The past few days have been a veritable mini cruise in celebration of my birthday. It all began when my sister made a trip to New Haven and I showed her a few of its many charms. First there was The Cupcake Truck, where she surprised me with a red velvet cupcake topped with edible gold. That evening we stopped in at the neighborhood cigar bar, the Owl Shop, where a table of middle-aged Connecticut men told us about the nuances of their jobs as liquor promoters. Luckily, just as they whipped out a round of Jägermeister liqueur and insisted on mailing us various alcohol-related “tchotchkes,” eight of my friends showed up to steal me away for the first surprise party of my life. Ironically, it was hosted in a sorority house, a place I would ordinarily never be caught dead.

The three-day birthday cruise segued into two incidents of spontaneous guerrilla-style dance: the first took place next to the Yale University Art Gallery’s Oxfordian arch, to the mellifluous sounds of Prince’s “Delirious” blasting from a Volvo; the second transpired next to the Harvard Square T-stop, to street performers’ Andean ethnic folk music.

The birthday finished with a quieter intervention on the Boston T. My sister had found a beautiful eight-foot-long tree branch outside of the Museum of Fine Arts. Thinking it would be a perfect decorative accent to our lavender bedroom walls, I brought the unwieldy branch into the subway with us. When I entered, the subway operator immediately called her supervisor and said, “A woman just brought something like a large tree branch in.” The branch’s presence in the subway worried a few, delighted some, and mystified many. It’s funny to see what a touch of nature does to an urban landscape.

The above picture is of a woman in a fetching fur hat at an ever-popular Yale Center for British Art reception.

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