NEEDHAM, Mass. It’s 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night, and Sue Ellen Mischke is getting ready for her annual winter Tupperware Party. “It’s for a good cause,” she says slyly as she sets out a serving tray loaded with cruditees; “Me!”
“Psst–who’s the creepy guy with the lettuce spinner?”
Her doorbell rings and several women–both close friends and “friends of friends”–enter her center-entrance colonial home to be greeted by party kisses in the former case or a warm handshake in the latter. She’s about to close the door when she hears a voice call from out of the dark. “Hold on–it’s slippery out here!”
She peers out towards her curb and dimly perceives a male making his way up the icy sidewalk, a bag in his hands. “Hi,” the man says as he walks into the beam of the spotlight on the Mischkes’ front porch. “I’m Adam Wansleigh.”
“Hello,” the woman of the house says in an even tone. “Can I . . . help you?”
“I didn’t invite him–did you?”
“I’m here for the Tupperware Party!” Wansleigh says with an ingratiating smile on his face.
“Oh,” Mischke says, taken aback. “I . . . didn’t know you were coming. Do you know someone here?”
Wansleigh is a stranger to every woman inside, but he’s done his homework, running license plate numbers on the cars parked outside through the Registry of Motor Vehicles website to ascertain the names of their owners.
“Gosh, there’s Laura Middleman, and Esther Blundsoe–it should be a fun party!” he says. Mischke falls for his guile and allows him to enter, accepting–with obvious distaste–his proffer of a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
“An armpit fart–you’re so funny!”
Wansleigh is an example of a growing phenomenon fueled by the widening gap between women’s higher level of education compared to the opposite sex; “hen party crashing” by males who have trouble meeting and mating because of their occupations.
“An all-female in-home retailing event is a target-rich environment for men who jumped off the treadmill of advancement due to video games, fantasy football or Thursday night all-the-chicken-wings you can eat promotions at Dave and Buster’s,” says sociologist Nathan Cummings of the New England School of Public Policy. “You’ve basically got a living room full of women to hit on with no competition, so if you can’t at least get a lunch date out of it you’re not even trying.”
“Oh my God–he pronounces ‘on-DEEV’ ‘EN-dive.’”
“In-home retailing” refers to events organized by a housewife to sell consumer goods such as cosmetics, clothing or kitchen items to other women, using a comfortable setting, finger food, high-pressure sales tactics and “guilt-tripping.” “The implicit message is, you come into my home and eat my hors d’oeuvres, you damn well better buy a fancy sweater or at least a purse,” says Melinda Parcills, head of design for Upscale Clothes, which describes itself as a “friend-to-friend merchandising company.” “A woman could hypothetically walk out empty-handed, but she’d never be able to show her face at her country club again.”
Wansleigh works as a grease-trap cleaner, a profession dominated by males that, for some reason, is not subject to agitation by women’s groups to increase representation of the fairer sex among its members. “I don’t know what it is,” he says, as he dips a celery stick in a bowl of crème fraiche and dill. “Women seem to prefer high-paying jobs in business and the professions to the personal satisfaction you get from pulling a big brown gob of gunk out of a narrow aperture.”