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"  When he was 65, the celebrated New Yorker humorist James Thurber quipped to an interviewer that if there were 15 months in every year he&amp;#039;d only be 48. His math was a little off\u2014he&amp;#039;d have been 52\u2014but his point holds: &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the trouble with us. We number everything,&amp;quot; Thurber said. &amp;quot;Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40.&amp;quot; I agree\u2014there is no other chapter of my life that felt so fertile (no pun intended) and distinct, and as it came to a close I rued the cruelty of its expiration date. My friend Alexandra felt the same way, so when we turned 38 (in the same week of July) she suggested that instead of each facing the dreaded 4-0 alone, we celebrate it together. I asked her to please not mention that number again until we were at least 39. Thirty-seven had not gone the way I&amp;#039;d wanted, and I already loved 38 for how it allowed me to cling to the vaguely nubile thirtysomething, even if my father kept calling up to say, &amp;quot;How&amp;#039;s my middle-aged daughter today?&amp;quot; and then erupting into loud guffaws. Thirty-eight turned out to be only so-so, but 39 started out pretty great, so by the time Alexandra and I began brainstorming ideas last year I was ready to openly acknowledge arriving at 40 instead of just slink across the threshold and hope nobody would notice. We both live in Brooklyn, but we have the sort of e-mail correspondence that&amp;#039;s its own alternate reality: There is actual life, and then there is everything we think and feel about it, which we zing back and forth in a ceaseless stream of uncensored, diaryesque messages, and I blame this lawless environment for how quickly our ambitions morphed from a dinner party at her place to a week on the coast of Massachusetts, culminating in a clambake by the sea. &amp;quot;Think Martha Stewart goes Grey Gardens,&amp;quot; I told the prop stylist, because yes, we hired one. Tables were rented. A tent considered. A menu fastidiously planned. A save the date was sent to 40 (get it?) of our closest family and mutual friends. We started referring to the event as our Platonic Lesbian Birthday Wedding. Alexandra&amp;#039;s actual husband expressed frank concern that we were going overboard, but we were like those prank cake candles that reignite as soon as they&amp;#039;re blown out. For me, this party actually was a bit like a wedding\u2014it was the first time I&amp;#039;d asked my family and friends to take considerable trouble to gather together on my behalf, not to mention spend their money to get there. (My friend Gary even stealthily conscripted everyone into writing 40-word toasts.) Initially I had to convince myself that making such a request was appropriate. It helped when my best friend, Erika, a new mother and college professor, did everything she could to rejuggle teaching and child care to fly out from New Mexico. I&amp;#039;d been her maid of honor, and the seriousness with which she took my invitation was her way of saying that my big event was just as legitimate as hers had been. Admittedly, this in turn sparked a new concern\u2014what if I did want a wedding someday? Would everyone be willing to make the effort all over again? Did I get points for sparing them the added expenditures of a bridal shower, bachelorette party, reception dinner, day-after brunch, and a gift, plus the bonus of knowing that, unlike nearly half of the weddings they go to, this celebration wouldn&amp;#039;t end in divorce? If there was one thing I could assure my guests, it was that I&amp;#039;d be around until I was dead. So it&amp;#039;s only natural that for my big day I would totally freak out about The Dress. It would be a dress, of course, and not just any dress but my feelings about the event incarnate, which I could see in my mind&amp;#039;s eye with astonishing precision: a loose and breezy 1970s-esque floor-length tomato-red gown with a halter neck, a PG-13 version of a slinky nightgown I remembered my mother having when I was little. It would be casual enough for cracking open lobster shells and chasing my nieces on the lawn, while still exuding a bold-yet-understated singularity befitting a woman of 40.  Alexandra, being an editor and writer for the Styles sections of The New York Times, not to mention already married, was quite sanguine about the wardrobe aspect, and when she e-mailed me an iPhone shot of what she&amp;#039;d chosen\u2014a black-and-cream to-the-floor Stella McCartney halter jumpsuit she&amp;#039;d found on eBay, accessorized with a red belt and red shoes\u2014we crowed over how beautifully our outfits would complement each other. Look at us! Sartorial soul mates! Tomato red was everywhere that season, which would make finding what I wanted no problem. So instead of wasting my free time shopping, I lavished attention on the party favors. This entailed deliberating for weeks over a motif (a lobster; no, an anchor; no\u2014a mermaid!), scouring the Internet for the exact image to copy and make into stickers, and bidding on the winner: an antique matchbox emblazoned with a mermaid swimming in a tomato-red sea. The stickers would go on drinking jars that would be filled with treats, including a dish towel hand-printed by yours truly with a mermaid stamp I&amp;#039;d carve from a linoleum block\u2014never mind that I don&amp;#039;t know how to carve. In June, I finally bothered myself to go online and get a dress. In the course of 10 minutes I learned that, yes, fashion had created a garment that season that met my requirements\u2014and every single version of it was sold out. Everywhere. Alexandra and I had been congratulating ourselves for staving off existential anxiety with the minutiae of party planning, but wouldn&amp;#039;t you know it, the dread had been there all along, just waiting to be unleashed. Heretofore we&amp;#039;d been in this together, a platonic lesbian couple on the eve of our birthday wedding. Now I was on my own. I became a woman deranged, staying up until all hours frenetically scouring every retail site I could think of, stubbornly resolute that the dress in my mind&amp;#039;s eye was the only one that would do. Along the way I ordered three different vintage versions\u2014none of which fit. That the entire exercise had a whiff of my fourth birthday party, for which I \u2028insisted on an all-chocolate menu, did not occur to