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Table Talk
Contributor Julia Reed discusses the ins and outs of seating guests and shares firsthand rules for success
Floral designers Jon Davis and Jaime Beard of The Avid Companies in Birmingham share four unique ways to seat guests for your next soirée. Here, place cards of pastillage were created for an elegant dinner party. The sugary mixture is usually used for making molded decorations, such as flowers and leaves on cakes. "We liked these place cards because their delicacy and muted colors accentuate, without competing against, the vintage linen napkins, silver, and china," says Davis.
"We wanted a frilly, girly way to assign seats for a ladies' garden party, and we've had ribbon embroidered many times for other uses, but never for place cards," says Beard. The original idea was to tie the ribbon around the napkin, but that seemed uninspired to Davis and Beard, who are always looking to create the unexpected. "I took glass cube vases, cut some garden roses, and all the elements fell into place," Beard explains.
Photos by Howard L. Puckett
Floral Design by Jon Davis and Jaime Beard

When I got married a couple of years ago, I had no problem with the commitment itself, the dress (in the gifted hands of Carolina Herrera, what could go wrong?), or even the guest list -- by the time you're 40, you know who's important to you. The only difficult thing to cope with was the seating at our rehearsal dinner. It was held in the middle of nowhere in the Mississippi Delta, in an abandoned cotton gin that I'd renovated and furnished with long medieval-style banquet tables lit with six-foot-high candelabra. I knew the setting would be dramatic and beautiful, but the problem was how to properly -- and entertainingly -- seat more than 100 people from all around the globe, who ranged in age from 8 to 80 and in occupations from artist to makeup artist, preacher to planter.

A close and extremely organized friend and I sat on her apartment floor armed with poster board, sticky notes (hot pink for women, blue for men), and lots of wine for weeks on end. We stewed and stewed and mixed and matched and got so stumped that on the day itself, an entire table still hadn't been entirely filled. By the time I presented the final seating chart to the woman in charge of the dinner, she didn't have time to arrange the place cards on trays as we had planned, so guests were left to wander around that huge space, squinting hard to find their places. At one point I realized we'd put a 9-year-old boy next to the wife of one of my husband's law partners.

Perhaps seating is such a trauma because the rules are relatively new -- the dinner party itself did not come into its own until the last half of the 19th century. Until then, formal dinners were the exclusive province of the aristocracy and were usually preludes to the entertainment rather than the entertainment itself. The banquets featured an almost pell-mell rush to the table, with little order to the seating. All that changed in the Victorian era, according to Roy Strong in his excellent book, Feast: A History of Grand Eating, when the seated dinner evolved into "one of the great prestige symbols ... an index of a family's taste, discrimination, bank balance, and connections." In the new age of commerce, it was an occasion "for combining pleasure and profit" -- not to mention an opportunity "for the host to display his wife and daughters to advantage."

With so much riding on the dinner party's success, it is no wonder that etiquette and manners books explaining how to navigate them suddenly abounded. One went so far as to call the party "a direct road to obtaining footing in society," and another listed professions that were acceptable presences at the table. They included medicine, the army and navy, artists, sculptors, and architects, "but not always their families." The mad rush to the table became an orderly procession, as handbooks instructed hosts to tell each male guest which lady he should escort into dinner.
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