Two Bookings, One Ballroom

We arrived from the ceremony to find another event's guests in our ballroom. Not early arrivals — a fully deployed retirement gala for a man named Gerald, sixty tables of his colleagues from forty years at a regional water utility, banner and all: THANK YOU GERALD FOR 40 YEARS.

The venue manager, pale as his own tablecloths, admitted the double-booking and unveiled his solution with the pride of a man presenting a lifeboat made of paper: the folding acoustic divider. The ballroom would be split. We would have the half without the built-in bar; Gerald's people would kindly shuffle their sixty tables into their half. The divider, when deployed, stopped four feet short of the ceiling and transmitted sound like a drum skin.

Dinner proceeded as a duet. Our toasts were punctuated by roars of laughter from Gerald's side; their slideshow narration bled into our first courses ('...and here's Gerald at the sedimentation tanks in 1997...'). Our band tuned up; their DJ counter-attacked with ABBA. By eight o'clock the divider was less a wall than a shared joke, with guests from both sides meeting at the gap by the fire exit to trade drinks and intelligence.