BY AGE 50 YOU WILL ALSO HAVE:

* Bags of plastic bags hanging on the back doorknob

Flashback Friday: F Word Edition

I celebrated my 40th birthday (Yesterday! I mean alt-yesterday!) in New York binging on Broadway shows and bodega food and big AMEX bills. Coincidentally, this lady was doing something 40-related on bus stops and sidewalk billboards all over town as well. And she was gracious enough to pose for a picture with me. (You're lucky I don't know any words that start with F because if I did I might descend into tedious alliteration here, which is the lowest form of writing imaginable. You're welcome.)

How to turn 40: Step 7

Once upon a time, there were three little boys who eventually moved to Chicago. And they were each assigned to stay young and relatively wrinkle-free. But I took them away from all that and now they work for me. My name is FORTY*.

I have two friends in the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus who are also turning 40* in and around the end of April. And since we have pretty much the same circle of friends, we decided to pool our money and our guest lists and throw a huge threeway party (wait ... that came out wrong). So last night, we packed the cool loft space above Hamburger Mary's in Andersonville with friends and family and liquor and cake. Lots and lots of cake. (I was in charge of the cake.)

*One of us is actually 45, but the backstory was easier to write if I just said we were all 40. NoFo apologizes for any confusion this may have caused.

I was going to wear all black to the party to mourn the passing of my youth, but Richard and Michael convinced me to dress festively with them ... if for no other reason than to match the room:

I ordered three cakes, one for each of us. And Richard thought it would be fun to get 125 candles and put a 1, a 2 and a 5 on the cakes (125 = 40+40+45, for those of you struggling with the math):



As you can see, by the time they were all lit, the candles created quite a blaze. In fact, by the time the third cake was completely lit, the first cake was a pastry inferno:

And yes, that's candle wax you see pooling across the top of the cake. Soon after we took the above picture, the flames got so low that the frosting actually started to boil:

But what's a 125th birthday without boiled cake? Thankfully, our guests found it in their hearts to eat our boiled cake and not make snide comments about how old people can't be trusted with fire. So it was all good.

The party started at 7, and by 11 it was really swinging. Unfortunately, I wasn't. I'd celebrated my actual birthday with my family (including my newly minted domestic partner!) the day before and then spent Saturday morning at my cousin's wedding in the stunning Celtic-meets-Art-Nouveau beauty of Old St. Pat's Church followed by lunch with the kids at Ed Debevic's followed by shoe shopping with my mom and sister (because I was totally running out of shoes) followed by last-minute party preparations followed by the party itself followed by oh hey is it already eleven o'clock?

So home to bed I went, while the guests and the other birthday boys partied on in my absence. But I'd had my cake. And I'd eaten it without burning my tongue. And I was safely on the other side of 40, with two full weekends of celebrations under my belt documented in a seven-part autoblography.

And either I'm old or I'm tired, but I can't think of an interesting way to end this blog post. So I'm afraid you read all this way for nothing. But what do you expect? I'm 40 now. Give an old guy a break. Sheesh!

How to turn 40: Step 6

I've finally reached that magical birthday where I honestly don't need any more stuff. But I do need the fiancé. More than air. And while our country's moral leaders struggle valiantly to convince the world that our love is something to be feared and loathed, I struggle to wonder if those moral leaders will ever know the happiness and stability we share in their own lives. Stupid fuckers.

So I sneaked out of work a little early tonight and met the fiancé at the Cook County Clerk's Office. Once we got the baby's breath arranged in our hair, we began our slow and hopeful march down the escalator to the subterranean Vital Records Division, where we had a brief but meaningful ceremony. We set the mood with the first two choruses of Standing In Line Behind The Couple With The Kid In The Bassinet. Then we had a reading of Please Print Your Names On The Form Exactly As They Appear On Your Driver's Licenses. After the obligatory Double-Checking Of The Driver's Licenses and the traditional Waiting While The Clerk Runs To The Printer, we declared our love symbolically through the charming local custom of Handing The Cashier Thirty Dollars.

And we were officially domestic partnered! Which is the best 40th birthday present I've ever gotten.

