Life Is a Party!

A Screaming Blast: Exceptional Entertaining (Rizzoli)
Author Rebecca Gardner, Foreword by Sofia Coppola, Photographs by Adam Kuehl

Rebecca Gardner, the hostess/party maker of our era, recounts her ongoing talents in her new—and first—book, A Screaming Blast: Exceptional Entertaining

Rebecca Gardner is the kind of person you’re happy to concede to. By that, I mean that she is able to organize a person’s life, imbue it with fun memories that endure. Indeed, she actually has the ability to elevate the everyday. As she writes in her new book, A Screaming Blast: Exceptional Entertaining (Rizzoli), “Life can be oatmeal mush, but a party is a chance to seek and find sweet relief.”

Rebecca (who for years was a Contributing Editor at MILIEU, especially at our outset) has since become the hostess, the party maker, of our era–and the party isn’t even close to being over. In the book, which is as much an autobiography as it is a guide to hosting a party, she recounts her formative years in South Texas and the Mississippi Delta, along with her ongoing legacy of hosting events for some of the world’s most famous and influential people in all disciplines. Sofia Coppola, the movie maker, writes in the foreword to the book that her “dream would be to have Rebecca Gardner in charge of the party committee of my life.” Coppola continues to remember a birthday that Gardner organized for her years ago, making that single event a lasting memory that gets even better as time passes and the memories of the festivities grow in importance.

I met Rebecca some fifteen years ago when the college she worked for, The Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), invited me to give a talk to their students at their campus in France. Rebecca wasn’t much older at the time than the undergraduates, yet she already possessed a poise, an innate elegance, a confidence, and an ability to organize and expedite that continues to awe me these years later. She ushered me and other visiting editors and writers and artists through the South of France, making every restaurant meal and reception we attended into something magical. She knew how to seat people, what to order, how to start conversations. She has a kind of inner radiance that she translates into gatherings she creates.

In her book, she relates poignant and moving tales of her upbringing, the family members who mattered to her and influenced her. She goes on to describe the meaning of the many parties she has created for the likes of Tom Ford or Frank Gehry, Lauren Santo Domingo and Sofia Coppola. She conveys the glamour, the fun, and the import of these parties, as well as divulging some of the secrets of her success. “Events are live theater,” she writes. Which means that life itself needs to be the best performance we can give. Rebecca knows how to do that for herself and for her clients. Her party continues.

—David Masello