Kelley and I both have big birthdays coming up at the end of the month.

On my 30th birthday, I told Kelley that for my 50th I wanted a big blowout party with dancing girls, the whole bad movie, pre-orgy-feast trope: luscious women doing the dance of the seven veils, hand-feeding me grapes, lots of wine. Belly-dancing music. The scent of opium wafting through the fretted screens…

This summer Kelley said: So, do you still want those dancing girls? And I said, Not in public, not in front of a zillion of my closest friends. (With age comes wisdom, or at least understanding of Embarrassment Potential.) So we agreed: no public dancing girls.

That just leaves us with trying to figure out what to do for our Momentous Occasion/s.

That, it turns out, is easy. We’ll do everything.

We’ll have a series of pleasurable evenings (and afternoons, and mornings) with and without friends, in a variety of combinations. I’ve just finished planning our private celebration for the night of Kelley’s actual birthday. (No, I’m not going to tell you what it is.) But just thinking about all the events we’ll be lining up makes my face ache with smiling. Life is good.

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Edit to add: look at this! A whole new way to see dancing girls :)