Home of the Snarkmaiden

Yeah, LA fandom had grown weird about drinking since quite some time. But the thing about any given Clarion West party is that each one plays host not only to the students in the workshop, but the instructor who has been teaching that week, and the instructor is generally going to be a Big Name Writer, someone with their own fairly substantial gravity field. The gravity fields vary, from massive frozen gas jiants like [mumble] to sprightly, mercurial, airless inner planets like [mumffle], but they all exercise a strong social pull in the vicinity of their LaGrange points. At our particular Clarion West party, the planetary body in question was Connie Willis, and after arriving she parked herself next to the kitchen door for much of the party, and the consequent clutter of orbital captures quite naturally filled the space between her and the television set. And the beer and wine were all out on the front deck, so there was less reason to break through than there otherwise might be. So it stayed pretty solidly packed.