It’s June in January in New York. Or something like that with temperatures in the 50s yesterday.
My friend Joan Kron was having a birthday party for herself down in SoHo at an Italian wine bar called Centovini on West Houston. Joan and I share a distinction of both having having been editor-in-chief (she about a decade or more before me) of a magazine here in town called Avenue when it was owned by its founder Judy Price. Joan also has a number of other distinctions in the journalism field, including that of being an expert on facelifts, something that grew out of research that she did on the subject a number of years ago for Allure magazine. Until last night I knew nothing more about her relationship to that particular distinction.
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| Joan Kron delighted by her birthday cake. |
The party was called for 6:30. What with traffic and all the other time-related obstacles of city life, I made it down to Centovini about 7:30 when the restaurant was packed with Joan’s friends and family. Patrick McMullan was there photographing the crowd. I got a picture of Joan with Judy, and Joan with some friends, and some family.
Then about quarter to eight they brought out the cake which was decorated with Joan’s name and also Daniel’s. Daniel Kron is her son who announced to the crowd that he and his mother shared the same birthday. When he was a kid, his mother, he told us, wished to age a little more slowly than her son, and so they celebrated his birthday every year and her birthday once every ten years. Life with mother, he told us, was always fun and exciting, as well interesting that he’d now reached an age where he looks “older than Joan.”
Then “mom” took the floor and announced to the crowd that this was her eightieth birthday! The number took most of us a bit by surprise only for the obvious reason – she doesn’t look like the picture of the octogenarian. This was, she told us, the result of three facelifts, a brilliant dermatologist, Fred Brant (who was there last night), a host of wonderful friends, a wonderful life as a journalist, a mother, a stepmother and a grandmother. At that point, Joan’s stepson, public relations executive Jon Marder led the group in singing “Happy Birthday.”
Then Linda Wells, founder and editor-in-chief of Allure magazine took the floor to tell us more about the birthday girl. Joan, she told those of us who didn’t already know, started out as a socialite in Philadelphia who wrote first for the local magazine and then after her divorce came to New York where she worked for New York magazine, the New York Times Magazine where she coined the term “High Tech,” and for Andy Warhol on Interview magazine, then at Avenue, and then at Allure. |