The county's standard ceremony package doesn't come with a photography service, so my newly minted domestic partner's brother—who was our witness—took this lovely portrait of us just outside the chapel with my cell phone camera, which I then slightly color-corrected in iPhoto so we'd look extra-tan on our special day:

And then we headed up a few blocks to meet my entire family at the architecturally fabulous Grand Lux Café for a celebratory dinner followed by molten chocolate cakes. Because no domestic partnership or wedding—or 40th birthday, for that matter—is valid without pastries that bleed when you cut them. And instead of a honeymoon-like cab ride back to our condo, we walked six blocks to the el so my niece and nephew could cap off their evening in all the joy and wonder that comes with riding a train.

I may have lost a fiancé today, but I gained a two-disc Sweeney Todd DVD. Oh, and a domestic partner. And as I type this, my domestic partner and his brother and my entire family–everyone I love the most in this world—are safe and cozy and asleep under our roof. And that, my friends, is how you have the Best 40th Birthday Ever.

How to turn 40: Step 5

Wake up.

So it's finally happened. What started 40 years and 12 hours ago as a little trickle of water while my soon-to-be parents were working in the garden has culminated in 17 addresses, three cats, four cars, one college degree, 17 jobs, one broken arm, five mortgages, two televisions, five marathons, two triathlons, 525,600 show tunes, 12 Disney visits, uncountable pairs of shoes, one sister, one brother-in-law, one nephew, one niece, one fiancé ... and now one earthquake.

And the adventures continue to continue ...

How to turn 40: Step 4

We are home. We've been up since 2:30 Chicago time so we could be on the first flight out and I could report to work enriched but exhausted at 8:00 this morning. We are very tired. But not too tired to share some more highlights of our fabulous birthday Broadway blowout!

44xX: Get the brioche french toast. Fabulous! Don't get the huevos rancheros. Ranchero-less! Ogle the staff. Ogluous!

August: Osage County: This epic piece of theater takes the Southern Gothic traditions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and ratchets up its characters' utter collapse to the levels of King Lear ... and then smothers everything in the acrimony of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for good measure. The extended family at its center fails spectacularly, irrevocably and unpredictably over the course of three-plus hours and two intermissions. And I was completely swept up in its collapse Saturday afternoon, alternating between stifled sobs and gasps of laughter for the whole ride. The fiancé has learned that I like to mull over plays, musicals and movies alike, discussing them for days after I see them as I continue to wrap my brain around the playwrights' intentions, the directors' interpretations and my own evolving opinions. But out in the light of day, this play strikes me more and more as a soap opera wrapped in an after-school special dipped in a reality show rolled in an entire season of Dallas. Its characters survive every—and I mean every—Bad Family Tragedy as three generations dance together and apart in an intricate tango of lies, failure and blame. Don't get me wrong; it's epic, moving theater. But it piles on the Trials of Job awfully thick. Then again, it just won the Pulitzer, so what do I know? (Let me point out, though, that I just gave you an overview of the play's general themes without spoiling a single moment of its many surprises. Which makes me a far superior human to the New York Times' Charles Isherwood, who pretty much cataloged every spoiler in his review ... which the theater dumbassedly posted in giant type on its sidewalk displays. DO NOT READ IT if you intend to see the play. Which I whole-heartedly recommend.)

Hell’s Kitchen: Between shows, we met my friend Arno for dinner at a fabulous upscale Mexican restaurant curiously named for the neighborhood it occupies instead of the fabulous food it serves. We all practically licked our plates clean ... and then we stabbed each other with forks so we wouldn't have to share our desserts. EAT HERE. And get the tres leches. And do not, under any circumstances, share it.

