How I got 85 people to party in my 400 square foot apartment: a COVID tale
As someone who *loves* parties, I was very sad when I realized there was zero chance of going out with friends for my birthday this year. On the other hand, I’m a terminal optimist and I figured a Zoom party could give me the opportunity to have the massive house party that I could never have in my shoebox-sized apartment, and that I could essentially invite every person I know, no matter where they are.
The last time I tried out something pseudo-experimental with Zoom, I got several texts and emails asking me how I set it up. Since this idea is… on a larger scale, I decided to document it from the very beginning, in case it goes well and others want to try it, but also so I can track the inevitable hiccups as they arise so that others can avoid them.
I wanted to do something different from the usual “virtual hangout,” so I started brainstorming less annoying versions of theme parties. My initial plan was to hire a tarot reader and give her a breakout room; the rest of my friends and I could go one-by-one to the Reading Room, and otherwise sit around and…. do what? I love a big party, so at the minimum, I was thinking 50 people. Are we just supposed to sit in a grid and awkwardly talk over each other? Maybe we could play a game… but my Zoom Game Nights have been plagued by the fact that not everyone has a great internet connection or consistent access to two devices. So I was trying to think of fun games that wouldn’t require a blazing connection or a second device… but what if someone just doesn’t want to play? I kept mulling over different ideas but felt stumped.
I went ahead and booked a tarot reader, someone in my circle of friends who is a respected reader and was willing to participate in an experimental online party format. I already had a Zoom Pro account for work, so the extended event times and features weren’t a problem: only the host needs a Pro account to activate them; the guests can be Free users.
I started digging into articles about the Zoom “breakout room” feature and found this Medium piece about using them for parties. I could have my main room, the reading room, and a room to play games. But what about people who want to cluster in smaller groups? Friends from college who haven’t seen each other in years and just want to catch up amongst themselves?
This was when I started to think literally in terms of house parties — what about the “kitchen”? All of those inevitable spots where people wander off to chat? And a front porch for the smokers… What if there’s a room for specific topics of conversation that might span the different groups so that people might make new friends? A colleague recently told me “you never do anything when there’s an opportunity to overdo it instead.” I took this as a compliment.
I think best on paper, so I started creating a model of my fantasy Party Mansion. I found a sort of generic large house blueprint and designed the Maison de Quarantaine Quarante-Quatre (it’s hard to be mad about turning 44 when it creates such terrific alliteration).
My three largest core groups of friends are from Pittsburgh, PA (where I lived for ten years, through college and the first part of graduate school), Kansas City (where I have lived since 2011), and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (the organization that hosts my annual professional conference, which was sadly canceled this year along with literally everything else that is good in the world). Rooms for those three groups were no-brainers and the names of the rooms are, of course, dumb inside jokes from each group. I’ve been having near-weekly virtual meetups with smaller segments of most of my friend groups, and many of them seem as starved for interaction and fun as I am. Among those people, a very large number are visual artists, and many are musicians.
I thought having collaboration spots could potentially be cool. Zoom has a collaborative whiteboard that can be activated in the breakout rooms. For the musicians, my original plan was to convince 3 or 4 of my closer musician friends to chill there for a while and encourage experimentation; my method of bribery was going to be to send each of them an otamatone in the mail as inspiration. I never claimed every one of these ideas was a winner. That did, however, put “the mail” into my head, which we will come back to shortly.
My first draft of the Maison had 8 rooms, with one that was going to exist but stay locked, for a dash of Mystery. I kept thinking back to the best qualities of the Great Parties Of My Youth (both those that I hosted and attended). Although I enjoy being Surface Extra for entertainment value, I’m not a huge fan of highly-structured or themed parties. Most of my friends have spouses and/or kids and during a quarantine and intense civil unrest definitely don’t need another requirement or responsibility handed to them. I wanted to give people a lot of options without actually asking them to do anything, other than showing up and being game to meet new people and try out a potentially rickety structure.
I do have a lot of friends who love karaoke, so once I gave up on the idea of music collaboration, I decided to put karaoke in the Conservatory. I’d already hosted two Zoom karaoke parties (modeled after the one featured in Vulture, which paired Zoom with a site called Watch2Gether) and more or less had the kinks on that worked out. Aside from the musicians and artists and karaoke enthusiasts, most of my friends are film and media scholars, and I wanted to have a room dedicated to them, even if it didn’t get used much. Again, I was thinking of parties in college, when we’d set up a tv in one room and just run experimental films on a loop, or compilations of B-movie trailers. I decided on a Screening Room that would run films released in the year I was born (1976 was an excellent year for movies). That one is easy enough: load the movie in Netflix or Amazon or wherever, mute it and put on the subtitles, share the maximized screen, and people can hang out and talk or text in the breakout room’s chat.
