Birthdays
I guess it could be worse. I can’t imagine having September 11th as my birthday. I got thinking about this in the days after the Great Blackout of 2003, which started on August 14. That’s right. My birthday.
Fortunately, I don’t live in New York City, or any of the other cities affected by the blackout, so it was an ordeal I mostly observed on television and through worry for my brother-in-law who does live and work in New York.
But it got me thinking…Hmmm. How will this affect Steve Martin, Halle Berry, Susan Olsen (Cindy from the Brady Bunch), Magic Johnson, Gary Larson, Danielle Steel, Antonio Fargas (Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch), Fred Astaire’s widow Robyn Smith, and David Crosby? They all share my August 14th birthday.
For most of them, it’ll probably be ok.
But what about Harry Connick, Jr., Moby, Roxanne Biggs-Dawson (B’Elanna Torres of Star Trek: Voyager), Kristy McNichol, Tommy Shaw of Styx, and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead? They were all born on various September 11s. That’s a tough one.
We all know about the kids like Annie Lennox, Sissy Spacek, Barbara Mandrell, Jimmy Buffett, and Gary Sandy (Andy Travis from WKRP in Cincinnati). They were all born on Christmas Day. Of course, if any of them are Jewish…No big deal.
Then there’s C. Thomas Howell (Red Dawn), Ellen Burstyn and my childhood baseball hero, Cincinnati Red Johnny Bench. They were both born on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7th. That would kind of suck, especially for Bench who was born in 1947, soon enough after the attack that it still smarted a little, even though we eventually got a lot of payback. The great singer/songwriter Harry Chapin was born on the 1 year anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but he died in 1981, so I guess we’ll never know how he felt about it.
Really, Christmas babies aside, having a date recognized as important by Americans everywhere be your birthday, good or bad has to be hard. Sure, George M. Cohan and Ron Kovic (played by Tom Cruise in Born on the 4th of July) made a lot of hay with their July 4th birthdays, but what about Dear Abbey and Ann Landers? Do Leona Helmsley, George Steinbrenner, Bill Withers and John Waite (I know, he’s a Brit - and don’t think that’s not embarrassing for him) feel left out when everybody’s oohing and ahhing over the fireworks in the sky rather than on their birthday cakes? ***Edited - See below***
Either way, it’s probably better to have your birthday be a day that’s celebrated (or mourned) for that reason, but as time and history march forward, unless we start doubling up more on important dates, eventually we’ll all share our special days with a more public observance.
***Interesting (to me, anyway) postscript to this…While writing it, and coming across Harry Chapin’s December 7th birthday, I realized “wow, I have 12 gigs of music on my iPod, and none of it is by Harry Chapin.” The Apple Music Store was able to rectify that with 4 clicks and $1.98. W*O*L*D and Taxi on the iBook and then firewired to the iPod. 2 minutes later, I’m listening to the songs through wireless headphones while writing this.
Wonder what Harry would have thought about that?
***Edit Explanation*** In the interest of accuracy, I removed the bit about Geraldo Rivera (born on July 4th) being born with the name Jerry Rivers. The day after posting this, in a coversation having nothing to do with this weblog, I learned that the “Jerry Rivers” story is an urban legend. Here’s the real story of Geraldo’s name.
