40

I don’t know about anybody else but I’d have thought that if I had my hair done (two words: Mad Men), wore a tiara, donned a strapless black velvet dress and heels (okay, so not the mismatching red heels but heels nonetheless), bought $1000 worth of alcohol, called in favours from all my friends so there was great food, great music and a dance floor with moving lights and a motorised disco ball etc., etc., etc.,  that the night of my 40th birthday party would have been All. About. Me., right?

But nooooooooooo.

I had to endure guest after guest (after guest) coming up to me to say: “I want to meet the Mild-Mannered Lawyer!” and “I heard the Mild-Mannered Lawyer might be here!” and “That Mild-Mannered Lawyer is hot tamale!”

The MML! Shuh! (*shakes fist*)

I mean, I’m the NDM, people! Of course, I have to concede that it would have been a bit weird if all the party guests had been asking to meet the NDM or had been pointing and staring and saying, in hushed tones, “There’s the NDM! She’s sohotrightnow!” since, you know, they were my friends and knew who I was, anyway. But still!

Near the end of the evening, my friend Miss Deb came up to me.

“I’m so excited!” she said. “I met the Mild-Mannered Lawyer!”

“Whatevs,” I said. I may even have done the hand gesture.

“But to be honest,” Miss Deb continued. “I don’t think I could tell you which one she is now.”

Ha! In your face, MML! As I said to the MML later, “I MADE YOU. I CAN UNMAKE YOU!” Although, arguably, getting Miss Deb drunk enough that she couldn’t recognise the MML a few minutes after meeting her was more about unmaking Miss Deb than anything else.

Anyway, I should concede that the MML really is hot tamale even though I’m not entirely sure what ‘tamale’ is. And that the night really was All. About. Me. – as proven by my mothers group donning feather boas and providing back up to my dear friend KT singing her heart-of-gold out to “Reach Out I’ll Be There” just for me and then, later on, my Facebook Friend performing a spontaneous interpretive dance entitled “The Four Decades of [NDM]”, which involved a lot of primal screaming and, at one point, licking of the television screen. Tasty. Even my friend The White Lady, who every time I saw her told me, in no uncertain terms, that “THIS IS A SHIT PARTY! I’M SO FUCKING BORED!”, managed to drink and dance until the early hours, shortly before riding someone else’s $500 mountain bike home wearing heels instead of the clip-on shoes required.

And there was the Glügg. Of course there was the Glügg. HOW COULD THERE NOT BE THE GLÜGG? As predicted, a  group of people joined me in a shot of Glügg some time around 3am. I’m not entirely sure that Glügg is meant to be drunk that way and, indeed, some might argue that the best way to serve Glügg is to pour it directly down the drain, but still… my friends honoured me with those shots.

As for the karaoke, all I can say is that some people still can’t get ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ out of their heads four days later. Yes, they took that bullet for me and I love them all the more for it.

And then there were the hangovers right across the city the following day. Yes, my friends continued to honour me (and perhaps curse me a little) into the late hours of Sunday – and in some case, well into Monday, too.

So now I am forty. Pah! With such friends and family dancing up a storm in my corner, I think it’s fair to say that I’ve made forty my bitch…