It was not all accolades and compliments and the warm burn of bourbon. Penises were flashed, an independent survey conducted in the bathroom during the party determined that most people do not wash their hands after using the toilet, and Dan Savage arrived in a borrowed jacket the color of a baked potato. And none of us here in The Stranger's editorial department are particularly good in social situations. But in spite of all of those things, and perhaps because of them, the dinner and awards ceremony in honor of The Stranger's first Genius Awards was a howling success.

Really, no one was more surprised than I was, which ought to take at least a bit of the self-serving gloss off of these paragraphs. As thrilled as I was that we were giving substantial awards to artists we really, really like, I didn't think that a dinner party and awards ceremony could be anything but a dull, tepid affair. I mean, we had seating plans, for God's sake. Have seating plans ever resulted in sparkling dinner conversation?

Luckily, our guests knew better, and no one sat down all night long (except for performance Genius Chris Jeffries and his boyfriend Ed Hawkins, who had great seats and used them). Instead, the two front rooms of Consolidated Works--decorated with large drawings by Kathryn Rathke (something of a genius in her own right) of geniuses past and present, a huge ice sculpture of a brain, and strange cracked-head-and-glowing-wire centerpieces--were jammed with artists and patrons and arts administrators and well-wishers and drunk Stranger employees, milling around and eating food that was rumored to be unbelievably good (some of us managed only to take in liquids, although I did have a single delicious scallop) and talking and meeting other people and getting nicely drunk. (Like E. F. Benson's Lucia, I like to see my guests getting slightly squiffy at my expense; it makes me feel I've been a good host.)

It was remarked more than once that there was something distinctly un-Seattle about the whole affair. Certainly everyone looked very nice: film Genius Web Crowell in a dark double-breasted suit jacket with fine pink stripes, art Genius Susan Robb in a white furry wrap, books editor Christopher Frizzelle in an impeccable gray suit, plus orange shirt and silver tie. But it wasn't just that here was an event everyone would finally dress up for. It was a sense that finally everyone had risen to the occasion. Our sponsors rose to the occasion by taking the award for Genius Arts Organization, which we had split in two halves (between Velocity Dance Center and Greg Lundgren's Vital 5 Productions) because we couldn't decide between two, and rounding the halves up to the full $5,000. Our guests rose to the occasion with cheers, standing ovations for the winners, and lots of compliments, which some of us found very hard to take gracefully. The winners rose to the occasion with funny, moving speeches. (My favorite came from literary Genius Matt Briggs, who noted that he had sacrificed his body to his art, gaining something like 50 pounds while writing his books; Jeffries' speech, which complimented Seattle's fertile ground for unusual theater-- how you could have the weirdest idea and someone would help you make it happen--was also eloquent, and went rather to the heart of what does work around here.)

The evening ended on the best possible note, which was that everyone went out afterward in combinations of people you couldn't have predicted before. As for me, I found myself in unusual company--not just the usual cadre of artists and writers, but with a filmmaker and a photographer and a bunch of theater people as well. Wouldn't it be amazing if this--if associations across the usual genres were forged, and new alliances planned, and unimaginable new projects undertaken--was the unintended legacy of the Genius Awards? Wouldn't it?

Perhaps we'll find out next year, when we do it all over again.