That was the rule being enforced last night at the Ballard Elks Lodge No. 827, where former Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers and their friends and significant others all paid $10 each at the door in order to pull off the goodbye party that the Hearst Corporation wouldn't throw for them.

The rule was, in a way, apt. Given the recent mass layoffs at the P-I, most people at the party, were, in fact, no-working press. But it was also ironic. A bunch of journalists having an off-the-record party?

I was grateful to have been allowed in with my charming date, Stranger publisher Tim Keck, and while I will respect the ban on relaying all that I experienced beyond the party-room doors, I don't think it's breaking any rules to say that the ban seemed, in the end, pretty unnecessary. I left feeling tipsy and warm (though, truth be told, due to some after-work Stranger staff cocktails I also arrived feeling tipsy and warm) and as I walked through the parking lot I wished that the final scene in the death of this civic institution hadn't been kept so private.

I will tell you this: While inside the party, a line from some article I'd read recently about the death of newspapers came into my head. I couldn't exactly remember the line then, which bugged me, and I was still trying to remember it as I walked across the parking lot after the party—which I believe means I can recount this without breaking the "no working press" rule, since my moment of attempted remembering, as well as my memory of not being able to remember inside the party, all happened, physically and metaphysically speaking, in the parking lot—and then when I woke up this morning I performed a quick search of the newspaper-killing Internet and within seconds found the line. It's from Michael Hirschorn's January article in The Atlantic about the possible death of The New York Times, the wider likelihood of a "collapse of daily print journalism," and what all of it will mean. It will mean many things, Hirschorn wrote, but among them:

It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind.

This is what the P-I party recalled for me: a premonition of the end of a semi-charmed way of middle-class life.

Illustration by Andrew Saeger.