Best.Birthday.Ever.

Today is my birthday. In spite of the spate of  birthday greetings I got through Facebook urging me to spend it surrounded by friends and family, I spent a lovely, quiet day mostly alone at home, except for an adventure to my office to drop off the most recent pile of graded papers,the grocery store to restock the larder, and a movie just because.

I didn't mind because I don't mind being alone and because my "real" birthday celebration was a couple of weeks ago, when I got to spend a weekend with Darling Daughter and Prince Charming in Los Angeles, where life was their usual whirlwind of adventure—including a surprise opportunity to work out at the Richard Simmons Slimmons studio in Beverly Hills (Richard Simmons is a hoot in person) and a planned opportunity to see the beautiful stage lighting DD had done as her swan song from the school she just left as she moves on to her newest incarnation. On Saturday, while DD was running the lights at that evening's iteration of the show, PC and I took off to see a Cloud Atlas, and I was more than a little tickled when we bumped into a friend of his and PC introduced me as his mother-in-law. I think the day is coming!

As much fun as that was (and it was a fine adventure), it still falls short of the whirlwind ride she took me on a year ago, which has to go down somewhere as the best. birthday. ever.

DD had planned it that way. I've always gotten a kick out of having a "binary" birthday (11/11), but last year was triply special because it was 11/11/11. I don't think she could have done a thing to make it better.

I flew to Los Angeles on a Thursday, determined to leave work behind for the weekend, so I immersed myself in a good book that took me completely away from work. I landed a little after dark, just in time for DD and PC to park my bags at their place and whisk me off to a party on a rooftop in downtown LA. The party was hosted by friends from one of DD's consulting jobs, and one of them had a roll of tickets she peeled off happily for refills on drinks and food. The view from the rooftop was amazing (well, except maybe for the 50-something dude who had stripped to the nude on his way to the pool...), the laughter was hearty, and the evening was off to a fine start.

We left the party early to go to a play that starred a young man DD had known in college. Called Nine Circles after Dante's nine circles of hell, the play was about a young soldier accused of murdering civilians in Iraq. Each of the circles was another scene from the soldier's life, showing the horrors and the stress of war. Maybe because I'm the mother of a soldier who served in Iraq and maybe because I was born on Veteran's Day and have always had a soft spot for our military, I found the play amazing and powerful.

I love the "little theater" setting that had us sitting just a few feet from the actors, and I was thrilled afterward to get to meet both the playwright (cool since I write but have no real talent for the creative kind) and the actor, who turned out to be also one of the leads in a popular tv series called Suits. Hanging around with my kids means I get to just hang around with the cast and crew after shows, and that's a whole different experience from just walking in and walking out.

Friday morning DD tossed me into the car and took off for the local bagel shop, tantalizing me with far too many choices for a natural-born bread lover. She helped me make a choice that was sure to add lard to my butt and scooted me out for the morning's adventures.

First on the agenda was a visit to her school's morning practice for their upcoming production of Steel Magnolias, where DD was acting director and she needed the girls to hear an authentic Texas accent (mine). If I'd realized my job better, I'd have just talked to the girls about what it means to live with kidney problems; I've had my share of infections because of a congenital malformation, and I knew a family that had four members on dialysis while I was in college. That would have tied in perfectly with the theme of the play and would probably have given the girls more useful exposure to my Texas accent than what I did, which mostly was to urge them to relax a little: no self-respecting Texan pronounces "what" with an "a" sound that anybody else in the world would recognize as anything but a "u"!

After play practice, we made a run by the REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney California Arts Theater, where she and PC both do consulting projects) to check on one of DD's projects there, and then made a stop at the Los Angeles Museum of Fashion. I imagine the museum would be great fun on a normal day, but like so many other places on November 11, this time the museum was closed. Not a problem for my daughter, though: she's best friends with one of the docents, who had to be at work anyway, and when security let her know we were there, she buzzed us right through. So instead of the "standard" tour-group visit, we got a private tour with lots of good back stories and fascinating information about how the museum works.

