She’s Out of Her Mind

Would I normally have had a party for an unremarkable birthday in my mid-40s? Highly unlikely. This year, when all the parties were cancelled, we needed them more than ever.

Thirty years ago, I accidentally threw a great party for my 16th birthday. It was meant to be a low key “sit around and talk about nerd stuff under the unwelcome eagle eye of your parents while being gifted the entire discography of the Cure dubbed on cassette by the drummer of your boyfriend’s band who probably had a secret crush on you” kind of event. But then my skater friends turned up, and since we all traveled with music on us at all times back then, they threw the punk on the stereo and turned our dining room into a mosh pit and that was that. Nineteen years ago, I accidentally threw another great party for the last birthday I’d celebrate in Ann Arbor, which started off in the same “sit around the living room drinking too much whiskey and gossiping about your grad school professors” vibe, and ended up with my brother and a local illusionist called SuperWayne, whom I’d met at our bar earlier that year, juggling flaming torches out in the snow in the front yard while we all cheered like we were teenagers in an 80s movie watching someone do their first keg stand.

It’s not that I never try to throw great parties, they just tend to be for other occasions and they usually happen because we invite literally everyone we know to attend them and that ends up being an extremely eclectic mix. Our Halloween parties in grad school, our holiday parties here. I’m missing them like crazy this year, when both Halloween and Boxing Day are on Saturdays and they were going to be a helluva lot of fun.

Instead of all that, I convinced the DJ whose sanity-saving music streams I’ve been listening to for the past few months to let me sponsor a NIN-themed industrial and dark wave night for my birthday, complete with a mostly-all-punk hour long set of my favorites in the middle, starting with “Burn” and continuing on with “Burn.” It was more fun than I imagined I’d be able to have in the midst of all this, particularly the part where everyone fielded wild guesses about what would be in my birthday set. “These guesses are cracking me up,” said my old friend from high school. “They’re going to be really disappointed when they find out it’s Blink-182.” “I never know when you’re kidding.” “THAT’S WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT ME,” said I, a Sagittarius.

It wasn’t them, but it could have been! Happy pandemic birthday to me. She’s got a black shirt, black skirt, and Bauhaus stuck in her head.