A week before the opening of New Moon (the second installment in the Twilight saga), I hosted (if I do say so myself) a fabulous Twilight party. What made it so great were the guests and the decorations. The guests’ ages were wildly varied: I had a group of twenty-something women from work (the glampires); a group of women in their thirties, forties and fifties; and my 8- and 9-year-old nieces. The glampires were given the job of creating the desserts, and they spared no effort or imagination. Molly filled oral syringes with black cherry jello and vodka for the ultimate vampire jello shots; Nikki baked a red velvet cake with raspberry jam oozing out of two fang bites in the cream cheese frosting; Heidi made blood-spattered red velvet cookies; and Liana made brownies with red sprinkles, and every brownie had a photo from the Twilight movies attached to a toothpick and inserted into the brownies. But the young women weren’t the only creative ones; my good friend—who must remain nameless due to her “shyness”—made sugar cookies from scratch and wrote “Bite Me” in icing on every single cookie.

The night before the party, Molly, and my incredibly creative and hard-working sister-in-law, Donna, helped me decorate the house. Molly had culled ideas from Twilight Internet sites and we put together quite a display (feel free to check out the photos on my Facebook page: Patsy Bahner Porco). Once we had finished, we watched the Twilight movie. Only I had seen it before (18 times, to be exact). Molly, being a recent college grad, made a drinking game out of it: every time Bella bit her lip, we took a drink. We ran out of beer before Bella ran out of lip.

The party itself was a tribute to my guests. They all mingled and participated in the scavenger hunt and the trivia game (although half of Team Jacob kept disappearing during the trivia contest). Neither team won—each team knew the answer to every question they were asked— but that was good because that way, everyone got a prize. I had stocked up on Twilight pins, stickers, bookmarks and Native American beaded rings.

The funniest part of the evening happened twice. Two relatives, Victoria and Michele, arrived about an hour after the party had started. In the interim, one group of women had congregated in the living room to talk and another group had migrated to the back of the house, into the family room, to watch Twilight. I was in the front of the house, when Victoria came up to me and whispered that there was “a whole roomful of women in the family room, staring into space.”  Then she asked if I knew that they were there. She didn’t realize that they were watching the movie and only looked comatose. The television wasn’t visible if you were looking into the room. Five minutes later, Michele ran up to me and expressed the same amazement. Every time I think of that, I laugh. How did they think those women got into the house without my noticing? All in all, it was a great time and I’m glad I had the party since the Twilight books and movie have given me great joy over the past year. I never stop reading those four books. Once I finish one, I start another, and in no specific order. Sometimes, I just read the pages that I’ve turned down at the corners. They’re the romantic pages.

After the party, I looked forward to seeing New Moon, which was coming out the following weekend. I had already bought two tickets to the Saturday show because I thought I couldn’t face the mayhem of the Thursday midnight showing or even the Friday showings. So, on Thursday night, I was bathed and in my pajamas, when my husband asked why I wasn’t going to the midnight show. I didn’t have to work until noon on Friday, so he said I should go. I told him there was no way I could get a ticket two hours before the show. Well, there was a way he could get me a ticket, and he did. Our neighborhood multiplex has eight theaters and New Moon was being screened in most of them. So, Frank bought me a ticket online and even drove me to the show and picked me up at 2:30 a.m. He didn’t want me to have to deal with parking at midnight. What a guy. He really is my Edward, even though he hates when I say that. The movie was great, even though it was me and a bunch of high school girls. I got a kick out of the swooning and cheering when Jacob ripped off his shirt for the first (of many) times. The audience was keyed up before the lights went down, but once the show started, they were dead silent. They hung on every word and you could have heard that famous pin drop. I saw it again on the following Saturday, during the day, and the audience was much less appreciative. I don’t even know why some of those people were there, since they mocked certain scenes and jeered at the dialogue. From now on, I’m only going to Twilight movies where the audience is composed of other Twi-hards.

Thank you Stephenie Meyer and the entire cast for a truly great year. This is escapism at its pinnacle.