that it’s “no fuss, no muss.”

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You’ve actually never brought anything other than deviled eggs to a potluck. It’s your dish. The smell of hydrogen sulfide is surprisingly comforting to you. You heard that Sandy was planning on bringing deviled eggs, but you reached out to her and convinced her to bring something else. You have far too many egg puns locked and loaded, which you’ll use to probe for compliments: “Aren’t these eggcellent? Do these eggceed your eggspectations?” If anyone rolls their eyes at your puns, you’ll say, “I know, I know, it’s a bit eggsessive.”

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You were going to bring ants on a log, but then parents started complaining about peanut allergies. This is their punishment. Un-drained canned corn in a bowl. No dressing. That’s it.

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You are worried about bees and wasps around your watermelon. This fear is linked to the first movie that made you cry: My Girl. To this day, the sight of a mood ring is enough to get you misty-eyed and make you think of Macaulay Culkin’s character and his bee-related death. You will stand guard, raising and lowering the lid on your watermelon like a forcefield. No one is going to get stung on your watch. But, just in case, you have a shot of Epinephrine tucked into your sock.

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You brought all the fixins to create a mini-buffet of toppings for the broccoli salad because you couldn’t go another year listening to some people complain about “too many raisins” while others complained about “not enough bacon.” You don’t let your hair down as often as you’d like, both literally and figuratively.

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This sounds a lot fancier than it actually is. You just hacked up some salami slices and cheddar cheese and impaled them on a stick. You found a nearly empty jar of olives in the back of your fridge, fished out the remaining drowned olives and added them to a few of the skewers. If anything, this presentation is actually harder to eat than if you’d just left the ingredients un-skewered. You forgot to soak the skewers, so you’ll spend the whole picnic warning people to “watch out for slivers.”

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Seeing children play with bubble wands will lead you to have the epiphany that you’ve been so focused on work that you’ve completely neglected your inner child. You’ll spend several minutes openly crying—the adults who see you will remark that you looked like Matthew McConaughey weeping in Interstellar.

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You planned on assembling your own vegetable platter because you can’t stand the jacked-up, inflated price of a ready-to-go store platter—what is this, beer at a baseball game? In the end, you ran out of time and had to acquiesce by purchasing a platter from the store. You’re going to spend the whole picnic stewing about what a rip-off it is, “Look at this, there’s only five cherry tomatoes. Five!”

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You’re getting drunk at this picnic. Your dip may have 7 layers, but you are far less complicated. You wear your emotions on your sleeve which is ironic because you’re not wearing any sleeves—and with muscle tone like yours, who can blame you?

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You’re planning on being the DJ at this picnic. You’ll start a dance circle, so you can do “the worm.” You’ll simultaneously hurt your back and get grass stains on your shirt only to have someone’s 8-year old nephew upstage you by effortlessly doing a backflip. The crowd will go wild and you’ll slink away and spend the rest of the picnic icing your back. You’ll deny any correlation between your injury and doing the worm, seeking reassurance by asking, “I still got it, right?”

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You saw on the sign-up sheet that someone was bringing charcuterie skewers and thought, “Time to blow them out of the frigging water!” You skewered the competition by using over 10 pounds of skinless, boneless chicken breast and making three different marinades as well as satay and tzatziki dipping sauces. You didn’t forget to soak the skewers—this isn’t your first rodeo. Despite your competitiveness, compliments make you feel kind of uncomfortable.

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Your name is Sandy. You were going to bring deviled eggs, but someone contacted you and, basically, told you that you were infringing on their territory. The whole thing felt eerily mob-like. You’re easy-going, though. You believe that variety is the spice of life.

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You just boiled tortellinis and dumped some Italian dressing on them. You didn’t want to come to the potluck and you don’t care who knows it. You have been looking forward to taking your pent-up aggression out on the piñata. Having seen too many videos of adults failing to strike the piñata, you have been secretly practicing swinging a bat while blindfolded in the garage on a nightly basis. You’ve also watched a couple of YouTube videos about “seeing while blindfolded,” but you’ve mostly been rewatching the 1989 Rutger Hauer action movie Blind Fury. You know you shouldn’t resist seeing a counselor, but, as your mother used to say about you, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” “Well, Mom,” you’re thinking, “I can lead a baseball bat directly into a piñata and let it satiate my thirst to rage.”

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You take on too much. There are too many people that would describe you as their “rock.” You plan on setting up your lawn chair under a tree far away from the action, so you can read—you’re hosting book club in two days and you’re only on page 4. You’ll end up falling asleep and having to watch the movie version of the book, but you’ll fall asleep during that, too. You need to get a better sleep schedule.

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You brought a hacky sack. You haven’t played since college, but you figure it’s like riding a bike—which you also haven’t done in a long time. None of the adults want to play and the kids have never even heard of hacky sack. You try to show everyone how much fun it is to play, but you can’t get more than three consecutive hits. You’ll pull a muscle and have to share an ice pack with the beef sliders guy.

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You knew there wouldn’t be a power source at the picnic to keep the slow cooker plugged in, but that didn’t stop you. The sun will keep the meatballs warm enough. Who cares if the red, too-sweet sauce congeals. Either way, this dish is basically just an excuse for you to do your Swedish Chef impersonation. You forgot to bring toothpicks for the meatballs.

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You also brought sparklers for the kids. You’ll use two big sparklers—and your dedication to a regular yoga practice—to perform a “fire” dance inspired by the time you went to a full moon party in Koh Phangan, Thailand. It will leave most of the adults speechless and feeling inadequate about their dance abilities.

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This picnic has far too many weird foods passing themselves off as salads. You’re here to rescue people’s taste buds from dishes that should have gone extinct back in the 1950’s. You brought a wood handle liberty bell that you’re going to ring when it’s time for dessert—stirring up excitement like this picnic’s version of an ice cream truck, “Ice cream! Get your ice cream!”