I’ve always been jealous of folks who get invited to quinceaneras. I see snapshots online, or occasionally I pass by some venue where one is taking place. These events look like blow-outs. Everybody dresses fancy, tables are laden, folks are dancing, and everybody seems to be having a blast.
If you don’t know, a quinceanera (quince for short) is the 15th birthday celebration of a girl in most Latin cultures. I hope I said that correctly. The word quince means 15.
My two smart and beautiful stepdaughters are Latina. They live in Miami, where they were reared by and with Raven, their dad. Both are married to fine, handsome, fun Cuban men. We have two high-achieving grandchildren.
My granddaughter, Bimini, was born on Earth Day fifteen years ago, and I looked forward to her quince for years.
Her mom planned the party for months. She rented a venue, a big white-tented dance floor located on a wharf in Fort Lauderdale. Because it was bayside it had no bathrooms, so she rented upscale portable bathrooms that get hauled around on trailers. She hired a DJ and two young dancers who would work the crowd to get people dancing. She hired a bartender. She hired a team to make mocktails for the kids. She hired a caterer. And videographers. People to run photo booths. And people to help you up the stairs to the bathrooms.
It cost a bundle. But that’s the way a quince happens. You throw down whatever you have.
The party started at 6. When we arrived the birthday girl was nowhere to be found. Her mom, it turns out, had also hired a makeup artist and a hair stylist, and Bimini was getting last-minute touches for the sake of perfection.
Everything was perfect.
Raven and I ordered a drink. It came frothing and hissing like a steam engine, which, it turns out, was from a piece of dry ice slipped into the drink, below the ice. This shows you how much time we spend in the country, with old books like Walden and Les Miserables. I learned from my son Silas, who is part owner in a bar—an investment I wouldn’t make, just saying—that dry ice is mostly forbidden in cocktail competitions. Turns out, there’s good reason. Dry ice in a drink will kill you. I guess you have to swallow it.
I’m glad I didn’t try to drink the volcano. But you’d think a bartender would warn a country mouse about stuff like that.
“We are so last century,” Raven says.
Bimini’s mom, my stepdaughter, who has an abundance of style, made great decisions, and one of those was brilliant. She asked all the kids to turn in their cell phones or leave them at home. She didn’t want the kids spending the entire evening lost in their phones. So she hired a couple of young women who checked phones as if they were checking coats and then returned them at the end of the evening.
Bimini and her mom like scary movies, so Bimini’s 15th had a thriller theme—the movie Stranger Things. Everyone had been instructed to wear black, “blacker than the abyss Will Byers found himself in.” I have not seen that movie. I never watch scary movies. My life is scary enough as it is—I kid you not. Yesterday, for example, I gave a girl a lift. She had obviously been punched in the face, twice. She had two moon-shaped bruises on her right cheek, visible through a pretty thick layer of concealer. Why would I want to get pretend-scared?
I also had not bought a new dress—I have lots of nice black dresses that I inherited from my late friend, the nature writer Melissa Walker. She bought expensive clothes, and one day she decided that she was going to stop wasting time in her walk-in closet deciding what to wear. Her uniform was going to be khaki cargo pants; a white, long-sleeved shirt; and a vest with pockets for memo pads and pens. So I got the finery. However, my one pair of black pumps were disintegrating so I’d shopped furiously that very afternoon and purchased a pair of black espadrilles.
We stood around in our nice black outfits in the foyer of the party room. The music was loud, and conversing was difficult. I didn’t really know anyone to talk to, anyway. My stepdaughter had invited two groups of people—Bimini’s friends and adult friends of the family. My grandchildren weren’t interested in talking to a grandparent, not with all their friends around. I did a bit of chatting with folks I barely recognized from past parties.
To tell you the truth, I was missing my own daughter. Italicize that, would you? She had turned 18, and now she had her own ideas about how to have fun, and she wasn’t with us. She would have loved the glitter and bling and loud music and bright lights. She would have loved the candy bar in the corner, which a hired girl was running, and the mocktail bar. She would have loved the young woman hired to keep circling with a camera, asking if you wanted your photo taken. (It wasn’t a camera, really; it was a portable photo booth that did crazy things with photos, and the photos turned out to be digital, and by entering a mobile number they were instantly texted to you.)
After a while the doors to the big party-room opened. Still no Bimini. Circular tables with nice tablecloths were set about the room. A large square beneath the DJ’s stage had been marked off as a dance floor, and between the dance floor and the tables were a few cream-leather sofas, rented for the occasion.
