Ain’t No Party Like One of Joy’s Parties

I’m pretty sure I threw the worst party ever to be thrown. Girls were frightened, attendees couldn’t remember things, and two people ended up in the emergency room.

This was not a college party. This was my fifth grade slumber party.

Starting in fourth grade, nearly every girl in my class had a slumber party to celebrate her birthday. We usually did a lot of the stereotypical “sleepover” things at these parties like braid hair and gossip about boys. There were also some exceptional parties where we did cool things like play with the host’s brother’s pet snake.

I digress. By fifth grade, I was begging my parents to let me have a slumber party. They eventually agreed, but they also told me not to invite too many friends (didn’t listen) and that I needed to complete my science fair project before the party (sort of listened- this comes up later).

After my group of twelve friends arrived (again, didn’t listen), I set up for movie-watching time. I planned to show my favorite movie, which at the time was Little Shop of Horrors because I was and still am a weirdo. My recently turned eleven-year old head did not stop to think that Little Shop of Horrors might be slightly frightening for other ten and eleven-year old girls because of the whole giant human eating plant thing.

Strike one.

After traumatizing a few people with my favorite film, I proceeded to move onto activity two: my science experiment. Yes, rather than do my experiment beforehand as my parents had instructed, I decided to conduct my experiment REALTIME on my party guests! What a gracious host I was. I had my friends read stories that I would test them on either right after they read them or after they woke up in the morning. Looking back, it was a really poorly designed experiment. Whatever. I was eleven. But I conducted experiments on my friends.

Strike two.

Now for strike three. I super intelligently neglected to mention to my friends in my invitation letter that I had two enormously fat cats. Like, twenty-five pounds each. Those two cats combined probably weighed the same as some of my friends did. They could have attacked them! Strike three!

Naw, that’s not what happened. These cats were, as I explained, ENORMOUSLY fat and too lazy to attack even a string. But, two of my friends were highly allergic to cats. They took some medicine when they arrived and thought they would be ok. My again SUPER intelligent eleven-year old head assumed they would be ok too. I had lived with cats for five years and was doing fine. They probably would be too, right?

No. Not right. My two friends’ faces grew progressively redder throughout the evening. When they started coughing and needed to go outside to breathe, we knew it was time for the hospital. Next came the ambulance trucks.

Strike three.

Luckily, both girls (and all of the girls, I should clarify) ended up being ok, and, for some reason, we all stayed friends. This could have been because eleven is still too young for girls to be overly judgmental (though my friends totally had reason to be), or because I went and got everyone apology donuts in the morning. In reality, we had a lot of fun together that night gossiping in our sleeping bags and trying to distract each other from having nightmares about Audrey II.

And I certainly learned some valuable lessons: 1) check if people have any allergies before inviting them to my probably always cat-filled home, 2) running experiments on your friends is less fun for them than it is for you, and 3) regardless of whatever ridiculous events you have planned or whatever crazy events arise, just spending time with a group of close friends is enough to have a good time.