Party Girl
Julia Reed March 19th, 2010My New Orleans neighborhood abuts the Irish Channel, which means my streets are still littered with green beads and wilted cabbages from the St. Patrick’s Day parade last weekend, and with several hundred “to-go” cups from the block parties on Wednesday. Like most occasions that demand revelry, St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal here. It is not a big deal in Greenville, Mississippi, where I grew up, but still we had a party. I’m willing to bet I was the only child in town who did.
That was (still is) entirely typical of my mother. She made cucumber sandwiches and petit fours with green icing and tied construction paper shamrocks to the chandelier with satin ribbons. My friends and I sat around the dining room table as though we were born to celebrate the patron saint of Ireland, even though I am almost entirely English with some Scottish thrown in. But ancient familial roots were not the point—my mother is simply a born party-giver.
I had Valentine’s Day tea parties with construction paper hearts replacing the shamrocks, an especially memorable Easter dinner party featuring votive candles my mother and her friend Bossy made by dripping layers of different colored wax into blown out eggshells (I was six!), and a fourth birthday featuring two kinds of ponies (real ones and the painted ones on the merry-go-round that was the gift of my extremely extravagant grandmother’s). When Bossy’s brother-in-law turned fifty, she and my mother announced the occasion by placing a bill-board-sized light-up sign proclaiming “Fifty is Nifty” on the front lawn; for another friend they enlisted a dancing chicken as a live illustration of the honoree’s favorite story. When they hosted Bossy’s nephew’s rehearsal dinner, they made pretty pastel checked tablecloths for the tables outside and cooked (by themselves) Chicken Kiev for 85 people.
The lesson was that holidays, milestones, random good news—life itself—should be marked, celebrated, made the most of. The result was that my parents and their friends had to endure my own early party-giving efforts. For their birthdays I struggled with quiches and cakes, thought it was hilarious to use those birthday candles that keep re-igniting, and set the table with the surprise balls I loved. (I still love surprise balls. I asked my friend Jane Bensel, owner of New Orleans’s (and Taigan’s) The Stationer, to order some for me a few years ago, and now they are a staple in her store.
As I grew older, the parental birthday parties got a tad more sophistcated and larger scale, but no less silly. My mother is a die-hard Elvis fanatic, so we recreated a Las Vegas nightclub, formed a female singing group (the Elvettes), and forced my father to don a white jumpsuit, gold shades, and an actual Elvis concert belt in order to serenade her with Love me Tender. My father’s 80th birthday at the 21 Club featured the same girl group reconstituted as the Satin Dolls, an eight-page rhyming toast from my mother, and countless other raucous tributes that left the waiters enthralled. Never had they seen so many people go to such lengths to entertain themselves.
In these days of economic anxiety, a scary health care bill, and two wars, it is more important than ever to find something to celebrate. And really, it’s not that hard. In another piece in Fetch, I mention one of my favorite cookbooks, Silver Spoon Pasta, and the fact that my friend Aram Bakshian of the Wall Street Journal made the book’s linquine with caviar and vodka to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War. Surely, there’s an anniversary of something every day of the year—people are born, books are written, wars (cold and otherwise) are won and lost. At my own recent book party hosted by Bossy’s two daughters, I was gratified to see that they used those same checked tablecloths from the long-ago rehearsal dinner. We may well whip them out again this weekend. Both women are members of the Satin Dolls and we will be serenading two other charter members on the occasion of their 50th birthdays. I can assure you that there will be streamers tied to my chandelier, surprise balls at each setting, and rhyming toast phoned in from my mother. And we will in turn toast her—the consummate celebrator of life who taught me that no occasion is too trivial to remain unacknowledged.
Elusive Find: Oysterman
