How to Host a Badass Babes Dinner Party
I finally hosted my first Badass Babes dinner. What is a Badass Babes dinner? Let me start at the beginning. Years ago Ann Shoket – author of The Big Life, former editor-in-chief of Seventeen magazine, and former executive editor of Cosmogirl magazine – started a community called Badass Babes, which she defines as “a sisterhood of young, hungry, ambitious women.” Every month she invites a few of these ladies to her New York City apartment and they discuss careers, relationships, general life challenges, and more.
When attending The Lady Project Summit a few months ago in Providence, RI, I was able to attend my first Badass Babes dinner. Ann Shoket hosted a dinner the night before the conference kicked off. I walked into a room of thirty women I didn’t know, but I had a funny feeling they were all pretty badass babes. We sat in a large circle of mismatched chairs, ate round pizza that was cut into square slices (which still confuses me), and drank rosé. So simple, so delicious. Ann asked us each to go around the circle and answer the following three questions:
What is your name?
How old are you?
If she could magically solve one problem for you right now, what would it be?
Y’all. I was amazed at the outpouring of vulnerability and honesty I heard in the three hours that ensued. I heard about stories about women looking to get to the next level of their careers, women working hard to be the best managers they can be, a woman waiting for her boyfriend to propose, a woman who had three miscarriages in the past year, a woman who lost her boyfriend to suicide 3 years earlier, a woman trying to figure out how to balance her day job and burlesque career, and so many more thoughtful stories.
I was mind blown. These women barely knew each other’s first names, but life challenges and hardships poured out of them. (It’s amazing what a sense of community can do for a girl.) Not only that, but there was so much support from others in the room. There were so many people empathizing, sharing advice, offering general guidance and support, and a heck of a lot of “you go girl”-esque comments. It was such a cool experience, I knew that I needed to host my own Badass Babes dinner, sooner than later.
For months I had considered starting a mastermind group. I even got to the point where I texted people to see if they would want to join. I had done my research on how to host, what types of questions to ask, what the meeting agenda should be, and talked to friends who host their own group. I just couldn’t pull the trigger on it. At this point I have too many commitments to commit to running a mastermind group, it wouldn’t have my full attention, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to bring all of the awesome ladies I knew together. The Badass Babes dinners were the perfect solution. And Ann Shoket even provides a guide to host your own dinner. I downloaded my guide and was ready to go.
Step 1: Make the Guest List
This part was so. much. fun. I spent an evening cleaning out my Google Contacts list, removing duplicates, adding frequently contacted folks to my contact book, and adding labels to people. I created a label called “Badass Babes” and added in all of the ladies in the Philadelphia Area I consider to be hungry, ambitious women. (I also created a label called “Tribe” for 125 people in my life I feel like would appreciate a biannual newsletter on my life, but that’s a story for another day.)
The biggest challenge for me was deciding how many people I needed to invite to end up with a group of about 6 people. I started out by going through the total list of babes and choosing 10 ladies I thought would have enough in common to easily chat with each other, but enough individuality to add something fun to each other’s lives. I emailed those 10 ladies and tried to coordinate a date that worked for everybody. After choosing a date that only worked for about 6 people, a few started canceling. I was bummed out. (Planning parties is sometimes super frustrating, y’all.)
So me. Being the rational person that I am. Decided that I should invite all 48 people on the list to try to get to 6 people. I ended up with 8. And they were the perfect 8. Sometimes the universe knows what’s up, man. (I did have a little rationale for this. I was inviting people 2 weeks out and it’s both summer and wedding season, I figured the chances of them all saying yes were super slim.)
Step 2: Set the Stage
Knowing that this could be a little tough – you know, to invite a bunch of people who don’t know each other over to talk about their life challenges – I wanted to make sure that I set the stage before everyone arrived. Here’s the exact blurb that I put in the invitation:
After attending The Lady Project Summit this year, I was inspired by Ann Shoket to host my own Badass Babes Dinner. What is a Badass Babes Dinner? A dinner where you meet cool ladies and “talk about all the itchy, complicated issues around being young, hungry and ambitious” through a series of prompted questions. Admittedly, I’ve never hosted one before, so you’re all guinnea pigs. But you’re all really incredible ladies, so I’m not worried.
I’ll be buying pizza. Feel free to bring a bottle of wine. I’d love to see you there. I will almost definitely be doing this again though if this date doesn’t work out for you.
This way, everybody knew exactly what they were getting themselves into.
Step 3: Prepare for the Party
Ann provides a great framework for hosting these parties. In her guide she says her formula has consistently been:
fancy frozen pizza
rosé
a killer cheese plate
the Adele station on Pandora
My favorite part is that it’s so approachable. You don’t need to make a big hullabaloo about the food because the point is the conversation, which made party preparations really easy. Here are the steps I followed:
Clean the living room and the bathroom.
Re-read the list of prompts Ann offers in her dinner guide.
Order pizza.
Make iced tea and cut up watermelon.
That’s it. And to be honest, I didn’t have time to do anything fancy, I had to work up until 6:30pm before a 7:00pm party. Alright, full disclosure: Ben cleaned the bathroom (because it was his turn); he also cut up the watermelon (because I shouldn’t be trusted with sharp knives). But still. It was easy.
Step 4: Host the Party
Y’all. I was so worried about facilitating this party. Should I be acting as a host or should I be acting as an attendee? Did it matter? Would I need to do a big introduction to what a badass babes dinner even was? What if nobody wanted to share? There were so many questions.
Turns out I didn’t even need to use one of the prompts, the conversation just naturally flowed through careers, relationships, and more. At one point we did all answer the following three questions:
What’s your brunch order?
What’s your favorite Disney movie?
What clubs were you in in high school?
because I’m convinced that’s the best way to get to know who somebody is, but the conversation didn’t need any overall steering. And honestly, I attribute that to two things: (1) setting the stage in the email, and (2) the fact that nobody really knew anything about each other before the dinner started. Every dinner I’ve ever been to where people didn’t know each other has always resulted in deeper conversations than normal dinners because people are asking a lot of: ‘what do you do’, ‘where are you from’ questions.
Tips for Hosting your own Badass Babes Dinner
There’s not too much that I would change about last night (besides maybe buying new chairs, mine squeak too much), but there are a few tips I have for making your Badass Babes dinner even better:
Don’t order the pizza until a few hours before the party because you never know how many people will cancel on you and you don’t want to end up with too much extra pizza. Just being real.
Test out playlists before you start the party and find one with the vibe you want (or maybe I just should have stuck with the Adele one that was suggested)
Ask everyone during the party if they would like to be included on an email where you share contact information so that all of your attendees can connect after the party.
My Next Steps
There’s a few things on my to-do list at this point. (1) go through my list of badass babes again to make sure I didn’t miss anybody, and (2) contact Ann to see if she wants to Skype in for one of the dinners. (Because that’s totally a thing she offers up on her website.) I’m excited!
–
Have you ever hosted (or attended) something like this before? If not, I highly recommend it, you’ll be amazed how much you can learn about the awesome people in your world already. And I’ve got to tell you, I can’t wait to host another. Let me know if you have success with it, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