This room had two more photo booths, and one was a 360. You stood on a small round circle marked on the floor, and a boom spun around you. Raven and I tried it—we crammed onto the circle with my stepdaughter, who loves to have fun—and we got dizzy watching the boom swing around.
A real bar was set up, as opposed to the mini-bar in the foyer, and the bartender was a tattooed bodybuilder about 40 (I kept thinking how much Harry Crews would have loved him.) I got in line for a drink—I think it was a margarita—and oh my gosh. The guy had flair. He was deep into the art of shaking. He gave the tequila bottle a spin in the air and lifted it a couple feet above the glass, so the liquor was running like a waterfall toward the cup. This mixologist threw his knife around, chopped a lime, and did a funny little dance while he crushed the citrus into the glass. He juggled some stuff. And before this bartending-turned-performance was all over, he slipped a deadly piece of dry ice into my glass, although I didn’t know of course that it was deadly.
What I did know was that I’d be drinking a lot, because I wanted to watch this guy work. I tipped him $20.
I went over to one of the sofas and sat down. The two young women who had been hired to get folks dancing hadn’t got the memo to dress all in black. They were working the floor in checkerboard booty shorts. What they did could be called dancing unless you watched them closely. Then you could see they were pretending. Once the dance floor filled, they backed off, moving in slow-mo around the perimeter.
Word spread that Bimini would soon be coming in, that it was time to line up at the door. She didn’t come for a long while after that because certain lights had to be turned on and somebody had to queue up her special song—I forget which one it was—but it was energetic, bright, promising. Like Bimini. Everything had to be perfect, and that took a while, another 15 or 20 minutes.
Then she was in the doorway, radiant, gorgeous, a starlet. She was wearing a crown. This was Hollywood or the Oscars or The Princess Bride. Bimini was escorted by her brother, who is a few years older. Her strapless formal was magenta, glowing, and ten feet wide where it touched the floor, like a Southern belle’s, a huge hoop skirt swallowing her brother.
Her song was playing, her daddy was crying, her mama was beaming proudly, and the slide show was rolling photos of her first fifteen years—Bimini on a playground, Bimini in a pool, Bimini in diapers, Bimini on stage singing, Bimini at Disney, Bimini with her grandfather and grandmother, who weren’t married to each other because one of them was married to me. Which was as uncomfortable as it sounds.
Then there was a little shoe ceremony, where the dad puts on a big-girl shoe. Then a speech that Bimini’s mom gave, because Bimini’s dad couldn’t. A father-daughter dance. A brother-sister dance. Then everybody dances.
Everything was going to be all over at 11. Eleven was late enough for a bunch of 15-year-olds, another wise decision. A limousine was already waiting outside the door.
Now dark had fallen. The room was dark, except for lights that circled and flashed and drenched the dancers in reds and blues and oranges.
I had a few hours to go, so I worked hard at enjoying myself. I took some photos in the booths. I spent some money tipping the bartender to make drinks like Tom Cruise. I made the dance-warmers happy by getting up and dancing. I’m a pretty good dancer: I don’t feel weirded out by doing weird movements looking weird around 15-year-olds and a bunch of people I don’t know. Instead of the slide show now there was a real-time video of the dance floor projected on the big screen. When the food was served I ate a plate of paella with salad and tortilla chips and some vegetables. I wish I’d taken notes. Dessert was maybe flan. It was all delicious.
Bimini did her choreographed dance in the colored spotlights. She and her friends kept dancing. A couple of times a dance train circled the room. Some fancy cupcakes came out.
Then the hour struck 11, and the kids rushed to get their cell phones out of jail. The caterers began to pack up. The candy woman started handing out gift-bags of candy to go. We were out into the night, watching the lights on the bay, looking at a nice Rolls Royce in the parking lot. We’d drive back down to Coral Gables, to the artist’s airbnb where we were staying, through the wonderful sinking city.
The next day Bimini would say to me, “It was like Club Bimini for a night.”
Yep. That it was. Because you live in Miami and people do things big in Miami. Because you’re only going to turn 15 once. Because what’s a good life without a good party?
Enjoyed going on this adventure with you guys! What's life without a party indeed. Invite me to a red earth party sometime so I can see your dancing for myself.
I loved reading this. Growing up in South Texas, quinces were a big part of my teenage girlhood, and I always marveled at the spectacle, the elaborate dances, and the idea of being considered a woman at that age.