Last weekend, we got invited to some parties. We did not know, until after we accepted, that one of them was a John Kerry Party. Do you remember the Oakland Peace Gang from Fahrenheit 9/11, eating cookies and amiably chatting about...well, peace, and how we could all get some? This gathering made the Oaklanders look like a celebration from a 1978 Major League Baseball clubhouse.

At first, it was a sort of passively bad event. We walked up to a 2nd floor Somerville apartment and helped ourselves to some free cookies. There was no alcohol, so I had water and Leah enjoyed some orange juice. There were parents and other assorted old people, and we assiduously avoided them, because, who wants to talk to old people? There were signs on the wall on which we were encouraged to write Kerry talking points. On the "Civil Liberties" poster, for example, people had written things like, "More respect for personal freedoms," and "No harassing libraries," and "All of the above!!"

We were busy examining the cabinets that the landlord had seen fit to suspend from the ceiling in the middle of the kitchen, effectively cutting the room into two tiny parts, one of which had a view of the back of the stove, when we were called to order.

"Order," in this case, meant that the poor host gamely tried to get people to brainstorm (his word) ways to help Kerry win. It was quickly established that Kerry had already won Massachusetts. "Wait," said a fortyish woman sporting sandals, wool socks, and a fashionable middle part. "College campuses! There must be thousands of kids at Harvard from Ohio!" We did not debate whether this assertion was, in fact, a fact. Instead, a general murmuring began about how hard the Republican lackeys were making it to get absentee ballots.

"I think the deadline was last Friday," said a man who had regaled us with a tale of how, simply because he lives in New Hampshire, he was denied an absentee ballot in his home state of Ohio. The missing of the deadline did not stop us, and in fact people moved on the bigger and better goals.

As the host tried to get people to commit to "doing something tomorrow," his grandmother sabotaged the effort by decrying "Kerry's mealy message" and wondering if perhaps we could get together to make a commercial and send it to Mary Beth Cahill. He thanked his grandmother politely but was interrupted by a woman who said she had already "sent Mary Beth - and I know her real well, and I think she's good for John - reams of human resource studies showing a worker's crisis in America, because we need to affect the message!"

"No," said the host. Then, surprised at his own backbone, it seemed, he apologized and went on. "What I mean," he said, "is that Bill Clinton is changing the message. We can't. But we can register unregisted voters. So, who will go to Tufts? Who can go to BU?"

"I'm starting grad school at Brandeis next week," said someone else. "Maybe I could see if there's a Democratic Student Club." Right. While you're at it, see if there's a Jewish Student Club. I think they hold meetings together and call the club, "Brandeis."

The forces advocating actually convincing the Kerry campaign began, miraculously, to overwhelm the gang that wanted to register voters. We carefully gathered some bumper stickers to put on Republican friends' cars and slipped to the stairs. As we left, someone called out, "Is there a Kerry campaign office in Boston?" When we arrived at the next party, there was dancing and chicken wings.