By Gina Angostura
Columnist

Dear Diary,
Today I was invited to a party! I’m so excited. I’ll have my braces off by then, and Mom says I can get some cool new bellbottoms and maybe get my hair feathered, too! Wait, wait. That’s Marcia Brady’s diary entry. Mine as a teen would have been somewhat different. Think Marcia Brady with crooked teeth on downers. Without the boyfriends. And the great hair. And the 20 pairs of white knee socks.

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We were so poor, my three sisters and I only had one knee sock, which we rotated between us. We had to fake a leg injury and wear a cast so we could wear the sock on our other foot, and you better have had a really great event planned to get a turn. National Honor Society induction did not cut it. We hated the Bradys. And don’t even get me started on those creepy Partridges.

But I really did go to a party this weekend. Well, not really a party. All right, it was a product demonstration at my friend’s house. It was better than spending another Sunday in my bathrobe having a threesome with Ben and Jerry and pre-freaking about the coming work week.

The party was for one of those companies that sells stuff for your kitchen. I don’t want to say the name, but my older brother used to call it “Suckerware,” because, of course, you need a $30 plastic bowl.

I realized as the woman was showing us all of the cool things the products can do (store spaghetti sauce upside down from the ceiling!) that I haven’t needed food storage containers since I became single again.

For one thing, I’m not cooking as much. And when I do, it’s just enough for whoever is around. To be perfectly honest, my new food storage container tends to be the fl oor of my car. That’s where scraps of Taco Bell and Dunkin’ Donuts cups pile up until I get the time once a month or so to clean it all out.

There was a time in my life when these plastic party pieces were the object of all my desire. I wanted my lettuce to be fresh more than anything else. Having coordinated pink bowls of varying sizes lined up in my fridge gave me a great sense of satisfaction, order and accomplishment.

Well, things change. Stuff happens. Now I’m lucky if I get to cook the chicken before it goes bad. I have a bad habit of buying two chicken breasts and putting them in the fridge, because, of course, I’m going to be using them in the next couple of days. Then I get busy – or lazy, or tired – and then I notice the smell when I open the refrigerator door.

“Gina, where do you keep the butter?”

“It’s on the bottom shelf, next to where I store the rotting chicken.”

So yesterday at the party, I bought a $30 Rectangular Chicken Keeper with Super Sucker Seal, as both an attempt to save money and as a tribute to my past. It’s bound to delay chicken decay for a few more days, anyway.

I realized, too, that just because I spent a Sunday afternoon at a product party – actually the only kind of party I feel comfortable at anymore because no one else brings a partner, either – doesn’t mean I’m pathetic.

Really, aside from the money stress, the intermittent loneliness and the ever-present fear of being found in my house dead among 23 cats, being single is a pretty sweet deal.

And who’s to say being coupled would be all that different, in any of the above areas? There’s no guarantee that I wouldn’t be with someone again for a few years, and then be cast off, put on a boat and set adrift in fl ames like a Viking corpse.

Those Vikings, they should have had Suckerware. Much better way to keep things fresh until you have to get rid of them.