Let me share an anecdote with you. Forgive me if some of the details may be wrong. I'm old and addle-headed.

One afternoon in, probably, 1974, Chuck McDonald called me, and said Let's go. Party. Free drinks.

Those were different times. In 1974, the drinking age was 18, and I wasn't, yet. In the mid-seventies, today's jailable offenses were dismissable indiscretions. Drunk driving earned an escort home. Possession of marijuana got a severe tongue lashing. And maybe you lost your stash.

So, in, probably, 1974, Chuck McDonald called me, and said Let's go. Party. Free drinks.

He sounded desperate.

It turned out that Col. McDonald, Chuck's dad, was hosting a pre-election party for Luther Jones, and the potential turnout was less than the the Colonel had probably promised. So, in an act of desperate political expediency, Col. McDonald called up the underage youth to fill out the crowd. At the party, I sloshed through a couple of rum and cokes in an historically indeterminate location, (in hazy extrapolation, maybe the Cortez), until, at some early point in the evening, Woodrow Bean, Sr., for whom the highway is named, with his craggy face and bushy eyebrows, leaned over my fellow high-schoolers and me and said, “So, are you boys old enough to, uh, vote?”

Pre-election parties are different than post-election parties. Pre-election parties are seduction. Post-election parties are payoff. On election night, I went to some post-election parties.

The first I attended was Regina Arditti's. It was still early. In fire stations and elementary schools across the city, the caucuses were still rocking. Poll workers trickled into the old house at the corner of Arizona and Mesa. The buffet was lasagna and assorted fruit and cheese, and the beer was domestic. A live band dealt jazz rock from the corner of the entry room as results shown sporadically on the big screen TV. Judicial races aren't sexy. The results didn't get a lot of TV coverage. When I left, it looked like Regina's race was headed for a runoff.

Afterwards I walked to the Soho lounge where Marisa Marquez was hosting her after party. Outside some professional political operatives sweated election results on their cellphones. Inside the DJ was playing Justin Timberlake and Kanye West in the spaces between televised election coverage. The spread was barbecue, brisket and pork and sausage, from Rudy's, and the bar was cash. Fiscal responsibility at its finest. TV crews flitted around the candidate like bumblebees. Sometime during the evening I seemed to move, in the perception of the attendees, from freeloader to fourth estate, and I got the sense that they liked the freeloader better. Or maybe that was just the rum talking. At one point in the evening, probably close to when the race was called, Marisa asked me “Are you being nice to my people?” I thought I was.

From there I hit the Hillary party, where the Hal Marcus gallery used to be. It was late by the time I got there, and most of the crowd had cleared out, except for four or five dozen die-hard Clintonites. I found a nearly full bottle of Chivas in the kitchen and mixed myself a Scotch and Coke in a styrofoam coffee cup. I wandered into the TV room and caught Senator Shapleigh coming out of a room marked Staff Only.

“A couple of weeks ago you could feel the momentum change,” he told me. “You could see it in Obama's face.”

Then he said he had to go and left.

I wandered around the old gallery and got the sense it was an old house. I finished my drink, and found some cases of Bud at the front desk, and popped the top on a can. Obama came on the TV and people booed and catcalled, as though they were vehemently invested in the race, and afterwards happily percolated in twos and threes and fives throughout the building, celebrating Hillary's victory as though it was their own.

This year is an historic election, in terms of participation and diversity and choice. The parties should rock.