Birthday Memories

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

As I spend my last day of being 68, I thought about all the birthdays I could remember that were special in either a good or bad way. Surprising that the few I’m about to talk about are the only ones that still jar the memory bank in the least, and the bad ones are still with me.

The first birthday I actually remember celebrating was my sixth, which turned out to be not a good one. I was in a new town (Chapel Hill, North Carolina), so my folks thought it might be a good way to bond with some of my classmates. What they didn’t count on was my propensity for being a sore loser. They instituted a party game where an object is passed around a circle while music plays, then my mom would stop the music, and whoever is holding the object when the music stops would be out. I was the unfortunate first one out, and didn’t take too kindly to it, it being my birthday and all. Wasn’t I supposed to win everything on my special day? I had a meltdown, and my dad picked my up by my arm and scuttled me off to the bedroom, where I received the discipline that is now illegal in Scotland, plus the embarrassment of one of the neighbour kids accidentally walking in while I was being disciplined. I remember nothing else from that day. I was given extra chances in the ensuing couple years, because in each year, I was in a new town. My 7th birthday party was in Lafayette, Louisiana, and my 8th was in Tucson, Arizona. Nothing traumatic happened at either of those, or I’d probably have a better recollection of them.

I didn’t have another birthday party until my 23rd, by which time I was living in San Francisco. My duo act was working pretty steadily, and my partner decided to have a big blowout surprise party at the house we were both living near Golden Gate Park. She invited about 60 people, most of whom came. Most memorable was a couple of friends in attendance were the (late) Mitchell Brothers, the porn film-makers, who brought a 16mm sound projector, while my partner obtained a couple of Warner Bros. cartoons and an Our Gang short. Unfortunately, one of the WB cartoons was one with Porky Pig called “Old Glory,” that was one of the company’s token efforts to promote patriotism, not exactly a party piece. I recognised it by its title, and suggested we pass on that. Watching it the next day with my brother and a few others proved I was right to do so. Still, the party was a major success, and a major amount of cannabis and alcohol was consumed, plus there were people who came from 30-40 miles away. Credit to Ruby for pulling that one off.

My 30th birthday was the antithesis of the above, as I was a bit depressed for several reasons. Mostly, it was feeling that all the promise shown from the year before for major success seemed to have fallen by the wayside. Movie, TV, and recording offers all failed to materialise, and now I was planning to leave San Francisco for LA, perhaps a year too late to really capitalise on the buzz that had surrounded us exactly 40 years ago. There were still a few things that did happen once we moved to LA (Mork & Mindy and Pee Wee Herman Show), but on November 9, 1980, I was not in much of a mood to celebrate, as reaching 30 was sort of a cutoff point where show biz is concerned. There was, and still is, that vibe that if you don’t make it by 30, you probably won’t. I was feeling that, plus my first marriage was pretty well done, so my birthday celebration was just my brother and his wife joining me and my wife at the house and playing Scrabble. Party animals!

The rest of the birthdays are sort of a blur, though I remember my 57th came at the end of a horrible week on a cruise ship, something I had said years before I would never do, but this was maybe my fourth go at it. The ship was sailing from Southampton to somewhere in the Caribbean, and I only had to do two shows the whole week, but the first one was such a disaster, the events manager cancelled my other one (I still got paid for both). I had to put up with the humiliation of encountering people at the food court, some saying (in posh English accent), “I watched your show the other night, and did not understand what it was you were doing.” So thankfully there was an open bar to keep me going for the rest of the cruise. I was hanging with the other acts on the final night, all of us quite inebriated, and shouted out just when it turned midnight: “Hey! It’s my fucking birthday!” I was serenaded to the drunkest chorus of Happy Birthday you’ll ever hear.

The other memorable birthday was three years ago, a day after Maggie and I had gotten back from a trip to New York. She showed up at my house at 8:30 in the morning, something she hadn’t done before and hasn’t done since. She claimed it was to bring me my birthday presents, but I just looked at her and said, “Trump won, didn’t he?” She nodded, and I calmly went to our house’s message board and wrote the only two words that could come to mind: Fuck America! Not very arty I know, but it was early in the day.

This year, Maggie has planned a destination unknown for a weekend birthday getaway, and has been very clever at not revealing any details. I’ll probably write something about it on Monday, as I’m sure it will be memorable. Looking ahead, I hope that for my 70th birthday next year, the US has a new president, and that nothing has changed in UK except maybe the absence of Boris Johnson from Downing Street.

November 8th, 2019



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