MEMOIR
Everybody Ditched Me at My Birthday Party
As if turning thirteen doesn’t suck enough already
I was barely 13 years old, but I could tell my party sucked. Watching the guests leave forty-five minutes after arriving was a clear sign that this wouldn’t be the grooviest birthday slumber party ever.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing — I’d been having fantastic parties since I was a kid.
Although I never had a bounce house or a scary clown torturing balloons into unrecognizable animal shapes, I had cake and ice cream, which, in the 1970s, was a lot.
Children’s parties weren’t my mother’s thing, but occasionally she made an effort.
Once, she put some Chiclets gum in a rubber balloon thingy and tied it under our rattan lighting fixture. She then handed us a wooden spoon and let us beat the balloon with it as if it were a sad, discounted piñata.
The makeshift piñata didn’t have the same impact as when the Mickey Mouse piñata caught on fire from a tiki torch at my 40th birthday party, but it was still festive.
However, there wouldn’t be a single fake piñata at this party. We were teenagers now and above such childish party games.
