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.

The correct method, she writes, is to accord a foreign guest the most importance, followed by a stranger (usually a guest brought by a friend), someone who has held an official position in the past, and a guest invited for the first time. "Constant guests," relatives, and children bring up the rear, and people of great age or who still hold official positions trump everyone. She also warned that particular care must be taken with foreigners and officials, not necessarily because they're so wonderful, but because they'll know the rules.

My favorite senator, Thad Cochran, couldn't make it until the wedding day, but had he been there for the rehearsal, I certainly would've seated him next to my mother, in accordance with Fenwick's rules. We did give all the foreigners (the best man and his wife were from Madrid) excellent seats and swell partners, but the fact that they all happened to be fabulous company had at least as much to do with their placement as with their personalities. Though not listed as a factor in any official rule book, being good company puts you up there with generals and octogenarians -- the real difficulty of seating is making sure that personalities mesh.

At the most important dinner of my life, I wanted the people I care about most in this world to have a wonderful time. When I asked my father who he wanted to sit by, he said, "somebody who hasn't heard my act yet." In other words, a woman with whom he could flirt and who would hear his stories with a fresh ear. So I sat him beside the sexy and funny Australian partner of my good friend, artist John Alexander. And for the rest of the week, he couldn't stop talking about the femme fatale his thoughtful daughter had placed him beside.