Between the time I write this and the time you read it, I will have had a birthday.
I love my birthday. I love the excuse to gather people, to make something out of an ordinary weekend, to celebrate being alive with people I adore.
Years ago, I took the pressure off my husband of planning my birthday festivities, and he has never once complained about that decision. I worked 17 years as a professional event planner — parties come easily to me. Handing him the party planning baton was genuinely unfair. I do the planning, and he helps abundantly.
It’s an arrangement that works beautifully for both of us.
Through the years, I have had a lot of fun with it — especially the big decade birthdays.
For my 40th, I fulfilled a lifelong dream. I hired a band, borrowed a red sequined dress, and for one night and one night only, I was a backup singer. In an outdoor kitchen south of Lafayette, I sang backup to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and James Taylor’s “Shower the People.”
For my 50th, we rented multiple cabins at a state park near my hometown in Mississippi. Friends came from near and far, and my sweet parents organized an old-fashioned field day — the kind my dad used to put together for the town where I grew up. It was a blast.
My dad was in his heyday in complete drill-sergeant mode, bossing people around. We competed to see who could pick up marbles with their toes and drop them into a bucket. We tossed pretzel sticks into a shower cap covered with shaving cream like it was an Olympic sport. My dad always made whatever competition we were competing in feel like an Olympic sport.
For my 60th, I hired a different kind of band and a caller, and we had a contra dance. On one of those Louisiana days that can only be described as perfect, there are moments from that afternoon — spinning, swinging, dosi-do-ing and surrounded by love — that will stay with me as some of my favorite memories of my whole life.
So this year (which is not a decade birthday, just a perfectly good birthday), I was torn about the best way to celebrate. We have a lot going on right now — living in a rental house while we rebuild our home after a fire. Work is full. I’m teaching a journalism class at LSU. Like most everyone else, we have a combination of responsibilities that make life rich and complicated and occasionally overwhelming.
I couldn’t come up with a party idea that felt right for the moment. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what some are calling the “post-luxury shift” — the idea that some people are done with spectacle and hungry for something real and a little ridiculous.
Even with that insight, I was stumped on this year’s party.
That is, until last week, when we were on vacation in a yurt, and the idea hit me — I had seen someone online having this very competition in front of their home on the West Coast.
I am having a Parallel Parking Party — on a Tuesday. The weekends were just too full all the way around.
I have created rules — no cameras and no driver-assisted parking. I have secured multiple orange traffic cones. I have confirmed judges with measuring tapes, yardsticks, painters’ tape and clipboards.
With the help of my husband, we will have appropriately themed street food.
The response from friends has been something else entirely. Turns out, many people believe in their parallel parking abilities with their whole hearts. Maybe they are hungry for something real and a little ridiculous, for the joy of a specific, unglamorous skill being taken seriously on a Tuesday evening.
One friend is rearranging a trip — rearranging an actual trip — because she is so certain she will prevail in this competition. People are trash-talking their unknown competition. At least a dozen people are certain they will win.
Maybe parallel parking is one of the last things we do without an audience — or even the possibility of an audience. There’s no scoreboard — no one watching other than cars that pass or wait. People rarely see how good any of us are at it.
Until now.
Life is full.
We steal celebration and laughter where and when we can find them. At this stage of life, a Tuesday evening surrounded by people we love — defending their honor over parallel parking — might be exactly the right kind of party.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
