Defending the Right to Party

Both Halloween parties I attended were effectively shut down by noise complaints from neighbors who started calling the police at 10 p.m. In both instances, the police responded to a complaint from a single neighbor whose antisocial intolerance ruled the night, despite advance notice of the celebration and the cooperation and involvement of everyone else in the neighborhood.

Halloween is the nation’s annual party night, an occasion when children party all day through the evening, and adults like me get silly the rest of the night. Ten in the evening is 90 minutes before “The Tonight Show” even comes on; it is before dinner hour in many cultures and about the time children go to bed on a holiday night. One wonders about the mind-set of adults who not only choose to sleep through the revelry, but also feel so self-righteous in their puritanical choice (or perhaps, resentful at their social exclusion) that they relentlessly impose their early night on the entire community.

Every neighborhood has its own Kenneth Starr, a Puritan who has judged the human need to socialize and dance--generally considered to be a rather rewarding aspect of our existence and certainly one of the few permissible forms of instant gratification--to be “bad,” hedonistic and decadent. The problem is that the law compels the police to indulge these local Kens, who dictate without hesitation that the police must close down a wedding celebration so that they can be asleep by 10 on a Saturday night.

Current noise restrictions penalize those who are not wealthy enough to insulate themselves from their neighbors with large houses and undulating gardens. The rich can party because no one hears them, while the rest of us are trammeled by our economic inability to sufficiently isolate ourselves from the embittered, anti-social minority.

To celebrate is a natural and positive human proclivity that should not be reserved for the wealthy in an inherently undemocratic policy that implements minority rule at a cost of thousands of taxpayer’ dollars and reduces police availability to combat real crime.

A modicum of economic rationality, democracy and fairness could be introduced by suspending noise regulation laws completely on holidays like Halloween and New Year’s Eve by moving the noise-restriction start time to midnight and by mandating police response only when more than one complaint is received.

And to all the Kens out there: We’d like to occasionally dance to our tune and not always be forced to sleep to yours, so why don’t you show some consideration a few times a year?