Happy Happy Birthday

Carmel-by-the-Sea, California 

One of my favorite birthday cards ever, one that I bought by the score and sent to a collection of friends and family, featured a cartoon of two men seated at a table in a restaurant. The caption read: Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Yo-Yo Ma dine together. One is saying to the waiter: I'll have the mahi-mahi; The other says, I'll have the couscous. Inside, the card read: Happy Happy Birthday.

As I wrote, I sent this card to a bunch of people and told others about the card. Not everyone found it as hilarious as I did. This, I am sure, says more about me than them. I have a rather quirky sense of humor. I will say that my brother-in-law (a four-night Jeopardy winner, by the way) also found it very funny. I stand by it being very funny.

So, here we are, back in one of my favorite places on the planet, celebrating my birthday. It's kinda a big one. Back in the day we only considered the decade birthdays to be 'big,' Those and the milestone ones: Sixteen when we got our driver's license that gave us wheels; 21 when we ordered our first 'legal' cocktail. I have great memories of both those birthdays. But I've had some really downright horrific birthdays as well. Birthdays, like life itself, live on a spectrum not a dot.

My last big birthday was five years ago when we were just coming out of the pandemic. Joel took me to a restaurant in West Hollywood where we sat at the bar and ordered oysters. That's been our birthdays tradition since we were first together. We had to show our vax cards to the masked doorman to enter the restaurant. Afterwards, we went to a club to dance for the first time since early 2020. At that time, I was using a car wash service that came to my house during the pandemic, and one of the guys had recommended this latino club. He said it had  featured a band when he had gone the previous weekend. I looked it up online and saw that it was a band we knew well.

We entered the club wearing our requisite masks, and again showed our vax cards. The club was rather dark and fairly crowded, but we found a small banquette table along one wall adjacent to the decent-sized dance floor. Joel went to the bar, and I surveyed the population. I scanned it twice, just to make sure. It appeared that I was the lone non-latino occupant in the entire club. And I felt certain that many of the faces staring back at me realized the same thing.

Now, to be clear, salsa clubs in Los Angeles generally are predominantly latino. But there is always a mix of other ethnicities. There are a fair number of Asians dancing, as well as African-Americans. In early classes, I practiced dancing with an Armenian man. And even though white guys aren't known for their dancing (unless their surnames are Astaire, Kelly or Baryshnikov), I've danced with a few who could handle their own on the floor. But, in this club, on this night, there was only one non-latino in the club, and that was moi.

I pointed this out to Joel when he returned with our water. He had already noticed. Don't worry, he said. Wait till they see you dance. And when the band started up, we walked onto the dance floor. We did not, however, dance salsa because the band who we knew from salsa clubs where they performed salsa and bachata, was only playing cumbia.

For a bit of history, cumbia is a dance that originated in Columbia and then was adopted, in a big way, by Mexico. Joel grew up dancing cumbia from a young age, taught by his mother and aunts. In a salsa club you probably won't hear/see cumbia or if you do, it will be one song. But this club was all cumbia with just a little bachata thrown in for good measure.

When Joel and I were first together, he taught me cumbia, but we don't often get an opportunity to dance it in the clubs. So, on this night, the only white woman in the club danced cumbia all night. I don't generally notice people off the floor when I am dancing, but Joel said we were a big hit at the club. I didn't care. I was simply overjoyed that we were sharing oysters and dancing again after about twenty months of almost complete isolation. It was a big birthday, and a happy, happy birthday, indeed.