Birthday on Broadway

[ellenkushner]

Well, really; what did I think would happen if I carried a heart-shaped cake inscribed: "Happy Birthday, Ellen" down 87th St.?
- Are you Ellen?
- Is it your birthday?
- Happy birthday!
- What a gorgeous cake . . . . .

What I didn't expect, when I got to the bus stop on B'way and set it down on a bench, was for a gang of 60-ish tourists from Maryland to warmly enquire, and then start singing Happy Birthday to You (Dear Ellllllen), joined by various passers-by, shoppers and dog-walkers . . . . "We're not drunk!" they hastened to assure me. "We're here to see a show. We're going to see South Pacific!" Well, of course they weren't drunk. They were just high on the City; on the possibility that anything can happen, any time - that beautiful cakes will be sitting at bus stops , that total strangers will come up to you and wish you well and begin to sing. . . .

Here is the cake that caused it all, sitting at home on the new sideboard (next to a Rosh Hashanah card from Eve Sweetser, a photo she took on her trip to Japan). Chalk another triumph up to cake- (and film-)maker extraordinaire, conteurlisa! Yum.



Oh, and it isn't my birthday 'til Monday (10/6) - we just decided to start celebrating early.

On Monday night we are planning to go see beloved Red Bull Theater's reading of A Horse's Ass, "loosely adapted from Pietro Aretino’s Renaissance comedy Il Marescalco: 1526. Mantua. A homosexual man will be forced at knifepoint to marry a woman. He's tearing his hair out."

Comments

[dryfoo.livejournal.com]

I am still vibrating slightly from the display of raw courage it took to walk through the streets of any large city (no disrespects to the Apple) with an uncovered cake. Please tell me it was in a nice cakebox with a transparent top. Visions of (1) pigeons, and (2) a particular scene best left undescribed from a teen-comedy movie, it's all more than I want to contemplate.

So glad you and it arrived safely, and with greetings and song.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

I was vibrating, too - but I had Terri at my side, fending off distracted dogwalkers with her umbrella. The pigeons, we just had to trust.