Month: June 2018

40th Birthday Celebrations

I turned 40 a few days ago. I’m not bothered by turning 40, but I know it’s one of those ages that’s supposed to be a big milestone birthday (although by the amount of 50 related birthday things compared to 40, I think 50 may be the new 40). Honestly the only birthday that ever really bothered me was 36 of all ages. I think because that felt firmly middle aged and sent me into a new demographic category that did not include any 20s.

Anyway, I used turning 40 to have some fun celebrations. I know a lot of people do big trips or something like that for their 40th, but I wanted to do something that let me celebrate with all my friends. I knew that if a good number of my friends were going to come I had to make it a kid friendly event, so I decided on renting a pavilion at a park and having it catered.

Really I had been literally thinking for years about having blacksauce kitchen cater a 40th birthday party. Alas that dream was not to be fulfilled as they suffered a fire a few months ago and told me they currently didn’t have the capacity in their temporary space to cater a party that size. As my second choice I went with Blue Pit BBQ, which lets be honest is still a great option. I rounded it out with fruit and veggie trays from Eddie’s. I also got my cake from Eddie’s because I’m not going to lie as much as I love more sophisticated cakes I will forever and always associate birthday cake with sheet cake. Give me that overly sweet frosting with tons of it piled on in roses and other decorations. I mean not all sheet cake is good. Some of it’s pretty terrible, overly dry or made with that oil slick whipped frosting which should be outlawed. Eddie’s however makes an A+ sheet cake and it was exactly what I wanted for my birthday cake. And because my friend Alison is the best she surprised me with tons and tons (I have no idea how many, but there were a lot) of biscuits from Mason Dixon Biscuit Company to make up for my inability to have my blacksauce biscuits for my birthday.

I wound up renting a pavilion in Wilson Point Park in Middle River. I had never been there before or even heard of it as I have spent little to no time in Middle River in all my years in Maryland. I was just searching around online trying to find a park that had a pavilion big enough. A lot of them topped out at 40-50 people. Ultimately one of those would have been fine, but since I was inviting around 80 people I wanted to get something big enough in case most people showed. I found the website for Wilson Point Park that said they had a pavilion big enough, but I wasn’t sure since I didn’t know anything about the park. God bless the person who posted this video on YouTube because it’s pretty much what sold me on it. I did a quick drive by in February to make sure it did look okay in person, which it did. After going out there and realizing its location near I-695 and I-95 I also thought it would be a nice sort of central location for my friends who would be coming from all over the Baltimore area. It also had a nice big parking lot so there were no worries about parking. And there was also a nice big playground near the pavilion for the kids to play on. There was also plenty of lawn space to set up various lawn games as well.

I couldn’t have asked for nicer weather. After months and months of seemingly endless rain here in Baltimore the weather on Saturday was gorgeous. There was a nice breeze and the shade of the pavilion made it the perfect temperature.

It was so nice to have so many of my friends gathered in one place. It made me feel very special to have so many people come out to help me celebrate, and made me realize how blessed I am to have so many wonderful people in my life. The day went by way too fast and I definitely didn’t get to spend as much time with everyone as I would have liked. I feel like there were some people I didn’t really get to talk to at all, but I hope they had a great time and know that I appreciate them being there. It was the perfect day and just what I wanted.

The party on Saturday was my big celebration, but I of course had to celebrate on my actual birthday. I took the day off work because I try to never work on my birthday if I don’t have to. I started the day off with a massage. Then I took myself to the movies to see Hearts Beat Loud. It was a sweet little movie starring Nick Offerman as a single dad whose daughter is about to leave for college. They manage to write a song that gets some traction on Spotify causing him to try and use that as an excuse to keep her at home while she’s still trying to spread her wings. There was lots of great stuff for the music lover in me along with a wonderful story about family and support and letting go.

My final birthday fun was making my husband take me out to a fancy dinner at The Charleston. It’s been Baltimore’s most renowned fancy restaurant since I can remember helmed by multiple James Beard Award nominee Cindy Wolf. The menu is presented as a tasting menu with around 20 dishes on it and you decided how many courses you would like from 3-6. It’s not like a prix fixe menu where you get one appetizer, one main, and one dessert or something like that. With this you could order 6 meats if you wanted. Their dessert is also included in the meal and not counted as one of your courses. Even so it is definitely pricy and something I always had a hard time justifying to myself. In addition, the menu is definitely meat heavy so it felt doubly hard to justify going with my vegetarian husband. He even whined about it when I told him we were going. But as with all fancy restaurants where they are actually prepping the meals from scratch and not reheating something they ordered from U.S. Foodservice or somesuch, they were able to make him something not on the menu. He ultimately wound up having a better experience than I did. I had notified them during the reservation, and they addressed it as soon as we got there and walked him through the veggie friendly options already on the menu and then pointed out some of the things that could be easily converted to vegetarian. And then said they could put something else together with any other ingredients on the menu. He wound up getting essentially one dish from each category.

