When someone turns 30, is it better to have a dignified gathering, redolent of the more adult life one will now surely be living? Or is it the perfect time to tear it up old-school, strewing beer bottles and cigarette butts in your wake?
Jessica Burgess
Clearly Unedited
Apparently neither, if the guy with whom you plan to one day raise children elects to commemorate the loss of his youth by playing Street Fighter II at an off-brand Chuck E. Cheese.
I had a hard time accepting his choice. "Are you sure this is where you want your party?" I asked sadly. "We could have it at a restaurant, or a bar or, you know, anywhere besides there."
He looked at me with big eyes.
"Fine," I said, and dialed the phone. "I'd like to speak to someone about scheduling a party."
"No problem!" said the voice on the other end.
"Um," I hesitated. "The birthday boy is, er, 30. Is that OK?"
She didn't miss a beat. "Yeah, that's fine," she said. "Now, how many pizzas and pitchers of soda will you need? And do you want to go ahead and buy tokens now or just get them on the big day?"
His little-boy nature used to charm me to the point that I cheerfully enabled him. In fact, for his 28th birthday, I rented him a monkey.
That is not a sexual euphemism. I paid $200 for a real, live monkey and its trainer to come to our apartment. The monkey, whose name was Miki, spent an hour leaping around on our furniture and yanking on our hair. The fun ended, though, when Miki fumbled a cigarette out of a friend's pocket and shoved it in his mouth, then furiously rubbed the saliva-tobacco mixture all over his body. That's when the trainer went home with her monkey. (That is not a sexual euphemism either.)
My boyfriend (I mean fiancé), now that he is a little more mature, asked for a dinosaur or a koala bear this year. But I just don't have those kinds of resources.
So instead of exotic animals, it's pizza and soda at an arcade. We're having the shindig early so our friends who are allergic to Bacardi-less Diet Coke have time to go out and party afterward.
Me, I'm going home with the birthday boy. Playing Street Fighter II always gets me riled up.
Jessica's favorite Street Fighter character is Chun Li, who is the strongest woman in the world! E-mail her at jburgess@ quickdfw.com.
