One day I received a call from the Wall Street Journal asking what my feelings were on corporate spending, and how it was affecting my industry. I saw what the ramifications of not entertaining looked like, and it was job loss for a whole lot of people. At every one of my events, I would stand in the middle of 1,500 people and beam with pride—not at the gorgeous flowers or the state-of-the-art lighting, but at the sheer commerce of the event. Over the years, I had directly or indirectly employed thousands of people: catering directors, waiters, dishwashers, deliverymen, out-of-work actors, entertainers, musicians, taxi and limo drivers. It was big business, and it was helping New Yorkers to support their families, mine included. All of my employees depended on me to make their rent. All of our livelihoods were at stake, and I took that seriously.
With my birthday looming, and given what I had just told the reporter, I realized that doing nothing was setting a bad example. Wasn’t my whole career and life’s mission built on knowing you must enjoy each day?
I decided I would have a small ladies’ lunch with just my close friends, at a nearby restaurant or maybe at my apartment. So I thought of caterers. I mean, I am a party planner—why cook when you can cater? Lunch seemed innocuous, so I sat down and started to think of the people who I loved, who inspired me, and had impacted my life. When I counted the names I was at ninety-two women—and that wasn’t even including the family members I was inviting—and I couldn’t have taken one of them off that list. I started laughing. Well, that certainly wasn’t a reservation somewhere. Hell, it wasn’t even a private room. With that number of invites, I’d need a whole restaurant. And it surely was not going to be tea and cucumber sandwiches. I called my close friend who managed the Strip House, and since it was never open for lunch, she gave us the whole place to ourselves.
I started to get excited. I needed this celebration after the rough few years we’d had. I wanted a fun, boozy Friday lunch at my favorite steakhouse, with lots of red wine, and great chocolate cake. I laughed about a bunch of ladies digging into creamed spinach and onion rings. Even my invitation was shocking. The front looked innocent enough—it was a long horizontal card with pink, fat, juicy, whimsical letters saying, “Forty &.” Then when you opened the twelve-inch card, it said, “fucking fabulous.” It was fun and unexpected and powerful, exactly how I felt. In the face of everything I’d lost, and the uncertainty of the future, I wanted laughter and joy and thankfulness for what I did have. I wanted to say, I love you, and you are all important to me.
I spent days working on my seating charts and place cards. On one side of the place card was the guest’s name and a totally mortifying photo of me (i.e., from the 1980s, a decade that wasn’t great for anyone), and the other side had a very concise description of her unique qualities and how we met. Each of those descriptions was different, and not a single adjective was repeated; I wanted these women to know the effort I made to see them. When I got up that day to say my toast, I saw my mom and sisters, Rachel and Marissa. Then I looked at all my sisters by choice—the women I had collected through the years, from my first real friend Julie, whom I met when I was seven, to Susie from Camp Fernwood, to friends from Semester at Sea, to all the Tribeca moms who were my new friends. I felt so blessed, it brought me to tears. It was a special, perfect afternoon, more than enough for any momentous birthday. Well, almost . . .
I hate to make anyone feel left out, so the next evening, Saturday night, I had a whopping 250 people over at our apartment for a full-on, DJ-spinning club night. We removed every piece of furniture from the main rooms and lit the entire apartment in purple and red lights. We had glow bars lit up in different colored lights and installed platforms for professional dancers I hired (the former table dancer in me couldn’t resist). Every surface was covered in sweets, and at midnight forty boxes of pizza were delivered. It was a total blast. I received over a hundred e-mails and notes afterward thanking me for the best time my guests had had in ages, and for snapping them out of the bad mood they’d been in for months. There have been many, many things I have regretted in my life, but celebrating the end of that year, and the beginning of a new decade was just the yes, I can that I’ll never regret.
Oh, yeah, and for this party I did give out a goodie bag. It was an empty canvas bag that said “fabulous” on the outside, and it was up to each guest to fill it with his or her own treasures.
