Caryn Pollock is going to have a heart attack. At least that’s what she’s telling me as she stands in my kitchen next to two enormous tote bags and a suitcase on wheels. Caryn is my Pampered Chef consultant; she’s supposed to cook in front of a roomful of people in less than an hour, except there’s no food. The Peapod order never arrived! So Caryn’s having a heart attack, which turns out to be more of a metaphorical attack, thank God, because I adore Caryn, whom I met 10 minutes ago.

Caryn has three small kids and her husband is a cop, so she knows how to handle a crisis. She’s on the phone with Peapod, she’s on the phone with Pampered Chef, she’s speaking very calmly. Did I mention her shirt says “we get paid to PARTY” in blue sparkly letters? She’s opening my fridge and my cabinets while I stand there, being totally useless. She’s asking me to route her phone to the closest grocery store, then she’s gone.

And so begins my first Pampered Chef party.

Say the words “Pampered Chef” to a Millennial, and they’ll either stare at you blankly or start raving about their parents’ garlic press. I’m in the latter camp. My mom went to a Pampered Chef party when I was a kid, and we could both tell you every single thing she bought: a green roller thing that removes garlic skin (discontinued), a pizza stone (used exclusively as a vessel for takeout pizza), a mini chopper (cool but a pain to wash), and an oil pump (aerosol-free!). Twenty years later, it’s all still in her kitchen, but I hadn’t heard a word about the company since.

So I was curious: What are Pampered Chef parties like in the Internet age, now that there’s nothing remotely novel about shopping from home?

Like Tupperware, Avon, and Mary Kay, Pampered Chef is a multi-level marketing company. No, it’s not a pyramid scheme; those are illegal. Doris Christopher, a home-ec teacher then stay-at-home-mom, started Pampered Chef in 1980, selling cookware and doing “kitchen shows” in her friends’ homes. "People I knew didn't like to cook, because it wasn’t easy for them,” she said in a 1995 interview. “Part of me said, ‘Maybe I can never convert them.’ But another part said, ‘They’re using knives that aren’t sharp and forks with missing tines. If they had the right tools, it would be fun.’”

Today Pampered Chef is a massive corporation with more than 40,000 “consultants.” The company sells every kind of cookware imaginable, but it specializes in gadgets—the kind of stuff you might not think you wanted until a bubbly woman from Staten Island is standing in your kitchen, soft-pitching a gravy separator to you.

First I reached out to some consultants because I am a reporter. There are hundreds of Pampered Chef consultants on Facebook hosting “virtual parties,” which seem to be just event pages that encourage people to shop online. If this was what Pampered Chef had become—a bunch of people alone in their homes buying kitchenware on the internet—I thought, that seemed kind of sad. I sent messages to a bunch of consultants and got basically the same response: They’d love to talk as long as the company said it was okay. Then I got an email from a Pampered Chef’s PR. They were so excited that I was reaching out!!! They would be thrilled to connect me with the appropriate consultants!!!

I realized I’d never truly understand the Pampered Chef experience in 2017 unless I hosted a party myself, even if PC orchestrated it for me, delivering Caryn straight from heaven via the Verrazano bridge.