My dream bachelor party

(No offense to my actual bachelor party, which was awesome and did also involve kidnapping!)

This was quotes in Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering. I read it for my Future of Conflict project, and took more notes and quotes down in this post.

Four months after he got engaged, Felix Barrett, a prominent London-based theater director, received a key in the mail in an envelope marked “To be continued.” He heard nothing else for months. “It was blissful torture,” he later said, “the whole world suddenly took on a heightened hyper-real feeling, and everything was shrouded in mystery.”

After that first envelope arrived, he waited. Eventually, another letter arrived: “Now we can begin.” A suitcase was delivered to him at work. Inside, he later told The New York Times, he found a tide table, map coordinates, and a small shovel. He followed the coordinates and found himself on the banks of the River Thames. There, he dug up a box full of photographs of words on a computer screen. Those photographs told him that if he completed a series of challenges, he would be welcomed into a secret society.

For weeks, he would receive bizarre prompts from odd messengers: strangers, the words on a cat collar, letters in remote vacation spots. Each prompt included some kind of challenge that he would have to complete were he to enter this secret society. Barrett being Barrett, he obliged. He found himself doing half-marathons and climbing between boats on ropes. Each individual challenge presumably took him one step closer to that secret society.

Then suddenly one day he was blindfolded, kidnapped, and taken to an old manor house where he was greeted by thirty men in hooded robes. They were his best friends. He was at the bachelor party of a lifetime—his own.