Chapter Seventeen
Illumination
All any parents want is for their children to be happy. I had experienced that in my own life, and I’d seen it over and over in my clients’ lives. The mother of the bride who seems a little too particular (okay, who seems like a complete nightmare) really just wants her baby girl to have the day of her dreams. I couldn’t blame her.
I once got a call from a wonderful couple, Debi and Jeff, who wanted me to help plan their dual thirtieth birthday party (their birthdays were within the same week). We had a great connection, and when it was over, they said, “We’ll call you for Andrew’s bar mitzvah.” FYI, Andrew was just three at the time.
True to her word, Debi called me seven years later. Now Andrew was only ten, and the bar mitzvah was still three years away. But for Debi, it was never too early to plan for her boy’s big day. She wanted to have the event in the country club where they were members, but she said all of her friends had been there hundreds of times. Rather than choose a different location, she wanted to redesign the country club’s banquet room to look like a completely different venue. This would involve custom upholstery and carpeting, and the wallpaper would be Andy Warhol–esque murals of her son’s face. Debi was so dedicated to making her son’s day unique that we used to joke about her coming to work at Save the Date®.
Two days before the bar mitzvah, I got a weeping and wailing phone call from Debi. I was very familiar with the two-days-before-the-event disaster by now. What was it going to be this time? Not enough tables? Wrong color upholstery? No, it was far worse. The country club for which all that upholstery, furniture, wallpaper, and carpeting had been custom designed . . . was burning to the ground. In fact, as she wept into the phone, Debi was standing in front of its smoldering ashes with the sirens blaring in the background.
Okay, this was a little worse than the typical event disaster. Debi had been so intent on every detail being a certain way that I was seriously worried that even if we could find another venue, she’d never be happy. Maybe she’d be like one of those binder brides for whom reality could never live up to their massive expectations.
Amazingly, we found an open banquet room in a country club in the next town over. My team lived there for the next two days, and we cut the wallpaper and shoehorned the carpeting so it would all fit. It wasn’t going to be perfect, at least not the way we planned it, but it was flawed in a way that only Debi would see. I was worried that this calamity would ruin her whole experience. After all, it had been her project for three years. I knew I’d be able to see her disappointment, even if others couldn’t.
This time, I was the one who shouldn’t have been so worried. The night of the bar mitzvah, Debi proved to me that she was no binder bride. Yes, she loved planning the party, but she knew the event was a celebration of her son—not of the upholstery or the wallpaper. Debi wept happy tears during her son’s bar mitzvah, and then she partied like a rock star at the reception. At the end of the night, she was the last to leave the dance floor, happy, proud, and glowing—and wearing a sweatshirt that read “Andrew’s Mom” in big fat letters. Andrew was happy, so Mom was happy, too. It made me appreciate her and her event all the more.
My two boys are so different that I always say that if I hadn’t witnessed them coming out of me, I’d never believe that they were brothers, much less fraternal twins.
Saxton is the engineer—methodical and careful, he takes his time and figures things out. He’s also a team player—on the soccer field he’s right in the mix and loving it. If you hand him a basketball,
he’ll make the basket nine out of ten times, and if you give him a bat, he’ll line it up just right and hit the ball. Grey, meanwhile, we call Evel Knievel. He’s the kid who doesn’t just climb up the ladder to leap into the ball pit—he throws himself into the ball pit backward. If you hand him a soccer ball, he won’t kick it, he’ll jump over it. The only way I’d feel sure he couldn’t hurt himself was if I encased him in bubble wrap from head to toe.
Saxton and Grey don’t look particularly alike either, but around their first birthday something occurred that made their appearances even more different. I happened to look down at the top of Grey’s head, and I noticed that his cloud of angelic curls was thinning. A few weeks before he’d had a fever and a head-to-toe rash, and the pediatrician said that his hair loss might have resulted from that illness—or from an allergic reaction to the antibiotic he’d been given. Most likely his hair would grow back all on its own, she said, but she referred us to a dermatologist just to be sure.
