Georgie’s F**king 40th

Forty years ago tomorrow, in the ice and snow of January 26, 1986, a surprise midnight arrival transformed my and my husband Harry’s lives forever. Two months before he was due, weighing just four and a half pounds, after an emergency Caesarean, Georgie Frederick Evans made his entrance into the world. We called him our snow pig because he was so tiny and pink with a serious, round head and crinkly nose, his little chest fluttering up and down in the incubator at New York Hospital. I gazed through the glass at him, disallowed from picking him up and cuddling him for an agonizing six weeks. This is not how it was supposed to be. Oh my God, I am a mother, I wrote in my diary, weeping.

Ignorant as I was of what to expect from a firstborn, it took me several years to understand that our golden, curly-haired boy was progressing differently from other kids. His little hands flapped; he was slow to crawl; he only wanted to move a tiny white dumpster truck back and forth on the window ledge. He had no interest in joining the games of the rest of his preschool class. I refused to believe the babysitter who pointed out missed developmental milestones. She was already out of favor for playing his musical elephant to him, our special thing! He adored Harry waltzing him round the room in his snuggly to “The Enigma Variations.” I was baffled and hurt when his teacher said she thought he should go “somewhere where he could get more support.” He may have had “slow motor skills,” but he knew so many words, like banana! Twice a week, I took him to roll around on top of a huge, white physiotherapy ball, while he giggled hysterically.

Golden-haired boy: Georgie and his baby sister Izzy

But over the years, the medical file fattened and fattened. Once he identified an obsession (laundromats, ceiling fans, hair dyers), it was impossible to shift him off it. We trudged between experts. There were “innovative” therapists who said he should be brushed all over with a hairbrush to lower his anxiety, or who recommended he wear earphones to listen to percussive sounds, and the supposedly wizard Israeli expert, recommended by some other desperate parent, who told us we “should look out for the symptom of red ears.” Six months later, we returned for another consult and declared triumphantly, that on six occasions, we had noted in a log that Georgie‘s ears were of a markedly scarlet hue. “So what?” said the doctor testily.

Georgie Explained?

In the end, it wasn’t a medical professional but a writer who nailed what was going on with our son. As editor of The New Yorker, I found myself reading a contributor’s piece that delivered a sudden shaft of understanding. It was Oliver Sacks’ portrait of Temple Grandin, the brilliant professor, inventor, and ethologist whose behavioral and cognitive oddities were eventually diagnosed as a form of autism or Asperger’s syndrome, some of whose markers are uncoordinated motor skills, problems with developing relationships, narrow fields of interest, inappropriate responses to conversation, and perseverating on the same topic. The last one particularly jived. Every night for a year and a half in 1998, Georgie made us watch the scene in Titanic when Rose stands on the bridge of the ship and threatens to throw herself off. On a Disney cruise, he climbed out onto the tip of the prow and tried to re-enact the scene, warbling My Heart Will Go On with arms akimbo, until an officer insisted he was confined below deck.

Georgie and his hero dad Harry

Parentally challenging? Yes. But Georgie is also blessed with uniquely wonderful qualities that cancel out the rest: his perennially upbeat energy, his guileless social brio, his disinhibited displays of affection, his unfiltered inability to say anything untrue or be anything but himself. It was all over image-wise this past new year at a White Lotus-like hotel in the Dominican Republic, when the chic, sarong-clad French concierge proffered us an exotic-looking welcome drink. Georgie’s response: “I didn’t pack enough underpants.”

Georgie out on the town

Planning for his 40^th birthday party was obsession #1 for Georgie since circa late 2024. The guest list included six former babysitters, five former therapists, and the bartender from The Horny Ram. Izzy, always the executive producer of Georgie’s life, took on the task of both organizing the birthday fest and managing Georgie’s expectations, not easy given G’s self image as Miranda Priestley. The venue was to be a half buy-out of the funky downtown bar Motel No Tell, but G was envisaging something more on the lines of the Met Ball. “The occasion should not be stressful but rather orgasmic,” were his mood notes to Izzy. He sent her guest updates such as “last night’s Uber driver,Yevgeny, who was really hot.” G’s main requirements were a) his speech could contain a lot of profanity and b) the bar package should feature “some damn good cheese.” At 3am last Monday, in a job-juggling, event-planning frenzy, Izzy texted me, “If I hear about the fucking cheese plate one more time, I will blow my brains out.” Our accidental use of an AI companion summarized one exchange on email as “the group moved on to discuss the cheese board controversy.”

Weather or Not

But then, oh please God, no, the snowstorm news hit. We instantly knew this would nix the attendance of all the wonderful members of Team Georgie on Cape Cod, where he attended Riverview School and lived for some years in a group house, overseen by two of the many angels in his life, Jim O’Connell and Jenn Maiocca. It would kill the travel plans, too, of the fabulous Erin Finholdt from Tennessee where, at the lowest point of Georgie’s life, when his dad died in 2020, he was coaxed out of his inconsolable year-long grief at a small therapeutic retreat called The Stables. This haven was located for us by another hero on the guest list, Allison Kleinman, of Future Centered Care in New York, which all parents of adult kids with special needs should have in their contacts. The deep remedial relationship Georgie forged at The Stables with Peyton, an empathetic pig, restored him to equilibrium. (In the weeks before Georgie returned to live with me, I agonized with Izzy about how we could ever replicate the Peyton effect in New York City. Ever the EP, she crisply replied, “Don’t worry mom. I’m sure we can find a pig in Queens.”)

Now what? With the weather forecast dire, the list of attendees was shrinking. G’s OCD was off the charts. We were getting cheese demands every ten minutes. He had planned, when the birthday celebration ended, to sample an underwear party he’d seen advertised online in some hideous dive across the street. If it was going to be minus ten degrees, at least I didn’t have to recruit a tighty whitie chaperone. Izzy was in full travel office mode, dispatching cars across the five boroughs to thwart guests who might go weather wobbly.

Party pics credit: Thea Traff

Until presto! We were all there, at the Motel No Tell in full glitz attire– Georgie ablaze in a gold Liberace jacket, full maquillage, and black gel nails — as clouds of balloons that read “Georgie’s Fucking 40^th” wafted overhead. The venue, of course, had lied about the other half of the bar being a “quiet group.” It was a teeming, pulsing sausagefest with a non-stop deafening DJ. But who cares? In streamed the Manhattan chapter of Georgie’s Angels, those beloved, authentic humans who are kind enough and patient enough to understand how rare and irreplaceable Georgie is in our fast, unforgiving world.

BFFs: A birthday kiss from sister Izzy

We cried. We screamed our inaudible toasts. We devoured the cheese plate.

“I damn love you all!” shouted Georgie. “Happy Fucking 40^th to me!”