Xanadu: What can I say? It's a delightfully campy stage version of a campily terrible movie. It's a festival of gay jokes and Cheyenne Jackson's brutal thighs lovingly wrapped up in a string of disco show tunes. It's inventively choreographed and expertly danced. And I speak with loving admiration and thinly veiled jealousy when I say that the pipes on the singers could put the horns on a garbage barge to shame. I have only two complaints: 1) the show looks kind of shabby, like an off-Broadway show that suddenly made it big and in all the excitement forgot to upgrade its wigs and sets, and 2) the sound mixing is so sloppy and so thoughtless that we couldn't understand a good three-fourths of the spoken dialogue. Which is a shame. At least I think it is a shame; we have very little idea what all we missed because we couldn't understand it.

Great Jones Café: We met Joe and David for a fabulous brunch on Sunday at this out-of-the-way spot in the Bowery. Then we explored the hood for a while, getting great New York history and trivia from both of them. They took pictures to mark our meeting, so I didn't. But they have yet to share the pix, so there's no proof we actually supped together.

Curtains: Dippy, silly fun. A great book punctuated by a mostly great score. Curtains is Kander and Ebb's final musical, which is not the strongest way for them to go out, but I'd still happily see it repeatedly. It stars the adorable David Hyde Pierce (for whom the fiancé and I have both threatened to leave each other) as a detective struggling to solve a string of backstage murders at a mediocre musical called Robbin' Hood. The bad-musical-within-a-musical trope is always a great way to squeeze together a bunch of unrelated music and allow major characters to burst into song with reasonably plausible frequency. We love Debra Monk and Karien Ziemba, and they deliver all the sass and moxie and Broadway diva fabulousness we'd hope from them in this show. Unfortunately, Curtains also co-stars Edward Hibbert, who is as fey and mush-mouthed and startlingly untalented here as he was on Frasier. His enduring career is one of the great mysteries of the theatrical world.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses: I’ve never seen a Broadway preview before. I’d assumed previews are full performances where minor, minor, minor kinks are worked out: refining the nuances of a lighting cue, finding a more suitable prop, tightening the chin strap on a dancer's wig, etc. At $100+ a ticket, I’d never expect a Broadway preview to include actors flubbing their lines … or coming on stage holding scripts that they've poorly hidden in the props they are holding. And yet, right there at dramatic end of Act I, the doddering old Madame de Rosemond marches out and proceeds to read her lines to poor Madame de Tourvel, who is having the breakdown of her fragile emotional life. Appalling lapses in professionalism notwithstanding, the production is quite lovely. It stars Laura Linney, and the fiancé was almost palpably giddy at the prospect of seeing her in it. Unfortunately, her performance is kind of ... wooden. And this comes from two big old homos who want nothing more than to love her in this sumptuously bitchy parlor drama of manners, appearances and cruelty in 1780s Paris.

Celebrity sightings: I’m traditionally not so good at this game, and this trip coughed up names only the most ardent theater fan would know: As we were walking to dinner one night, we’re pretty sure we saw Karen Ziemba heading in to a performance of Curtains. We definitely saw Rondi Reed hugging her castmates goodbye after two back-to-back performances of August: Osage County. And we saw Edward Hibbert (huzzah!) in the lobby of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. So since he wasn’t in the natural habitat of his own show, he’s the only true random celebrity sighting we had. LLD was a rare Sunday evening performance, and we’d hoped to see a lot of Broadway stars from other shows stopping in to see it on their night off, but no such luck. I did see Helen Mirren’s hair at intermission, but it didn't appear to be attached to Helen.

Times Square: It’s just like Disney World on a holiday weekend. Except with more Patti LuPone posters. And it's almost as if the city was just waiting for me to come celebrate my big milestone birthday in its show-tune-scented arms. Because in preparation for our arrival, it slapped this poster on the side of almost every phone booth from Times Square to the Bowery:

How to turn 40: Step 3

Wake up in a fabulous New York hotel all snuggled up next to your fabulous fiancé and realize that, while the fiancé is still pretty fabulous, the hotel is just nicer than OK. First of all, the pillows on the bed barely qualify as usable. You get a choice between a microwave-sized throw pillow with all the squishiness and comfort you'd find in a blister pack of store-brand lunch meat or an actual pillow that feels like little more than a threadbare pillowcase stuffed with balled-up socks. Then you get in the shower and discover the shower head is one of those water-saving aeration thingies that give you all the water pressure of a mouse sneeze.

