Dear Miss Manners: My husband is the president of a local college alumni chapter, and I am the secretary. The chapter recently held an alumni meeting at the residence of the headmaster of a local private high school. Though the setting was a private home, the event was a formal gathering attended by the university president and various dignitaries.
Upon our arrival, five dogs began jumping on us and the other guests. We did not know that the headmaster and his wife had dogs. As I am severely allergic, I quietly asked the hostess if the dogs could be kept upstairs during the meeting.
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She took great offense, loudly declaring that the dogs were her “children” and refusing to move them. I spent the evening wheezing and sneezing through my presentation to the university president.
Was I wrong to make this request? Should I have suffered in silence to avoid offending the hosts?
Gentle Reader: As unpleasant as this situation was for you, Miss Manners can’t help being relieved that it wasn’t even more dangerous.
You and your husband are not employees of the college, but its beneficiaries. Therefore any estrangement would have been a loss to the school, and not to your own status.
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And evidently, the headmaster and his wife do not have human children, if they believe youngsters of any kind should be jumping on their guests — especially ones suffering physical distress. (One wonders at the standard of behavior in the headmaster’s school, if this is what prevails at home.)
Of course you should not have stayed and suffered. You could have apologized to the guests that you had to leave because of your allergy, or you could have stuck the university president with that task. He would have had a strong interest in not alienating the leaders of the alumni group.
Dear Miss Manners: We’ve hosted an annual Kentucky Derby party in our home for years. We invite most of the same people every year, with a few new folks now and then.
We send out the invitations and let them know that we are providing all the food, and also tell them what drinks we will be serving. We ask that they RSVP so we will know how many to prepare for.
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We have had as few as 25 people show up, and as many as 60 — the majority of whom had not responded to our invitation.
I feel compelled to let the non-responders know how rude it is to ignore an invitation and how hard it makes it for us to prepare, but I fear that would be rude as well.
How do I handle non-responders? My first inclination is to ask them if they understand what “RSVP” means, or just to drop them from the list next year. Help.
Gentle Reader: The non-rude way to let them know how rude they are is to ask whether they plan to attend, and then to drop them from next year’s list.
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But Miss Manners wonders why your invitations don’t plainly state “please respond” instead of using a silly French form that some people really might not understand.
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