Tis the season for attending events. From weddings to retirement parties to political fundraisers to the occasional bar mitzvah, it seems we can spend every evening opening our wallets in return for a good meal of rubber chicken and overdone vegetables. (FOR THE RECORD: Vegetarians get to skip the chicken and are, therefore, expected to make larger donations.) But there’s one thing no event can do without. And that’s a master of ceremonies who can make or break an evening. In their honor, here’s what I wrote in the spring of 2008 that demonstrates just how valuable they are.

The other night I accompanied my wife to a dinner reception for a group of people that just finished working on a VERY SERIOUS PROJECT.

The dinner was a reward for all their efforts, much of which consisted of working twenty hours a day, seven days a week, for so many months that several participants went through all 20,000 of the songs on their iPods. Spouses were invited to the dinner, too, as a way of saying thanks for keeping all this hard work out of divorce court. Needless to say, I was proud to be there, if only to get reunited with my wife, whom I hadn’t seen since Wake Me When September’s Over.

The success of this sort of dinner is totally in the hands of the master of ceremonies. This job cannot go to just anybody. In fact, it cannot go to anybody not related to someone who organized the VERY SERIOUS PROJECT. This guarantees that the master of ceremonies will be the person least equipped to do the job.

This dinner began with the emcee demonstrating his skill for moving the microphone into the one position in the universe that caused a feedback howl loud enough to annoy any comatose audience members. Those already awake asked God to grant them a few moments of relief by shooting them with a Taser, a request seconded by many former atheists.

After the religious conversions, the emcee moved quickly to make sure all the project participants were recognized for something. If this sounds familiar, perhaps you attended summer camp, where every kid got an end-of-summer award, even the one who burned down his counselor’s tent (my choice of award: most likely to succeed by rejecting authority).

Since the VERY SERIOUS PROJECT had VERY LITTLE BUDGET, awards took the form of equal amounts of applause for such accomplishments as showing up sober, showing up at all, not showing up, whimpering all night if not fed regularly and whimpering all night while being mistaken for a ravenous schnauzer.

After appreciating all the hard-working employees, the emcee gave everyone a round of applause for being such a good audience, which presumably meant applauding without getting too much into what the applause was for, and then suggested one final round of applause for everyone, at which time someone in the audience, who obviously had not had enough applause, suggested a round of applause for the emcee, who responded by applauding the audience, whereupon the audience broke into a spontaneous round of applause. Fortunately, the applause only lasted until Labor Day, when everyone hugged and went back to their homes in the city.

Meanwhile, I set fire to the emcee’s tent.

From my book I Don’t Have All the Answers Only Because There are Too Many Questions, available from Amazon.com. And, yes, if you buy it I do make some money. But not nearly enough to get a real job.