Collapse in crumpled heap.

Well, we survived BirthdayFest 2003 in good shape. I think I’ve found the secret: Birthdays are crap, and should be treated that way.

Of course every child wants to see their birthday honored; I’m speaking here of the birthday industry, which makes every natal milestone into an excuse to spend a bucket o’ bucks. I’m getting off that merry-go-round, not that I was ever really on it, but I seem to recall Year Five as the year I spent $45 for a Barbie cake that tasted no better than the $8 one I got from Kroger this year.

New readers: My husband and my daughter share a birthday, which was this past Sunday. This year, in keeping with our status as temporary residents, we had a new/old synthesis. Kate invited one friend from her class, and two friends from Fort Wayne, and they all had a sleepover. Pizza, pajamas, “Finding Nemo” on DVD — do good times require anything else? I don’t think so.

As for Alan, he got a pair of nice walking shoes, suitable for campus strolling, and, of course, half the cake that read “Happy Birthday Kate & Daddy.”

The worst of it was suffered by our babysitters, with whom we entrusted all four kids while we went out to the Scorpio Party at Wallace House, in honor of the four Fellows, one staff member, two Fellow spouses and one Fellow child who have November natal days. (One is actually October, but he’s a Scorpio.)

When I met Alan, he shared a birthday with my friend Adrianne, and they complained that, with the exception of Elvis Whitehead, a kid in Alan’s class who died young, no one else in the history of the world had a November 16 birthday. Now there’s Kate, and Amy’s husband (who reminds us the world’s oldest living human being, a resident of Lima, Ohio, is also 11/16), and Fellow Fatih, and Martin Scorsese’s daughter Francesca (Marty’s own birthday is today) and many, many others.

Happy birthdays to all.

Posted at 9:26 am in Uncategorized |
 

16 responses to “Collapse in crumpled heap.”

  1. Mindy said on November 17, 2003 at 11:07 am

    How refreshing — parents of a young child that are getting off the birthday blow-out bandwagon. I endured several years of constant kids’ parties given by well-meaning sisters-in-law.

    Some parents never get out of the big birthday party mindset no matter how old the child. Here I am in my forties, and my own mother has confessed an outrageous plan to contact my friends and haul all of us out to dessert for my next birthday despite never having met any of them. Just the thought of this makes my hair hurt. I’d die of embarrassment. This would have been a better idea thirty years ago, but now? Oh, the agony!

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  2. Connie said on November 17, 2003 at 11:29 am

    Well, if you are keeping a list, add my Dad to it. He turned 72 on the 16th. Connie

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  3. anne said on November 17, 2003 at 1:38 pm

    We more or less got off that birthday bandwagon when my younger daughter had a 6th birthday party in kindergarten. We invited 5-6 kids and after doing art projects at the local art center, came home for cake, ice cream and presents. I made the cake � my cakes look like something out of Dr. Seuss but my kids pretend to like them that way. The party was pretty loud and although my kid is very capable of generating a lot of noise, she’s also a bit hypersensitive to it. She tolerated all the fuss fairly well but later said disgustedly, �all they did was scream!� That was the end of birthday parties, at least for that kid.

    I agree that birthdays are crap. But a few years ago, I decided that my birthday was one day out of the year I would spend doing pretty much whatever I felt like doing, not that that’s ever anything very exciting.

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  4. deg said on November 17, 2003 at 2:15 pm

    a friend of mine tried to minimize the birthday mayhem by having her kid’s fifth-birthday party at a mcdonald’s with a play area. the kids would get happy meals, tumble in the ball pit while the moms chatted over coffee, then eat some cake and go home.

    she SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED on the invitation that no one bring gifts, because she was tired of the glut of presents that were never used, or got broken before the party even ended. and guess what? half the moms brought gifts anyway. i ask you.

    one of the kids at this party had his own party at a pizza place later that year. there were no fewer than 15 kids there, plus everybody from the kid’s extended family. when i showed up to pick up my son, i watched in horror as the birthday boy’s presents piled up in an ungodly mess at his feet. there was so much crap that he was actually stepping on–and breaking–some of the gifts he’d just opened and enthused over. it was sick-making, lemme tell you.

    when my 12-year-old turns 13 next month, he’s having half a dozen friends over to eat pizza, play texas hold ’em poker (with chips, not money) and watch an execrable adam sandler video. do they really need anything more than that? not in my book.

