This week, IRTE will be bringing its interactive birthday party show, Happy Birthday, Stupid Kid!, to the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival in North Carolina. The titular character persists in seeing his 12th Birthday in a relentlessly positive light (even as his family falls apart around him). For many of us in the cast, the show brought back some conflicted memories surrounding our childhood celebrations - the highs,the lows, the excitements, the disappointments.
Jamie Maloney elaborates...
I had birthday parties until I was eleven years old. I'll call them disappointing. The reasons were justifiable if I look at them from an adult's perspective, but at the time I was not happy.
I lived in a neighborhood which was far from my school and relatively devoid of other kids. It also wasn't the safest area of New York City in the late 70's and early 80's. Add to this, a summer birthday, when people were away on vacation and it's easy to understand the low turnout for my parties. My parents did their best to give me happy celebrations but my social isolation left them and me ignorant of the trends and interests of kids at the time. Sitting in a circle and using teaspoons to pass a tennis ball around may have been fun in their day but the savvy kids of the 80's wanted more. And of course I was at a loss because being the weird kid in class whose living situation was a mystery and who compensated for his awkwardness by acting out didn't earn me many invites to other parties.
One cool kid came to one party and apparently spread the word because after that my only attendees were children of my mother's friends, kids I had known since infancy and the one cousin I had who was my age until we had a falling out over a Star Wars toy when we were eight. I have old pictures of a line of shirtless boys in our backyard waiting to play another round of "catch the potato" wearing the expressions of a group of convicts before they set out for a day of hard labor, and quite a few more of me pouting in the corner.
For my eleventh birthday (and final) childhood party, I caught on to the fact that all the kids were having their events at Laces, the local (to my school) rollerskating rink. I invited the entire class, terrified of the humiliation I was certain to endure when surely no one would show up. At the rink, with wheels on my feet and an escape route already planned, my guests started showing up. ALL of them! I was thrilled. They actually like me! I went over to some of the boys from my class to thank them for coming, but they ignored me. Some of the girls did talk to me and let me know that another boy in the class was having his birthday party at exactly the same time and that the girls and a few friendly boys were there for me and the rest were there for him. From anxious to vindicated to humiliated in the span of a minute. I parked myself in front of the Donkey Kong machine in the corner and had to be dragged physically into the back room where the cake and the presents were happening. I was done with birthday celebrations for the rest of my teen years.
When I was 21, I decided to celebrate my birthday alone. You come into the world alone, so
why not appreciate that? I went to the movies. Alone. And why not? Why not go alone? I felt a bit conspicuous at first but I discovered my solitary viewing preference and in a roundabout way it lead me to understand and embrace my introverted nature. For my 39th I saw the original Planet of the Apes at Film Forum, followed by a showing of The Warriors in Tompkin's Square Park. In Planet of the Apes the date on the console of the ship that Charlton Heston is in at the beginning of the movie shows the date July 14, 1972, the very day I was born. I viewed it as
IRTE Presents: Happy Birthday, Stupid Kid! at the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival
THURSDAY, January 26, 2017 @ 7:00pm
THURSDAY, January 26, 2017 @ 7:00pm
SATURDAY, January 28, 2017 @7:00pm
20 Commerce Street
Asheville, NC 28801
