(From Frame Analysis, pp. 262–263)
Observe that the shift from spectacle to game—from encasing events to encased events—typically involves a change in frame, the encased or inner events hopefully generating a realm that is more narrowly organized than that represented by everyday life. In any case, in a precise examination of formal social proceedings, one would expect to find that the formalized starting and stopping brackets were themselves bracketed by informal ones pertaining to the social occasion in which the proceedings were housed. (16)
(16) A structurally interesting issue arises when the inner, official activity is not itself formalized. Some students of parties would hold that "things" don't start with the advent of the first guest, and, in many cases, may never start at all, never, as once was said, get off the floor. Indeed, the understanding that late arrivals may overlap with early leavers implies that no precise formal proceedings will be involved, and that perhaps no particular inner proceedings are demanded. It is easy to identify beginning sequences such as (1) hosts ready to receive; (2) first arrival (if single or couple), allowing for partial assimilation to host-helper role; (3) second arrivals providing the first arrivals with nonhosts to talk to, and, incidentally, with the obligation to talk to persons they might not otherwise spend time with; (4) arrival of sufficient number so that clusters can form, allowing some expression of choice. Terminal phases can also be discriminated. But the midgame is hard to define. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a student of the form, takes Kenneth Pike's position:
The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the Follies. The party has begun. [The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925), pp. 40-41.]
If, following Fitzgerald, one can say that a party "begins" when a contagion of feeling has been accomplished which moves participants out of themselves together and in a pleasant direction, then one could argue that social parties and bridge parties can both ensure that a spectacle will occur; but only the latter can give any assurance that within these brackets an inner activity will take place. What characterizes a social party, in fact, in contrast to organized social occasions with a formalized core, is the precariousness of getting the inner activity going. A teacher in a classroom, a clerk in a court, a chairman at a club meeting, can more or less command a shift from preproceedings small talk to the business at hand, but a host cannot call a party to order. (But observe, although these leaders can often decide on the time to close the official proceedings, they may have appreciably less power to terminate the postproceedings and close out the spectacle.) For one study of the shift from preproceedings to proceedings see Roy Turner, "Some Formal Properties of Therapy Talk," in David Sudnow, ed., Studies in Social Interaction (New York: The Free Press, 1972), pp. 367-396.