E-Mail This Article to a Friend It’s your party Before you cry about it, try these party-planning tips from the experts BY RUTH TOBIAS

The days when planning a party meant scoring a keg and unclogging the toilet are over. From now on, it’s all about gold-lettered invitations and canapés, ivories tinkling and champagne flutes clinking. Top hats and little black dresses. Ice sculptures and doves ...

Well, maybe someday. For now it’s about eschewing the cheese curls and Pictionary in favor of using your imagination and showing some style. It’s about maintaining realistic expectations as you marshal your organizational skills. And, ultimately, it’s about ensuring a good time, for yourself as well as for your guests.

By way of inspiration, we asked some local pros to name the most important things novice hosts should keep in mind as they approach the day of the big event.

Choose a unifying theme

The advantage of a theme, explains Ellen Hochberger of Hostess Helper Inc. (20 Whittlesey Road, Newton, 617-244-7465), is that it gives you a firm yet flexible foundation on which to build your party. She uses ethno-cultural themes as a case in point: "They’re easy enough to do because you start with a menu and then you can go from there, deciding at each step how elaborate you want to get. If it’s a Mexican theme you choose, then you can have some kind of Mexican dinner, put up Mexican decorations, and the waitstaff can even wear Mexican attire." In other words, building on the foundation of the fiesta, you start with the food: do you want a casual buffet with, say, a taco bar and other walkabout snacks, or do you want a sit-down dinner, beginning perhaps with avocado soup or ceviche, continuing with turkey mole, and ending with natillas (custard)? From there, the beverage selection — beer, tequila, margaritas, and maybe some tropical juices — is a snap; as for decoration, depending on your budget, it can be as simple as a few well-placed sombreros and a Frida Kahlo poster or as showy as an assemblage of Mexican folk art on the tables and textiles on the walls, a homemade piñata overhead, and the like. By the same token, you can check off music by making a compilation of everything from traditional folk music to rock acts like Café Tacuba, or by splurging on the services of a strolling mariachi trio. And so on; the same formula would apply were you to choose a Russian, Irish, or, heck, Micronesian theme.

‘Make the party your own’

That’s the advice of A.J. Williams at Creative Events Inc. (31 Newbury Street, Boston, 617-267-2244; www.creativeeventsinc.com), implying that to some extent your theme should be you — not literally, of course, complete with rounds of You Trivia and grade-school photos as party favors, but in the sense that you "put yourself into the event, personalize it, and keep it original." The best way to do this, Williams says, is to "go conversational" when it comes to detail. "You can print up napkins with a work by your favorite artist on them, and they would be a conversation piece. You could create your own specialty cocktail. You could make a dish that’s based on an old family recipe." In each case, you’re offering not just food or a drink or a paper product, but a starting point for discussion. You can take this principle even further and make the party your guests’ as well as your own. For instance, you could ask attendees to send the name of a favorite song with their RSVP and make a compilation of the results. Or you could ask them to reveal some salient tidbit about themselves — within the bounds of decorum, of course — and make place cards with trivia questions written on the inside; guests could then read aloud the questions and try to guess which of their tablemates trains homing pigeons, whose native language is Tagalog, and so forth. The point is simple and rather poetic: everyone and everything has a story, and it’s your job as host to create a forum for their telling.

Relax!

According to Interactive Cuisine’s (Cambridge, 617-868-5995; www.interactivecuisine.com) Julia Shanks, the entire "success of a party is contingent on the host being relaxed and having a good time — if the host is calm, the guests will feed off his or her ease." Of course, relaxation requires some forethought: Shanks says she coaches her clients "to prepare as much ahead of time as possible, and to plan a menu that doesn’t require last-minute preparations. Save the complicated recipes for smaller, more intimate gatherings." Ultimately, it’s "better to serve a stew that you can keep warm in the oven than a sole meunière that requires last-minute finesse, will cause you to become stressed, and, most important, keeps you from spending time with the guests — the reason to entertain in the first place." In fact, Shanks says, you should aim to get out of the kitchen well ahead of schedule: "Reserve the 30 minutes before the guests arrive for sitting on the sofa with your favorite magazine, drinking a glass of wine." To provide a model for such a "relaxed disposition," she invokes her namesake, the iconic cooking-show host Julia Child: "Despite various kitchen fiascos, she made the viewers feel that even when they made mistakes, the food could and still would be delicious. She taught us how to recover from our mistakes" — and, when all else failed, how to laugh them off.

Finally, we might turn to poor Martha in our hour of need. Offering a comprehensive guide to party planning in the last chapter of her gorgeous tome Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook (Clarkson Potter, 1999), Stewart thinks of everything so that you won’t overlook anything — urging, for instance, that you tailor your guest list to your living space (there should be "just enough people to create a sense of movement and conviviality") and encouraging creativity when it comes to serving implements ("cutting boards, baskets, tall jars, glass and ceramic vases, and bowls of all kinds can be pressed into service"). Hey, nobody needs to know you got your idea of a good time from a convicted felon.

Ruth Tobias can be reached at ruthtobias@earthlink.net