me at the time. I would like to note that Alexandra and I weren&amp;#039;t alone in making a very big deal of 40. There is indeed a trend afoot; USA Today called it the new Sweet 16. Initially I attributed this to how the rising age of marriage is allowing women to devote more time to their careers, live independently, and have the discretionary income to host a blowout. After my party, I traveled to two other destination fortieths, both hosted by single women. The first was an outdoor bash in the Hamptons that featured several different musical acts, a rented dance floor beneath a tent, and a fleet of bare-chested men with giant red bows around their necks mixing artisanal cocktails. For the second, the birthday girl issued an open call to everyone she held dear to join her at surf camp in Costa Rica. More than 20 people (plus a few enthusiastic tagalongs) showed up, representing every phase of her life, and we all got along famously\u2014dare I say swimmingly. As said birthday girl put it when she arrived from Los Angeles to attend my fete, by 40 you&amp;#039;ve weeded out the bad seeds, so you can feel safe knowing that anyone who makes the cut (a) genuinely wants to be there and (b) deserves to be. Then I realized that my married friends were doing it too. It used to be that by 40 a woman&amp;#039;s identity was so bound up with those of her children that such an outright indulgence would be considered preposterous; her family was the point, not her. But those of us who&amp;#039;ve grown up on this side of women&amp;#039;s lib have spent our entire lives cultivating aspirations and identities that extend beyond motherhood and that don&amp;#039;t have to be set aside when the kids come along. And, thanks to medical advances and cosmetic technologies, we are generally healthier than our mothers were at our age, look younger, and can expect to live an extra five or six years. Turning 40 is an excuse to take full measure of our powers.  Coincidentally, or not, at the two aforementioned fetes the hostesses wore white. I don&amp;#039;t know what made tomato red the color I absolutely, without question, had to wear\u2014it was as if I&amp;#039;d had a synesthetic vision\u2014but I do know that the emphasis was on tomato, which I associate with &amp;quot;spirited&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;confident,&amp;quot; and also lobsters, whereas plain red would have been &amp;quot;hot,&amp;quot; which I very consciously didn&amp;#039;t want; sexiness wasn&amp;#039;t the aim here. This wasn&amp;#039;t about me being queen for a day, but about all of us being festive and having fun. Such are the perils of creating your own tradition: There&amp;#039;s no uniform. A white wedding dress is a blessedly simple statement. It marks the bride as a blank slate, the fresh piece of paper on which her future will be written, the inverse of the groom&amp;#039;s black suit; together, they complete a closed circle, like a wedding band. But a single woman throwing her own party at 40 is trying to say something more complicated: I don&amp;#039;t know exactly where I&amp;#039;m going, but I feel pretty good about where I am now, and the reason you&amp;#039;re all gathered here today is because you&amp;#039;ve lifted me up along the way, and I&amp;#039;m so unbelievably grateful, so I really hope you like the cake. Needless to say, I would not rest until I&amp;#039;d found my dress, and with two weeks to go things were not looking good. One day I was checking chores off my list, one of which was to return a Parker dress I had bought eight months earlier, decided wasn&amp;#039;t right for me, and hadn&amp;#039;t dealt with since. I&amp;#039;d been paralyzed with fear that Barneys wouldn&amp;#039;t take it back and I&amp;#039;d be stuck with something I didn&amp;#039;t want. I pulled it out of the closet and tried it on again, just because. My then newish boyfriend was over, reading on the sofa. He looked up and said, &amp;quot;Kate. That is your birthday dress.&amp;quot; I looked in the mirror. Floor-length tomato-red matte silk. Not a halter neck, but its loose, drapey short sleeves would totally do. For a second I paused on the silk factor, until remembering that this was a dress I didn&amp;#039;t even like two minutes ago, so who cares if I sprayed it with lobster juice? It was still too big, but a belt would go a long way, and so would tall shoes. I felt like a complete idiot\u2014and yet also relieved and a little triumphant. There was something pleasingly metaphoric about it having been there all along. Alexandra used her Internet bargain-hunting sorcery to find a pair of gold leather DVF platform sandals in my size on sale. I dug out a gold fabric belt of my mother&amp;#039;s from the bottom of a storage bin\u2014in traditional wedding parlance, my &amp;quot;something old.&amp;quot; The dress was still a little too long, but a tailor could fix that. On the day of, I came back from the beach, rinsed off in the shower, put on the dress, and froze. I&amp;#039;d forgotten to get it shortened. I bloused out the top a bit more, which made the deep V-neck gape; guests would get an eyeful of cleavage in return for my not tripping over my hem. And then as I hurried around my bedroom looking for bobby pins and putting on lipstick, I discovered that I didn&amp;#039;t care at all, that in fact I kind of enjoyed how hoisting up an edge of the skirt made me feel like a rakish pirate princess. I wore my hair down, sticky from the beach, mermaid-style. I&amp;#039;d rented a house overlooking the water, and as the sun grew lower we all drank Dark and Stormys on the long wraparound veranda. When the caterer, my old friend Martha, who had recently reinvented herself as a cook, sent the signal, we traipsed down to the house where Alexandra and her family were staying. On the porch were four long farm tables with black-and-white gingham runners, secured by silver candelabras and galvanized-metal buckets (for discarded shells). A buffet was laden with heaping trays of steamed clams, grilled lobsters, braised short ribs, and salads. The prop stylist had even filled a gorgeously dilapidated claw-foot tub with ice for the wine and beer. When the sun was just about to set, we all stopped talking and watched in silence as it sank into the sea. My niece was in my lap. There was lobster juice on my dress. I was completely happy. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/personal-style/a12575/kate-bolick-on-throwing-a-birthday-party/>