Recipe For Success

Now that I am of an advanced age, I can draw upon my wisdom and experience to offer you sage advice on how to have a birthday that is truly top drawer. So, in no particular order:

1. Spend three hours at the spa. There is no better birthday present.
2. Drink champagne at Favorite Bar with your 91-year old grandmother who's in town from Rochester, New York.
3. Continue drinking champagne until you close down Favorite Bar and end up a little sick at home at about 3 a.m. (okay, maybe that's not such good advice).
4. At the end of the night have rambling, alcohol-infused conversations with several soccer-playing Favorite Bar regulars whom you don't usually hang out with.
5. Get your birthday cake from Stella Pastry. The only drawback is that it will be such a hit, you won't have any left over. And that's a true shame.
6. Enlist Kirk to DJ your party and give him an extensive playlist, thus ensuring you'll celebrate your 37th to the sounds of a bunch of your favorite songs. After all, no birthday is complete without The Jam's "Beat Surrender" and The English Beat's "Best Friend." Proclaiming that you want to marry Kirk every time he plays a song that makes you particularly happy might be going overboard, but he would probably appreciate it and find it a little funny, at least.
7. Order so much food that the next day you find yourself taking a huge meat and cheese tray and about 500 rolls from Palermo Deli to work for the Secret Santa potluck even though you have the day off. But keep the fruit and veggie tray for your own snacking goodness.
8. Make sure it rains cats and dogs, even though it was sunny the day before and the day after your birthday. Then decide that, like weddings, rain on your birthday must be good luck.
9. Feel the love of your friends and family, who braved said rain to celebrate with you. Without them, you'd be nothing but an old lady staring at an ever-increasing number of birthday candles.
10. Hit the gym the next day and top off your work-out with a spell in the steam room to metabolize and sweat out the alcohol.

And finally... promise yourself that you will be more mature next year and refrain from ringing in three-eight by drinking your weight in Perrier Jouet. You're likely to forget that one, but eventually it will sink in. Maybe by 47.

Tonight, instead of joining Helen, Erin and Andrew for dinner in Japantown, I'm going to order pizza, write thank you notes and go to bed at 9:00. I may have the partying prowess of a 25-year old, but I definitely have the hangover resilience of a 37-year old.

p.s. I'd post photos from the epic event, but once again Blogger doesn't want you to see them. So you'll have to use your imagination.