Sorry for the hiatus, but I’ve been trying to figure how to turn that which has dominated my life for the past several days–the fact that my 5-year-old daughter Vivian crashed into another kid on a scooter and cracked her teeny tiny collarbone–into a semi-insightful mini-essay on life as a Formerly. You’ll lemme know if this works for you:
Viv has been a trouper. There’s been relatively little drama, which is the way it is when something major happens (as opposed to when, say, one’s sister uses one’s Holly Hobbie toothbrush. In that case, you’d think there had been a stabbing.) She has tolerated the pain admirably, along with the sponge baths and excessive fussing of her mother and grandmothers.
What’s been excruciating for her has been the restriction of her activities. We took her and her twin sister to their friend Maeve’s Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer-themed birthday on Saturday. All of the other reindeer got to do the hokey pokey and play hot potato and freeze tag and all sorts of other reindeer games that one needs a minimum of two arms and the ability to run around to join in.
“This is the WORST party I’ve EVER been to in my ENTIRE LIFE!” she said, sobbing, pleading for me to take her home. (It was actually a really awesome party with a gigantic snow-topped meringue cake and bingo and, most important, wine boxes, and I wanted to stay.)
What I thought but didn’t say in the taxi home (motherhood, of course, being a series of things you think but don’t say): “May that truly be the worst party you ever go to in your entire life.”
Below, some of the worst parties I’ve ever been to in my entire (much longer) life, in chronological order:
1. A pot party I was taken to in Philly when I was 8 or 9 by an older distant cousin who was in charge of me that day. I was wearing a T-shirt my parents had brought me from San Francisco that said boogie in sparkly letters. I loved that shirt. They asked me if I liked disco. I said yes, I guessed so. Everyone liked to dance, didn’t they? Some guy with a Jackson Browne haircut and cystic acne on his neck informed me in no uncertain terms that disco sucked. Then they got stoned. I said nothing for the rest of the day.
2.My best friend and I had a party at my apartment in high school sophomore year that we began planning too early. Word got out to all the schools in the city and soon it wasn’t Stephanie’s party so much as “A Bronx Science party on 97th Street.” More than 200 kids came. Beer bottles went off the 15th floor terrace. Even the police showed up. I cried and said I got good grades, which was true, and that this was my first infraction, which was also true. They didn’t fine me. My dad was quite cool about it (which impressed his girlfriend, and me) and didn’t tell my mom until after I’d had a chance to repair most of the damage. Still, scared me straight.
3.A party at the house of some prep school guy in OP surf shorts and with halitosis I met at Sheep Meadow in Central Park when I was 16. He thought public school girls would do anything and so tried to feel me up in front of his pals. I hit him, which was performance enough for his crew of idiots, who collapsed in heaps of Lacoste shirts and laughter. There was also a teen model there and she was very thin, which made me envious.
4. My prom, at which I was vomited on.
5. A beach-themed frat party at college, at which I was vomited on. At least I didn’t pay for the privilege.
6. The time after college when an old friend invited me to a “video party,” which, since he was a musician, I took to mean a band’s video premiere. It turned out to be two small blond women from Nebraska watching videos in an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. They were all part of the Church of God and spent the next two hours trying in the most polite way possible to convince me that I was going to Hell for real unless I let Jesus into my heart. It was awful.
7.A Halloween party with a guy I was dating maybe 13 years ago, from whom I was feeling estranged and was about to break up with. He was Speed Racer and wouldn’t break character all night. I was the Prom Queen who got a gun (I wore my original, puked on prom dress) and was lonely, blood covered and smelled vaguely like vomit from 1985. This other guy was dressed as the dial-a-dermatologist Dr. Zizmor (for those of you who don’t ride the NYC subways, that means he wore a lab coat and had a giant cardboard rainbow placard arching over his head) who kept abruptly turning and thwacking me in the face. I left and had a falafel by myself.
I could go on but I’d rather hear about your own worst parties ever. Please include mucho detail and be glad that you no longer have to cry to get someone to take you home.
Photo by: aprilzosia, CC Licensed
March 2, 2009 at 1:11 pm
In sixth grade, I went to the slumber party of a girl in my class. She was a little awkward and strange, and I went because I felt sorry for her. The party was really uncomfortable–the birthday girl kept bursting into tears and running upstairs, her younger sister kept wanting to sing showtunes for us, the father just sat in an armchair and glared at us…
One of the rare times that the entire family left the room, the other five freaked-out guests and I discussed how bizarre the whole thing was, and how we could possibly get out of the sleepover part. The mother then came into the room with snacks and announced that there was a special surprise. She had hidden a tape recorder behind the couch to capture the fun of the evening and she’d like us all to listen to it. Right then. We all broke out in a cold sweat, but were in great luck because all that could be heard on the tape were rustling noises. Phew!
