From the chapter titled Duly Noted:

“I don’t like to think of myself as the kind of person who brings wine or flowers to a dinner party just to get credit with the hostess. But when you’ve spent an entire evening stressing about whether the hostess knows the Rabbit Ridge merlot is from you, as I did the other night, you have to face certain truths about yourself.

A lot has been written about party going strategies – how to mingle and network and dress and not overeat – but the literature on gift-giving tactics is surprisingly slim, especially for something so crucial.

“What’s really scary,” a friend said, “is when you’re greeted at the door by the spouse who doesn’t care about such things, or, even worse, by a guest who has deputized himself as a para-host. He – it’s usually a guy – takes your wine, or whatever you’ve brought, and puts it down on some remote table, and you know the hostess will never see it or hear about it. She’ll go to her grave thinking you came empty-handed.”

Should this horrible situation arise, what should you do?

“You can’t let it happen in the first place,” a frequent partygoer advised. No matter what happens, you don’t let go if that wine bottle until you’ve shown it to the hostess yourself – even if you have to duke it out with the person taking your coat.”

“What I do,” a friend explained, “is bring something in Tupperware that has to be transferred to a serving plate, or which needs to have a fancy glaze added at the last minute. That way, I’m right there in the kitchen, so there’s now ay the hostess won’t notice me and my gift.”

A variation of this theme involves bringing out flowers and then conducting a very obvious search for a vase, or arriving with a dessert that needs to be flambéed.

But there’s a problem with those maneuvers. If the annoyance factor of accepting your offering becomes too high (or if you set the living room on fire) it may actually outweigh the gift itself, thereby canceling the credit. And then the hostess will remember, but for all the wrong reasons.

“I like to have a bouquet delivered to the hostess the afternoon of the party,” a professional guest revealed. “It’s very elegant.” Yeah, maybe, but pricey, too. In which case, why not take your chances that your present will be noticed, and if it’s not, simply do what George Costanza did in one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes: Steal it back. The self-regifting maneuver is not without its appeal, but getting caught stuffing a dripping bouquet into your clutch is even worse than being busted scoping out the medicine cabinet, and besides, it still leaves you in a no-credit situation. You’ve got the flowers back, but your reputation’s gone.

So, S., if you’re reading this, that great merlot was from me.”