Here we’re getting to a sticking point. I am lucky enough to have access to a work laptop in addition to my own MacBook, but now I wanted more than two screens. One for my primary host presence (the “Main Session”), one to share a whiteboard for the Atelier, one to share the screening, and one to float around. I asked around for tablets to borrow and I finally (finally) bit the bullet and sprang for the Mercedes-level Google Fiber. A few weeks out, I bricked my MacBook in a very dramatic coffee accident, but a friend offered a loaner laptop in case the replacement didn’t arrive in time, so I ended up with the four devices I needed plus a backup to have on hand.
In thinking some more about Meatspace Parties of Yore, I also got to longing for things like cake and signature cocktails, things that I couldn’t provide for my party guests. Unless….
Now is when I note that this massive party that I am planning, as of now, is costing me pretty much nothing. And I do believe that you could do this without spending any money and have it be great.
But I wanted to keep on my brand of Overdoing Things, and, fortunately, I have been saving for a year for a trip to the Netherlands this summer. Since that’s off indefinitely, I started considering methods of sharing cake and booze.
First, I needed a way of getting everyone’s addresses quickly. I asked for those with the simple explanation of “I am sending everyone a paper invitation to my Zoom birthday party lol” which no one questioned — and I did in fact do that.
Now that I had their addresses, I could send party favors. As much as I enjoy extravagance, I needed to be careful on this one, as the shipping alone was going to cost a bit (although I have several tricks on minimizing cost that I’ll share in a moment); cost and shelf-stability were my chief concerns. In terms of a “signature cocktail,” I thought of mini champagne cans, but the risk of postal explosion seemed high; then I remembered seeing Capri Sun-style cocktail pouches, assumed they might be at Costco, and was delighted to discover an entire world of Pouched Booze that I didn’t even know existed. So: drinks, check.¹ There really was only one possibility with cake, given the shipping issue. And as funny as a box with just cake and a pouch of cocktail might be, I wanted to include a few dumb, fun things as well, and some beginning instructions on what this party was going to look like in reality. I hate the idea of sending, essentially, a Party Syllabus, but as much as I admire and love my brilliant friends, not all of them are great at following directions, and some are hilariously un-tech savvy. And — as far as I could tell — not a lot of people had tried to maneuver a Zoom party at this scale. I threw in some glow sticks and balloons, too.
To make the shipping as pain-free as possible, I needed to give myself a couple of days of lead time (also, Memorial Day fell during the shipping window). Having participated in a Holiday Cookie Swap that’s gotten entirely out of hand, participation-wise, I know a few good USPS hacks. First: they will send you priority mail boxes *for free*. You go to the USPS website, choose the size you want, and they will mail them to your house in stacks of 10 or 25. For no charge. Not even shipping. (Can you tell how amazed I am by this, even now??)
I chose one of the medium flat rate boxes (11x8.5x5.5). But I’m not sending 30-some medium boxes Priority. I bought a huge, cheap roll of brown kraft paper and wrapped the boxes before addressing and sending most via USPS Ground, cutting the cost nearly in half.² Local boxes got dropped off by hand (with a COVID-Era Heads Up of “I’m leaving a mystery package on your porch, don’t fear it”).
All of the packages were sent with time to spare, and as of Party Day, 35 of the 39 mailed packages had been delivered; three didn’t arrive on time (one of which was international) and one was lost. Honestly, these are not bad stats for an under-funded entity in a time of abject national chaos, but I did feel bad for the friends who didn’t get their party favors in time.
A few days before the party itself, I built an email list with the attendees and sent out a Google Doc with more thorough setup instructions and the actual Zoom invitation link (and password). Some of the information in the doc was lifted verbatim from the Vulture and Medium articles mentioned above. I’ll post the full instructions at the bottom of this article.
My party was scheduled to start at 7 so at 6 I started setting up the computers. I put three tables in a spot with reliable light, hung up some balloons, put on my party dress and flower crown, and got to work. I had built the breakout rooms in advance; I’m really glad I learned how to do this, because that was unexpectedly time consuming and I wanted to put them in a structural order that made sense to me so that I wouldn’t waste too much time navigating. It’s also possible to assign people to rooms in advance, but I didn’t want to risk people showing up with different email addresses or getting stuck in a room without being made co-host first (which is what allows them to self-propel around the party).