The dermatologist couldn’t give us a firm diagnosis, but listed about six possible causes. She agreed that his hair might grow back. Or it might be alopecia—an immune system disorder that causes hair loss from mild to total. Some children outgrow it, and some don’t. She told us there was nothing we could do but wait and see.
A few months later, Grey woke up one morning, and I noticed that there was a fine coat of hair covering his bald spots. By June of that year all his hair had come back. Phew, we thought. It must have been a reaction to the antibiotic or the fever, just as the pediatrician had first suggested.
A year went by, and the twins were now two. In Florida, visiting my parents, I looked down at Grey’s head one morning and saw a perfectly round, quarter-size bald spot. I sank to my knees and fought back my tears in front of him. Oh, no, I thought. Here we go again. Clearly his hair loss had not been a onetime occurrence.
Back in New York we went to a series of doctors who all said the same thing: alopecia areata. By the third time we heard it, I had stopped crying. We were prescribed foams and creams for the bald patches on his scalp to help stimulate the hair growth. Grey hated it, but he put up with it like a trooper. Eventually he lost 60 percent of the hair on his head, and my friends could no longer assure me that it wasn’t noticeable. Now we needed to make sure that it was just hair, and we took him to a pediatric endocrinologist to rule out a whole series of possible (scary) health causes. Blood tests eventually proved that he was completely healthy in every way—but only after we’d been forced to confront the truly terrifying possibility that he wasn’t okay.
It was a profound relief that Grey still was just as healthy as Saxton. And because Grey still had a band of hair around the back of his head, when he wore a hat he looked like anyone else. It was winter, so it wasn’t so difficult to keep a hat on him, and we made Saxton wear one as well. Sometimes they both protested, but I insisted, and they knew that if they didn’t wear their hats, they couldn’t go outside.
The first time Grey’s hat flew off on a street near our home, I gasped and my skin tingled as if I were having an extreme response to fear. My pulse quickened and my ears closed up. I leaped after the hat and got it back on his head. There wasn’t even anyone on the street at the time, but I remember it took me several minutes to calm myself. Insanely, the last time I had felt that way was when Saxton had almost choked on an apple. I reminded myself that this was not a life-and-death situation. It was cosmetic. Still, no matter how many times I reminded myself how lucky we were that Grey was healthy, I couldn’t shake a feeling of doom and despair. We had gone from having three perfect kids to dealing with a situation.
It was then that I began to backslide. There were days when I struggled to get out of bed. All the lessons I’d learned over the last twenty years flew out the window. I asked myself over and over, How can this possibly be happening to my child? Hadn’t I learned life’s big lesson that there are never guarantees, and ultimately you have no control over the big picture? I also knew that while I could cope with anything that life had in store for me personally, I couldn’t stand the thought that one of my children might have to suffer. I could scream at the injustice of it. So I went back to making deals with the universe—I’d give up any amount of pleasure if it meant my son’s hair would grow back.
On the days when I felt bleakest—flat on my back in bed, without the slightest will to get up—I was right back in those dark days after the attack, when I’d lost all hope that there was joy in life. The only difference between now and then was that in this situation my sadness wasn’t buried under the surface. I wore it right on top of me. If I was at a party and someone asked how I was, I’d burst into tears.
I was so desperate that I began actually to listen to the people who tried to make me feel better. After all these years, I had become an at-leaster.
At least he’s not a girl.
At least he’s healthy.
At least it’s only the hair on his head.
At least he has his eyebrows and eyelashes.
At least he is not in physical pain.
Yes, I thought. That’s right. Isn’t it? Get a grip, Jen.
In the spring, Grey’s hair started growing back again, but he was left with two shiny bald spots. For a year and a half we’d been on a roller coaster of watching, and waiting, and hoping for the best. Each time his hair grew back, we thought, Phew. And each time he lost it again, we thought, Oh, no. But still we hoped, and constantly looked for silver linings, because we couldn’t entertain the thought of the worst.