On the other hand, you get a lobby dominated by these rather spectacular paintings:


On Day Two of our spectacular Broadway birthday blowout, we brunched at the gay-fabulous 44xX with my high-school friend Chris and his delightful husband Ricky, who, as a gay Asian male of a certain age, is of course taking hip-hop classes at the Broadway Dance Center. After brunch, he took us on a tour of the center, and I've already made plans to bring my tap shoes on our next Broadway blowout trip so I can say I've taken a tap class at a real Broadway studio.

But our day was just starting! Unfortunately our Day Three is just starting too, and I have to get some pants on (yes, I blog in my underwear) so we can meet David and Joe for brunch. And when I get back, I have much more to report about our fabulous Broadway birthday blowout!

How to turn 40: Step 2

Actually, let's go back to Step 1 for a second. Before you do anything, make sure you clarify to anyone who stumbles on your blog that your birthday is a whole week away. MAKE SURE THEY UNDERSTAND YOU ARE STILL 39. FOR A VERY LONG TIME. You're just celebrating a week early in NYC with your fiancé.

That said, it's safe to move on to Step 2, where you get on your plane to find out you've been bumped from the aisle exit row seats you'd booked and relocated to the back corner window seats near the bathroom. Which is a problem because you're more than six feet tall and YOU'RE ALMOST 40 SO YOU HAVE TO PEE MORE OFTEN.

Other than that, make your way to New York City with no issues and get checked into the fabulous Millennium Hotel and head to the Museum of Modern Art for Target Free Friday Night. We got there pretty early, so this the extent of the line we had to stand in:
The line soon quadrupled in length behind us, so we were in a good spot. But once we were in the museum, we resolved to never do a free night at a museum again. Because poor people come on free nights and they just get in your way. Dear poor people who are too cheap to cough up twelve lousy bucks to get into a museum: Get a job, you hippie bums! We're trying to look at art, not the backs of your heads!

The crowds got to us pretty fast, but we did manage to stop and ogle the naked ladies in one of my favorite modern paintings, Picasso's vibrant Les Demoiselles d'Avignon:
(Take note: The only boobs you'll probably ever see on my blog are the kind that only barely look like boobs. So enjoy these while you can.) After we elbowed our way through the crowds and the art, we sat down at a little sculpture garden-facing table in the MoMA cafe and enjoyed a fabulous prix fixe dinner. Then we trotted our gay little selves a few blocks over for the first of our five birthday (NEXT WEEK! NOT THIS WEEK! NOTHING TO SEE HERE, FOLKS!) Broadway shows: Young Frankenstein! Our verdict: It's pretty stupid, but lots of fun. The sets and costumes are spectacular, the jokes are predictable, most of the songs are great, Sutton Foster is grossly underutilized in a dippy role, Megan Mullally is fabulous (though she's still playing Karen Walker, just with better wigs), Andrea Martin and Christopher Fitzgerald should win every award they're eligible for—and be knighted!—as Frau Blucher and Igor, and Roger Bart's understudy looks like he's been playing Frederick Frankenstein all his life. So far, you can call us happy, satisfied theatregoers.

Now I'm off to bed. Because I'm old. BUT NOT 40! YET! And my little fake heart attack still makes me really tired at night. And tomorrow's a big day: brunch with my friend Chris from high school, August: Osage County (a sorbet to cleanse our palates between musicals), dinner with Hugo (who it's safe to say has probably abandoned his blog altogether), Xanadu, post-show drinks with my friend Sonelius, and then who knows where the night will take us. (Probably bed. See the previous sentence about being old and tired.) Night!

How to turn 40: Step 1

The fiancé and I are climbing on a plane in three hours for a big Broadway blowout weekend!

On our docket: MoMA, Curtains, Young Frankenstein, Xanadu, two TBD shows, dinners/brunches/post-show drinks with six different clusters of friends, and some good old-fashioned standing on the sidewalk and gawking up at beautiful buildings.

And nothing can possibly go wrong with our trip; we're flying on an American Airlines MD-80!