By the time we got through the museum, I was feeling somewhere well past spoiled, but the best of the day was yet to come: DD had managed to wangle us free tickets to the LA performance of Cirque d'Soleil. We arrived early enough for dinner at a lovely little Italian restaurant near the theater, then went in to a stunning performance; I can't imagine being brave enough to do half those stunts, much less having the coordination or energy for them. Almost as amazing was the behind-the-scenes tour, when DD's friend from high school showed us the works and told us about the histories of the actors (including the young woman who seems to dance on the head of a pin, a stunt she's done right through multiple pregnancies). Who'd have thought I'd get to go backstage and be greeted by a construction crew manager who greeted me as "mom"?

On Saturday, DD was due back at her school for an open house, and she parked me in the costume shop with yards of fabric she was to make into scrims for yet another lighting project. Her assignment this time was to light a party that was going to include dancers on a bridge across the second floor of the "party house." My job was mostly to measure out lengths of fabric and figure out how to attach them to dowel rods so they could be hung from the ceiling and then raised (or dropped?) at some appropriate time. I'm good with a pair of scissors and a can of spray adhesive, so we got something that would work before time to hang them, but I remembered why my trajectory hasn't gone too much toward theater arts.

After DD finished with her responsibilities and determined that I was sufficiently covered in spray adhesive, she hauled me across town (I never know where I am there) to a sort of scary-looking building that appeared to be closed where she insisted I had an appointment to get my eyebrows done. We had talked for some time about the practicality of having them tattooed on because my hair is too blond for them to show up without lots of help, and eyebrow pencils and powders just rub off a few hours after putting them on.

I'm not one to stop long enough to update hair or makeup during the day, so tattooed eyebrows seemed like the way to go, and DD had decided that would be her birthday gift to me. (After all, her total expense for the weekend so far had mostly been the bagels and the Italian dinner!) I was thrilled at the idea and delighted to discover how painless the procedure was. One of the brows needed a bit of touch-up later, but the tattoo artist was completely understanding about my travel plans and happily fixed it up next time I ventured west.

I could never have expected my daughter to pull out a jewelry box, too, then, because the eyebrows were supposed to be the birthday gift. She assured me the box didn't hold a birthday gift: the ring inside says "mom" because she had expected me to finished my PhD around Mother's Day, and she thought the ring would be a good combination Mother's Day/graduation gift. My research had gotten snagged in the spring and my defense had been delayed until October (not completely unintentionally on 10/10), so she had held onto the ring until the degree was finished because she had been sworn to secrecy about it. The fact that she had both an eyebrow appointment and a graduation gift for me the same weekend was purely coincidence, she assured me. What a happy coincidence it was!

As we often do when I'm on the west coast, we made a perfunctory visit to the grocery store, and that night DD had set us up to cook together, an activity we both have enjoyed since she was a little kid. The theme for the evening was "etouffe," which would have been easier if either of us had ever attempted it before or if we had known which of several alternative recipes we had found was anywhere close to what PC had in mind when he had suggested it. He was off at work for the afternoon and not in a place where we could just ask him, so we futzed around with an assortment of recipes until we came up with something we thought was tasty. We had forgotten the first rule of cooking for twentysomething males, of course: as long as it's edible, it's going to be fine.

We had time to feed PC and get the dishes mostly out of the way before  a string of friends showed up for an evening of games and laughter—not really a birthday party, but a lovely way to end a lovely weekend.

My plane left fairly early on Sunday, so DD hustled me out of the house and off to the airport in plenty of time to keep me from my usual nerves about missing a flight (which, in retrospect, seems sort of silly since lately I've had more flights delayed than leave on time), and the flight back to Houston was as pleasant as the flight out. In fact, once I got to my hometown connection, the desk agents found a seat available on an earlier flight than I expected, and I wound up getting home an hour or so early.

And thoroughly thrilled by the best. birthday. ever.