March 2, 2009 at 1:46 pm
My birthday party one year during high school. I suppose I should remember the year, but I don’t. My birthday is on December 31, and that’s when the party was. A bunch of people RSVP’d yes, but then everybody called that day or the day before to say they hadn’t realized it was New Year’s Eve, and they had other plans. Only one friend, who was like 10 years older than I was and didn’t seem to have much of a social life, actually came, and we hardly made a dent in the room full of food my mother had put out. I don’t remember what else we did, but I don’t think it was much, and it certainly wasn’t very fun.
Never again, until a few years ago, did I try throwing a party on the day of my birthday.
Also, when I was living in Fairbanks for a year after law school, clerking for a justice on the Alaska Supreme Court, I took a class at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. I got a UAF email account. One frat sent a school-wide message inviting everybody to a rush event. I went, because, hey, I was invited, and I am a hyper-extrovert and never say no to a party. There were like 5-10 of us new people there, and a bunch of guys from the frat. They didn’t kick me out or anything, but it was a bit awkward explaining why I was there. I did get a cup of free crappy beer, and met some guys who could have become lifelong friends. They didn’t.
And that’s without even getting into all the parties freshman year of college where I stood around a frat dance floor hoping to meet the love of my life, or at least the love of my evening, but met no one, and walked home drunk wailing “I am hu-u-u-u-man and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.” But that’s everyone’s story, right?
March 2, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I went to a New Year’s Eve party once when at twenty minutes past midnight, I walked in on my then-boyfriend in bed with another woman.
March 2, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I am one of those few adults who actually loves and looks forward to New Year’s Eve, but even I must admit that it can be a strange night. I must also admit that some of them have involved vomitting, but luckily not ON me. Of some of the stranger ones, there was the New Years in high school that Alexandra Nos and I spent at the Blimpee’s on Sixth Avenue (trust me, that was grim!) and one spent playing cards in the basement rec room of my boyfriend’s friend’s house in Queens. That boyfriend turned out to have been a Chinese mobster, as I expect his friends were, too, but the real issue for me was that I was the only non-Chinese person at the party, and none of the other girlfriends would speak to me. So while all the guys sat on one side of the room, playing poker, all the girls sat together speaking in Chinese.
Since I wasn’t exactly feeling welcome, I decided I had nothing to lose by inviting myself to join the card game. It took some persuading from both me and my boyfriend, but finally, reluctantly, they moved over and let me play.
After I won the next two hands, which was met with a lot of complaining (in Chinese) I was overruled and the game switched from Poker to some Chinese version of Go Fish.
But as mifted as I was that night, I felt just awful when the host of the party was killed in a car accident just a few days later. So I guess the moral of the story is bet high while you’re still in the game, and have a healthy respect for what unknowns will come in with the New Year!
March 2, 2009 at 3:01 pm
I’ve got two:
1- A pot party a “friend” invited me to attend when I was 14. I was a real boy scout and didn’t partake of the said pot, so the party was really boring. What made it worse was that a girl I liked was there and, of course, had sex with said “friend”. As is typical when we’re teens, she was in love with him. He took advantage and never saw her again.
2- A holloween party at my high school. I asked a girl I liked to dance with me. She replied “Wouldn’t you rather dance with another man?” And she wasn’t joking.
March 2, 2009 at 4:30 pm
I actually can’t concentrate on your, apparently, horrible party experiences because I can’t get passed the wine boxes at that kids birthday party. That’s GENIUS! Why didn’t I think of that?!
My son’s (the third kid) first birthday was thrown at a restaurant in Bayside called Tequila Sunrise…
I have learned that to ensure, or at least try to, that you enjoy your party, you must host (this also keeps me close to my bed, which is where I like to go when I’m drunk). I do Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Easter and the odd Passover. i will also do other people’s bdays. I like people in my house and…I’m close to my bed.
I must day, having re-read your sucky party list, you really did get the short end of the stick a lot and often quite severely.
March 2, 2009 at 4:47 pm
A friend of mine invited me to a 24-Hour Tom Waits party that she told me was going to be the best party ever! This party is an annual event and happens in the winter, up in Westchester. The day of the party was unbelievably cold, so it was essentially impossible to leave the house. This was before I had a car, so Daniel and I took the train there.
Tom Waits played non-stop. The only person I knew was my friend. Then there was some long, dumb, pointless video someone made about a dead car battery, then there was some other dumb shit, like bowing down in the direction of Tom Waits. Tom Waits still playing. Sucky food. Can’t leave. Sleeping not allowed (I eventually slept on the cold, hard, wood floor in the hallway). Daniel left (“She’s not *my* friend. I don’t have to stay. You don’t either.” Of course I stayed. Stupid, stupid, stupid.)
24 hours.
This is not all capturing how crappy this party was. It sucked major.
At least I didn’t get vomited on. To this day I hate Tom Waits.
March 3, 2009 at 8:37 am
i’m not really the party type, and wouldn’t know what to do if one turned out to be boring… it would turn out even worse if there were no alcohol, which was just the case at a company d&d a few years back… the organisers tried to entertain us by hiring some stage performers, but to me, it was really boring… i remember, whole night, i just wanted to get my hands on some beers, but everyone went straight home afterwards, and i ended up with a few cans alone in my living room…