With my multiple-screen setup, the main difficulty was switching gears for four different operating systems quickly (I ended up staying sober pretty much the entire night [alas], but it was worth the sacrifice), keeping the different screen-room relationships straight (next time I will physically Post-It each one), and the fact that the devices running the browser version of Zoom had such limited capabilities (including some of them refusing to go to gallery view). In the grand scheme of things, pretty minor frustrations.
In the end, I had 17 breakout rooms, which is insane and excessive, and turned out to be an incredible amount of fun. I kept the Foyer at the top to be easy to find, and the tarot Reading Garret at the bottom and marked “Private” so that people didn’t accidentally wander in. At the last minute, I had a surge of “what if no one comes, there is a pandemic and people are protesting police brutality is this really a time for a party” panic.
The clock struck 7. Here is what happened: everything worked exactly as I planned it, perfectly. 85 people came to my Zoom House Party. I had no idea 85 people came to my party until the morning after when I ran the meeting attendance report. I actually had no idea I had *invited* 85 people to my party, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Early on in the night, I did need to stick to the Main Session and make people co-hosts and toss them in the Foyer; this is why I didn’t have a sense of how many people were there: people arrived, I tagged and tossed them, then managed the next group who had arrived while I was doing that. As expected, a couple of people found this usually wordless, forced relocation confusing, but the guests who had already gotten situated were good sports about talking them through and for a long time, everyone just sort of stuck around the Foyer getting to know each other and chatting. One of my friends was an absolute champ and started handwriting a list of who wanted their tarot read, then texted it to me so that I would have the roster ready for the reader when she arrived. Then the first groups started to break off and, like magic, dozens of people popped out of the Foyer and all over the rest of the House.
At first it was very much cliques of existing groups sticking together, but gradually folks scattered into the karaoke room to sing and the screening room to see what was playing, and “let’s go find out who else loves true crime” and “hey I know some people from Pittsburgh maybe I’ll poke my head in to see if any of them are here…” and all of the mixing and mingling and gossiping and meeting new friends that I had hoped would occur. The tarot reader arrived, wandered around a few rooms to get the vibe of the party, then opened the breakout room list on her screen, found the name of the first person on her list, and called them into the Reading Garret. That worked well for the whole night — she just needed to skim the rooms to find the next guest on her list, and private message them to come in.
That wasn’t the only room that was easier than expected: the karaoke champs cut out Watch2Gether entirely. When it was my turn to sing, I pulled up the karaoke version of my song on YouTube, shared my screen and shared my computer audio, the others muted, and voila. There’s nothing *wrong* with W2G; it’s just an unnecessary additional step. YouTube ads are irritating, sure, but once everyone is hopped up on cupcakes and booze-pops, it’s just another quirk added to the weird charm of the online party. The actual artists avoided the art-making room, but other folks dropped in and I was left with a gorgeous, collaborative masterpiece that perfectly suits my taste. I cannot wait to have it printed and framed.
I wasn’t aware that I had invited 85 people because I didn’t count on a predictable turn (aside from folks sharing the link/password with a few extras, which I had said in advance I didn’t mind): couples who go to parties together don’t stick side-by-side the whole night, particularly if they both know people there; so several couples with two devices came separately and split up.
Around midnight CST, the East Coast folks started dwindling and the West Coast was still showing up, and around 2am the last guest logged off and I was in the unfamiliar situation of just having hosted the largest house party of my life and having no cleanup beyond my own empty booze pouches and cupcake crumbs.
Is there a bit of setup and planning required to host an 85-guest Zoom House Party with 17 rooms? Sure. I don’t recommend it for those who dislike the duties of hosting. You’re going to spend a chunk of your night popping back to the main session to get people in and settled. I enjoyed it, because it creates pauses in the night when you can jump to different rooms to check in on groups and say hello to people you may have missed in the initial rush. I am honestly shocked at how smoothly this party went. I had fully expected to crash Zoom with the 10th breakout room or 50th guest. I kept muttering “this is actually working” while bouncing from screen to screen to screen. I had a blast and my guests seemed to enjoy it, too. We are all pushing the very limits of Zoom in this weird-ass moment in history. It was delightful to get to do that for the furtherance of fun, for once. Godspeed, and happy partying.
- In accordance with USPS Publication 52.422.21, I hereby designate Costco Freezer Pops a “cooking wine.” Seriously, I double-reinforced, only mailed to people well over 21, and there were no shipping accidents. If you work for the USPS and are reading this, I apologize and will never do it again, I promise. Please don’t revoke my Mail Privileges.
- I don’t *think* this is frowned upon? My Post Office Ladies have seen me do this and never have had a problem with it. Please repeat my entire USPS apology/disclaimer here if needed.
