Big Ass Birthday

It was a bittersweet moment yesterday at my place of employment. It was our last birthday celebration in Warren Hall. (On Monday we move into our fancy new digs at University Hall across the street.)

And, wouldn't you know, our last birthday bash was a regular humdinger! We had four birthday girls on the floor! Ranging from the relatively tender age of BOO-AAAGH to the positively venerable A-WOOP! A-WOOP!

About 25 of us went out to lunch at a burrito place called Cancun, which was probably not the greatest idea. It's a small place with no table service, and we hadn't called ahead to let them know we were coming. We just marched in and took over this huge bank of tables. I felt kind of like Lee Marvin in "The Wild One."

Which I guess would make Jeff Marlon Brando.

So then we get back to the office, and since birthday lunch was such a disaster, I figure I should try to salvage things by getting a really bitchin' cake for the birthday girls, so Jeff and I went down to Ben and Jerry's on Oxford, and I pick out a Phish Food ice cream cake, and I say to the guy behind the counter "Can you write 'Big Ass Birthday' on a cake? I mean, you don't have a corporate policy against that or anything, do you?"

And the dude told me as long as I'm taking the cake right that minute and not leaving it in the display window, I can have "Ass" on it, no problem.

Then he asks me "'Big Ass,' is that hypenated?"

I honestly didn't know. Which is embarassing to me, because I have an M.A. in English Literature, fer Pete's sake. Jeffrey seemed pretty sure that no hyphen was required, though, so I deferred to his judgement. I guess as a rule of thumb it's best not to get carried away with punctuation on a cake. Maybe an exclamation point here or there, but a hyphen or an asterisk, that sort of thing is just likely to lead to confusion.

Also, when you ask the cake decorators to do footnotes in a smaller font, it just pisses them off.

Kurt "big daddy" True
10 june 2005