Ultimately I think he enjoyed his dinner more than I did mine. Either it didn’t say on the menu or I missed it but I didn’t expect the seafood in my second course to be curried. If I had known I would have ordered something else so that was disappointing, but completely my fault. Even though I don’t love that curry flavor the dish was still good and probably would have been great to someone who loves curry. The bronzino I ordered as my third course was delicious until I got the very center and it was not as done as I would have liked. There wasn’t enough left to bother saying anything about it. I have no doubt that if I had they very quickly would have brought me another piece of fish or replaced it with something else of my choosing as the service was very attentive and they even removed the beer my husband spilled from our bill. I am kind of still dreaming of the blue cheese that was in the salad I ordered as my first course though. My husband left extremely pleased with everything he ate. We’ll probably make it back for another special occasion at some point.

So far 40 has been a great year. Hopefully it keeps up.

The Boys in the Band on Broadway (AKA Matt Bomer Day)

My friends Jenny, Sarah, and I have a longstanding crush on our “gay TV boyfriend”, Matt Bomer going all the way back to his days as Bryce Larkin on Chuck. It of course was firmly cemented during his years on White Collar and then sent into complete overdrive with the Magic Mike films. Sadly I haven’t loved a lot of what he’s been doing lately on TV as I am not into American Horror Story at all. I also never watched whatever that Amazon show he did was. I watched the pilot and didn’t love it and then eons later when the show finally dropped I didn’t have time to watch it at the time and then sort of forgot it existed until I started writing this. Maybe I’ll watch it, but probably not.

Anyway, when we saw that Matt Bomer was going to be starring in a revival of The Boys in the Band on Broadway there was no way we couldn’t make a trip to NYC to see him in it, something I kept calling Matt Bomer Day in homage to Rex Manning Day from Empire Records. The rest of the cast including Andrew Rannells, Jim Parsons, and Zachary Quinto. My sister assures me that Michael Benjamin Washington who is also in the cast is someone that we went to high school with in Plano, TX and that he was her class president. Our high school was huge and I didn’t know most of the people in my own class let alone anyone in the year behind me so I don’t feel bad for having no clue but now I think it’s a fun tidbit.

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The last time the three of us went up to NYC together to see a show was a few years ago to see Neil Patrick Harris in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We took the MegaBus and got stranded on the New Jersey turnpike for 3 hours in the middle of the night on our way home, so this time we decided to take the train which was a much better choice even if it is more expensive. We just went up for the day without enough time to really do much between our show and the train on either side, so we just wandered around mid-town, had brunch, and of course got cookies at Schmakery’s.

I didn’t know much about the play going in other than knowing the amazing cast and that the show was a revival on it’s 50th anniversary. Having now read the New York Times review (which liked it much less than I did for some of seemingly the same reasons they didn’t care for Children of a Lesser God as much as I did), I now know that the original play was in fact two acts and that this production was trimmed and condensed into a 2 hour one act play. You can definitely still feel the shift where the act break would have occurred so I was not surprised to learn this.

It’s certainly not a perfect show, but it kept me entertained for 2 hours and that’s pretty much all I’m looking for in my Broadway entertainment. It’s still set in 1968 and is still a show that was written in 1968, so it still retains the sensibilities of homosexual life (or at least the way it was viewed) in 1968, which is one of the things the New York Times reviewer seemed to take issue with. I on the other hand am willing to view things as period pieces. Yeah, if this play about a birthday party being thrown by a group of gay guys for one of their friends was written 2018 it would probably not be this play, but it was written 50 years ago so it is and the characters act and react in the ways that they do because it was.

The first half was really amusing. There are still some zingers in the second half, but it does take a much more dramatic turn. I maybe do agree with the reviewer that Jim Parsons was perhaps not the right actor for the lead role. No offense to Jim Parsons, but he’s a pretty one note actor and while that worked for some facets of the character I’m not sure it worked for all of them. My boyfriend Matt Bomer was perfect though. That man is so pretty it’s almost criminal. We got to see a lot of him mostly naked on stage. It’s worth the ticket price just for that. The first half of the show was better not only because it was funnier, but because he did more than stand in a corner and be eye candy which is mostly what his character did in the second half of the show. At any rate I definitely enjoyed the show and getting to be so close to a long term TV crush.

After the show of course we went to the stage door to hopefully get autographs and photos. Given the large cast of well known actors it was unsurprisingly mobbed by the time we got out there, so we were a couple people deep from the rail. Everyone in the cast came out except Jim Parsons. I don’t blame him though because it was a 2 show day and he is working on a broken foot. Even though we weren’t right in front we were close enough that I managed to throw my arm across the shoulders of the people in front of me and get everyone in the cast to sign my Playbill except Zachary Quinto because some other woman threw hers on top of mine at the last second and he moved on down the line too quick to notice mine once she pulled hers back.

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We sadly weren’t close enough to get our photo taken with Matt Bomer right next to us, but my friend Jenny did yell out and ask him to look up and smile for us so we could get a selfie with him in the background and he totally did. Sarah also got lots of good photos of all the actors as they came out and were interacting with people. I did get a little bonus in that as we were walking away a gentleman grabbed me and said hey I got this photo of you with Matt Bomer would you like me to send it to you. I was like uh yes, please. It’s not the greatest photo ever. Someone else’s camera is blocking part of it and it’s a little blurry, but I’ll take it.

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It was a super fun day and really glad we did it. Hopefully this won’t be the last Broadway show that Matthew Bomer stars in. And I’m sure we’ll be up to see something else even if he’s not starring in it.