WHEN JULIA TURNED ONE on a rainy night in April, her grandfather bought her a chocolate cupcake from the little bakery around the corner, which she dutifully mashed into her forehead as I sang “Happy Birthday to You” and her grandmother stood by with a soapy washcloth. My friend Leslie suggested this might just be the most pathetic affair she’d ever heard of, and asked what I intended to someday tell my little girl about her first party.
“I will tell her that I rented a farm with ponies and a Ferris wheel and a magician and a rainbow and fireworks and sixty-seven ballerinas. I will tell her that Springsteen sang and Elmo juggled. And I will tell her that the world was in such fabulous shape, President Gore decided he could afford to take the day off and help blow out the candle on her strawberry-pink buttercream layer cake.” Leslie rolled her eyes.
Julia’s second birthday was spent in bed with a stomach virus, but eventually I will show her clips from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and point out how wonderful it was to have thousands of well-wishers lining the streets to celebrate her entry into the terrible twos.
My plan was to keep this up until she hit her mid-forties, but when Jules was on the verge of becoming a three-year-old, I knew the jig was up. She had begun to question how I balance the demands of being an ice-skating superstar with my rigorous schedule as the northeast’s only true fairy princess. She was also getting invited to more and more birthday parties. She’d embraced half a dozen Barney clones, dined on politically correct tofu nuggets, and received goody bags filled with bubble wands and Hello Kitty stickers. There was no way out of it—I’d have to throw a party.
Perhaps I should back up for a second and tell you about the last party I threw. The year was 1994. Kurt Cobain had just committed suicide. Schindler’s List won the Oscar, and I was feeling ambitious. Not ambitious in the learn-a-foreign-language, volunteer-at-a-shelter, go-for-a-power-walk sense of the word, but ambitious enough to make dessert from scratch.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. In retrospect, it’s easy to understand why you don’t see more flambéing done in the home. But who would ever have imagined that something called cherries jubilee could singe so much off so many?
When the smoke cleared and the little flecks of grated orange rind settled, I knew I’d given my last get-together. If a hostess has to end the evening by assuring guests, “With any luck at all, your eyebrows will grow back, good as new,” it’s time to take the extra leaf out of the dining table and call it a night.
But then was then, and now I needed to pin the tail on the goddamn donkey. I scoured Manhattan for a suitable venue and settled on a pretty little place called Moon Soup. It had a giant penguin in the window and “Hound Dog” on the sound system. But what hooked me was the promise that my one job was to show up and have a good time—they would take care of everything else. I knew I was perfectly capable of showing up. Hell, I’ve been showing up for things all my life—why, just the previous week, I’d made it to a mammogram, a pedicure, a memorial service, and a new-parents’ tea at Julia’s preschool. The question was, could I have a good time?
About the only thing I like less than giving parties is going to them. Suffice it to say that I am still digging out from the emotional carnage that was Jason Eisner’s bar mitzvah. Still, we do things for our children that we wouldn’t do for anyone else on earth (except possibly Clive Owen, but that’s a whole other chapter). I once hokey pokeyed fifty-four times in a single afternoon because—believe me—when you hit on something that distracts a baby from teething pain, you’re more than happy to put your left foot in, take your left foot out, put your left foot in, and shake it all about.
But I digress. You’re probably wondering how the social event of the season finally turned out, whether the kids liked the pizza bagels and the grown-ups liked the crudités, if everyone had a maraca to shake, a hand to hold, a balloon to pop. If I actually managed to find a bit of bliss, a shot of redemption, a few moments of pure, unadulterated joy in seeing my daughter serenaded by all the people she loves. Can a phobic party giver wrestle her neuroses to Moon Soup’s padded floor mat and triumph?
Well, in a perfect world, I’d be able to say that I not only survived, I turned out to be the hostess with the mostest and a good time was had by most. But—on the off chance that you hadn’t noticed—this is not a perfect world, so I’ll tell you the truth: One kid threw up, two kids cried, Julia started asking if we could go home about forty minutes before it was over, my parents started asking if they could go home about forty minutes after it started, I barked at Johannes (the only thing that kept him from divorcing me during this ordeal is the fact that he’d first have to marry me), and the phrase “Please, God, let this stuff I just stepped in turn out to be apple juice” was evoked several times over the course of two and a half hours. But according to my friend Jan, who has three kids and knows virtually everything I don’t, in toddler circles this constitutes a rollicking success.
So, my darling daughter, when you grow up I will tell you that your third birthday party was fantastic—because for the most part it really was. But I might also mention that it’s a very fine thread that sutures us to our dreams. My dream for you will always be sixty-seven ballerinas, but I’m afraid reality is a frequently overwhelmed mother and an old Jewish couple from Detroit picking cupcake out of your hair on a rainy night in April. The truth is, Springsteen was booked, Bush was president, and my skating did not take six gold metals at the Helsinki Olympics. But here’s one more truth: For a couple of seconds there, my mom and dad and you and me were the finest family in the world. We shimmered with closeness, we shut our eyes, we made a wish, and we blew those candles out.