In July Grey developed a fever, and the thing that we’d feared all along happened.
By the end of the next week, all of his new hair growth was gone, and the bald patches were getting bigger. One day when I picked him up from his nap, his crib was littered with hair. It was like a mass exodus, and Grey wiped his face to get the fallen strands out of his mouth and his eyes. That visual alone was heart-wrenching.
Eventually Grey lost all of the hair on his head, but he still had eyebrows and eyelashes. With a hat on, he looked like the old Grey.
I was in such denial over what was happening that I refused to take pictures of Grey. It was almost superstitious—as if taking pictures would make it all the more real. I’m embarrassed to say that for months of his toddler life—a time when most parents are snapping pictures every second—we have none.
Around this time, it was my parents’ forty-fifth anniversary, and my sisters and I decided to give them the gift of a photo shoot with the whole family. It would be a celebration of so much—my father, cancer-free for four years, my parents’ marriage, and their five beautiful grandchildren—and also how far each of their three daughters had come.
But first I had to get over my anxiety about photographing Grey. I had so much to be thankful for, I told myself. I had my three beautiful children and a husband I loved. He’d found his new dream job, and I loved my work. But as I picked out a sweet little sailor hat for Grey to wear in the photograph, I struggled with my sadness.
That afternoon we were on the lawn in the back of my parents’ house, and I thought, If this grass could talk. It was the same lawn where I’d thrown my first parties, and where I’d memorized every flower in my mother’s garden. It was the same lawn where Rachel and I had played, and baby Marissa had chased after us. Now, on the same lawn, the cousins were giggling and doing cartwheels. Grey’s face shone with delight and happiness—an emotion that was captured on all of our faces in the photo that now hangs on my parents’ living-room wall. Little did I know that Grey’s alopecia would progress, and very soon that photograph would be the only thing I’d have to remind me of what Grey’s face looked like before he lost all his eyebrows and eyelashes.
When Grey’s last eyelash fell out, I held it in my hand, and I mourned for the loss of that little lash like I mourned my own innocence. I tortured myself with the thought that my son’s life would never be the same.
What if everywhere he goes, people stare at him?
What if he can’t find love?
What if he doesn’t get jobs, or girlfriends, or anything else he wants in this life?
I went to my bad dark place. Coincidentally, it had just been the twenty-year anniversary of my attack, and a lot of my own bad memories and pain were bubbling in my head. Now, I told myself, Grey would have his own before and after, and his life would never again be so perfect. And how cruel that he was a twin—I pictured my boys on their birthdays, one with his thick head of hair and the other bald.
With all of Grey’s hair now gone, I knew this was alopecia universalis—total hair loss—and I knew that some people’s hair never grew back. I pored over Web sites and read devastating stories about adults whose lives were destroyed because they were afraid to leave their own homes. Oh, God, I thought. No. I shut off the computer and told myself never again to Google alopecia.
Every day, no matter where I was—in a work conversation, sitting at dinner with my family—at least 70 percent of my brain was occupied with worry over Grey. I kept imagining those nightmare scenarios in my head. Grey’s baldness broke my heart every day, and I couldn’t snap myself out of it. None of the “at leasts” that I’d allowed myself to entertain were working anymore. When a well-meaning mother at school said to me, “Well, at least he’s a boy,” I looked at her in tears. I said, “Oh, really? And what if it was your beautiful boy? Would you take solace in that?”
I became even more of a fanatic about covering Grey’s head—indoors and out. Even in warm weather, at preschool where everyone knew him, I insisted he wear a baseball cap. I dreaded people’s stares in the playground. I knew that when other parents saw my child’s starkly bald head and face they suspected the worst—that he was suffering from cancer. And even while I thanked God that Grey was healthy, I felt a hot rush of shame that these other parents pitied me and my poor child for something that wasn’t even true.
I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag Page 19