Birthday on Broadway
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."
- 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."