Surprises
August 25, 2005

My Aunt Dorothy and I have birthdays 13 days apart in August, hers early, and mine at the end. Since there are two of us, we feel justified in celebrating all month long. Often, at this festive time of year, I've thought about how much fun it would be to throw a big party for all my friends—a rash idea immediately followed by the horrified realization of just how much work it would be, whereupon the impulse dies a quiet and unmourned death.

It's not that I don't want to be generous to my friends. But after my 487 years in show business, I know people from Hither and Yon, and every whistle-stop in between—writers, artists, movie people, newspaper people, Trivia teammates, neighbors, teachers, shopkeepers, janitors, and lots of other folks who don't fall into any of these categories. Many of these people don't know each other, and the idea of herding them all together under one roof—especially my roof, which, let's face it, isn't all that huge—is daunting in the extreme.

So, when I had one of those Red Alert birthdays with a "0" after the number not long ago, Art Boy asked me if I wanted a party. Way too much work, I told him. I was content to write a column about the upcoming event, maybe prompt an email greeting or two. I thought that would be it.

Soon, we were invited to a barbecue by my friend Stacey. One of my favorite former Good Times editors, Stacey lives in a pastoral mobile home park in Capitola. The clubhouse is situated on a creek full of ducks, with a swimming pool in back, and a kitchen, pool table and enormous lounge area inside. Stacey has been known to host end-of-summer barbecues before. It didn't seem odd to me she was hosting one two days before my birthday.

Could a person be any more clueless?

We were walking toward the front door of the clubhouse when I saw two friends of ours outside in the back, people I didn't think Stacey knew. I immediately swerved down the path to the backyard to find out who they were visiting at the park. Thus we took by surprise the dozens of people swarming inside waiting for us to come in the front door so they could yell "Surprise!"

Surprised? I was positively flummoxed. The thing had been planned like the invasion of Normandy. The ringleaders were Stacey and my friend Nancy, former owner of the Nickelodeon, who lately had been spending her summers on a boat cruising British Columbia. Art Boy was recruited to keep me in the dark, and the emailing and RSVP-ing had been going on for the better part of a month. I never suspected a thing.

Looking back, I guess Art Boy had been acting shifty. But it never occurred to me to wonder when he started taking all his phone calls out in the garage (I thought he was just keeping the noise level down in the house), or when he wouldn't let me look at his email. I don't normally look at his email anyway; it was just his bad luck that Yahoo reconfigured their email page in the middle of the preparations, and I wasn't allowed near the screen to help him navigate. I just supposed he was ordering me some fabulous birthday present online.

The fabulous present was the party. Everybody brought food or wine or champagne. Four solid hours of British Invasion oldies blasted away on the CD player, put together by my friend Gary, the dj. The décor was Early Disney Pirate, in honor of my pirate novel, with tables draped in treasure maps, a ship-shaped piñata and eye-patches for everyone. One table was piled with ropes of shiny plastic beads and paper "coins." "Look, there's even booty, er plunder," I exclaimed. "Swag," Stacey corrected me, ever the editor.

The cat was almost out of the bag the week before when we went to hear our friend Jim read at the Capitola Book Café—who, unbeknownst to me, was A-listed for the party. As we were leaving, Jim said, innocently enough, "See you Saturday." I gazed at him with an even more blank expression than usual. "No you won't," replied Art Boy, ever the quick thinker, and whisked me outside. In the minute it took to walk to our car, he extemporized an entire scenario about another party to which we'd been invited but which he'd declined because we were going to Stacey's. I bought it. I spend half my life in a fantasy world anyway, at the movies or writing fiction. Art Boy is my liaison to the Real World, and I trust him.

I later found out he spent a week trying to talk the instigators out of throwing the party at all, thinking I would hate it. (Dorothy is the dynamic Leo; I'm the timid Virgo toiling happily out of the limelight.) But I was thrilled that somebody else took up the challenge of convening all these people, when I personally never had the chutzpah to do it. Family are the friends you're born with (if you're lucky), but friends are the family you choose.