Newt Finally Crushes His Solo Cup and Leaves the Kegger.

When you were younger, did your mom or dad ever bark out, just before you left the house for the evening, "Just remember, nothing good ever happens after midnight!"?

Depending on how you define the word, "good," I've grown to believe it's a fairly accurate statement. And in the case of Newt Gingrich's presidential foray, it's now so long after midnight that the birds are chirping and the paper boy only has half his route left.

Yes, Newt is the guy, that guy we've all known, who stayed too long at the party.

During his year-long foray in pursuit of our nation's highest office, Gingrich wallowed in irrelevancy for half of it. Despite a primary win in his native Georgia as well as a victory by a wiry, silver back hair in South Carolina, Gingrich hasn't held a polling lead since 2011.

Okay, and that was back when frontrunners rotated in and out of public favor like toothless skanks to Ted Nugent's dressing room at an NRA convention.

Since then, Newt has whored himself out to a sugar daddy casino mogul whose super PAC kept our fuzzy Muppet stocked with enough Sugar Free Red  Bull and mutton jerky to sustain Callista and him through those all-night steel horse rides. Yet he's still managed to rack up six hundred thousand dollars in debt, plus a forty-thousand dollar per day Secret Service tab at our expense.

And we all know those Secret Service guys have better things to do.

But alas, Newt has decided it's time to fish his car keys out of the bowl and leave the party. The floor is sticky, the keg is empty and the hosts have been yawning since around 1:30. They thought that putting the remaining pigs in a blanket into freezer bags might have signified a strong enough hint, but Newt stayed.

Rick Santorum left a couple of hours ago. He and Michele Bachmann's husband, Marcus, had to be somewhere to lay hands on a guy and speak in tongues to cure him of his gayness.

Michele puked after accidentally taking a huge drink from a Solo cup filled with Rick Perry's chew spit, but old dependable Herman was there, as usual, to give her a ride home.

Perry went out for another can of Copenhagen but couldn't remember how to get back.

Sitting in his van in the driveway, Ron Paul never did make it into the house, which left Gingrich alone in the living room with no one to talk to.

And so, after nodding off a couple of times with one wing-tipped shoe up on the coffee table, Newt Gingrich wiped the drool from his cheek, hoisted his carcass off the sofa and staggered out the door without even saying goodbye.

That's okay, though, I can say it. Bye, Newt.

Where's the party?

I think I must be missing something.

Maybe it's my advancing age. Maybe I'm one of  those outlying planets, like Uranus or Pluto, which orbits so far from the sun that it takes fifteen years to find out what happened last Thursday.

I suppose I'm a little sensitive because I work in fashion advertising, and in order to rake in the green, we must peddle the black, in the form of little black holiday dresses. Or medium black or plus size black. Whatever your size, you'll step out in style this season.

Okay, that was weird and annoying. Sorry.

My employer is also fervently pushing men's tuxedos because, apparently, we're now kicking off the biggest party season of the year, bigger than a slate of all-new Kardashian episodes. That's fantastic; I love parties. I'm a "my-red-plastic-cup-runneth-over," party aficionado.

The thing is, I currently don't, nor have I ever, worn a tux to anything but weddings and proms, and it's been so long that none were black. Where are all these black tie galas? Who are these people? Am I merely an insignificant, jean-and t-shirt clad island in a sea of dashing partygoers filled with Carringtons, Ewings and Bond, James Bond?

Actually, I couldn't care less about dressing up that fancily for an evening of patent leather follies. I'm a low maintenance reveler, whose party modus operandi has evolved slightly, yet not changed all that much.

Like most of us, the only parties I attended as a school-aged kid were birthday affairs where all activities were scheduled to culminate with the grand cake and present-opening ritual. After indulging in a few games or maybe eating some bad pizza, it was time for the birthday boy to get his.

I prided myself on consistently hugging the guest of honor to grow an inch. Pinches are mean and can bruise. Plus, I used to get spanked for pinching.

High school parties differed widely from the structured, adult-sanctioned kiddie bashes. No agenda was necessary when forty people gathered by a river, a keg of Rainier in the bed of some dude named Lonnie's Mazda pickup. The only certainty was a makeout session between two random folks who would deny the entire episode at school on Monday.

I prided myself on consistently hugging Lonnie, or whomever facilitated the event. Chipping in a couple of bucks for the keg seemed so shallow and impersonal.

I believe the word "college" is Latin for "It's noon somewhere." The party concept rose to art form status during those four (or five, in my case) years of higher achievement. We wore togas, asked girls their majors at least seven hundred times and learned to drink beer out of receptacles normally reserved for lifting and separating.

I prided myself on consistently hugging the person at the party who looked the saddest. Despite my good intentions, let's just say the emotion no longer betrayed sadness following my embrace.

As an adult finally free of academic constraints, the parties I attended still enjoyed a collegiate atmosphere, yet with an an added air of sophistication. After all, malt liquor had replaced beer as the beverage of choice. Frequently, the guests would stuff themselves into the kitchen to maintain close proximity to the liquid refreshments, leaving the main room virtually vacant, other than really tired people who lay face down on the living room futon.

At these homey events, I prided myself on consistently walking down the dark hallway, opening the door, turning on the light and hugging whichever couple had chosen the coat-piled bed as a good place to vigorously nap.

We don't even call them parties anymore. We're all pushing fifty and they're not referred to as "get-togethers" or "barbecues," certainly not formal soirees where cumberbuns and bow ties, silk pashminas and strappy heels spackle the room. It's usually a small group of friends, some wine and nice chairs with lumbar support.

I pride myself on hugging everyone in attendance. And most of these people finally know me so well that, by golly, they usually hug me back.