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  5. adrianne said on November 17, 2003 at 3:36 pm

    Nov. 16 is getting less special by the minute. I found out, thanks to my new newspaper’s newsletter, that I share my birthday (and Kate and Alan’s) with Suiki Rivera, one of our editorial assistants, and Gretchen Pina Breedy, a human resources employee. On the plus side, the librarian made Suiki a fabulous carrot cake today, of which I had a slice. And my co-editors are taking me out and A.M.E. Terry Egan (birthday Nov. 25 – same as Joe DiMaggio – for sushi. Yee haw!

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  6. John Ritter said on November 17, 2003 at 3:51 pm

    25th November is Joe D’s birthday? Isn’t there some first tier celebrity whose birthday is on the 25th?

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  7. Nance said on November 17, 2003 at 3:58 pm

    Um, yeah.

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  8. Mindy said on November 17, 2003 at 5:04 pm

    That first tier celeb with a 25 Nov birthday is our fair hostess. And I’m jealous that she shares the calendar with Joe D. I share my day with Don Johnson and Tim Conway. Bleah.

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  9. James Burns said on November 17, 2003 at 8:22 pm

    Rebecca’s younger sisters (fraternal twins) also have a birthday on the 16th…

    Mine is shared with George Bush the elder, and Rebecca’s is shared with Mikhail Gorbechev. Go figure.

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  10. anne said on November 17, 2003 at 9:21 pm

    It’s always fascinating to think about who we all share birthdays with. My mom (1/9) shares hers with Richard Nixon. I don’t know of anyone else that I share one with (1/16) but 1/16/91 was when we first dropped bombs on Iraq. That was a memorable birthday but not in a very favorable way.

    But, so what, your birthday can be your own day. Who cares who else or what else shares it. We’re all working and taking care of kids, spouses, parents, friends, whatever. Birthdays are a good excuse to be just a little bit selfish for once.

    Whatever day your birthday falls on, have a good one!!

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  11. anne said on November 17, 2003 at 9:21 pm

    It’s always fascinating to think about who we all share birthdays with. My mom (1/9) shares hers with Richard Nixon. I don’t know of anyone else that I share one with (1/16) but 1/16/91 was when we first dropped bombs on Iraq. That was a memorable birthday but not in a very favorable way.

    But, so what, your birthday can be your own day. Who cares who else or what else shares it. We’re all working and taking care of kids, spouses, parents, friends, whatever. Birthdays are a good excuse to be just a little bit selfish for once.

    Whatever day your birthday falls on, have a good one!!

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  12. mtk said on November 17, 2003 at 10:20 pm

    dunno if this even matters, but what the hell… the escalation of all the old traditional holidays into mega events (valentine’s and halloween becoming gift-giving occasions), and lesser ones coming on the scene (sweetest day), as well as wedding celebrations and birthdays going off the Richter scale in expense and planning and importance to those involved ($1,000 wedding cakes? $120/hr clowns at birthday parties for 1-year-olds?) has really hit home for me how right Disney’s Michael Eisner was a few years ago when he said the U.S. economy has passed from post-industrial to the “experiential” economy — in which the thing most people put #1 in their spending and planning is not an event’s innate worth or value, but what it “means” to them, the event’s lasting memory. We trade in memories and recollections, and “modest,” private events are even weighed in how memorably personal they were. … (drifting off into the ether here.) Some truth maybe?

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  13. Susan said on November 17, 2003 at 11:42 pm

    Anne, your mother and I share our January 9 birthday not only with Richard Nixon but with Joan Baez. Talk about an odd couple! (Nixon and Joan, not me and your mother.) We just missed Elvis by a day.

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  14. Bob said on November 17, 2003 at 11:45 pm

    For a slightly different take on the topic of shared birthdays, I remember this from a finite math course. I can’t recall the mathematical explanation, but I recall my teacher telling the class that in any group of 26 or more people, the likelihood that at least two people would share the same month and day of birth was nearly 100%.

    There were 35 students in our class, and as I recall, three birth dates were shared by two people each, and one birth date was shared by three.

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  15. Vince said on November 18, 2003 at 8:52 am

    Wait wait. Don’t feel lonely. Alan & Kate have high profile birthday company. Dwight Gooden, Burgess Meredith, Olympic gold medal skater Oksana Baiul, and Shigeru Miyamoto (Nintendo guru, designer of Donkey Kong) all have birthdays on Nov. 16

    What fine company!

    Isn’t it great how quickly the internet burps up such fine trivia?

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  16. Nance said on November 18, 2003 at 8:58 am

    MTK, that’s even more interesting coming from the husband of a clown, and a clown who keeps scrapbooks (I refer to use the verb, “to scrapbook”). Since K. makes a little cottage income as birthday-party entertainment, what’s her take on all this?

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