Gender-Reveal Parties Gone Wild (fire)
There’s no way to say this without sounding a tad unkind, so I’ll just throw it out there: Hey, expectant parents, almost no one cares about the gender of your baby.
Oh, we’re happy you’re having a child. We’ll coo over your little burrito when it arrives, whether it’s swaddled in pink or blue and even if it looks like Winston Churchill.
But do we need this information four or more months before the bundle arrives? No, we do not.
Yet you’re planning a gender-reveal party anyway. As if there’s a law that says every life event must be turned into a social media production.
Chances are, you honestly believe your pals want to come to whatever sort of extravaganza you have planned - with a videographer to record it all, of course - but truth is, they’re only there for the booze.
Think about it. Your friends have already been to your curated engagement parties, bachelor parties, wedding showers, stock-the-bar parties, rehearsal dinner and wedding. They’re wrung out and probably broke by now.
Give them a break. Ditch this narcissistic non-event.
But if you must outdo your friends who hired skydivers, flame throwers or tap-dancing midgets to reveal the genders of their babies, please do the rest of us a favor and skip the pyrotechnics.
Gender-reveal parties have a way of turning destructive.
That’s what happened this weekend in California where a gender-reveal party started the El Dorado wildfire that’s burned more than 10,000 acres and caused the evacuation of one whole town.
So far.
Seems some sort of fiery device that was supposed to belch either pink or blue smoke wound up igniting dried grass in the El Dorado Ranch Park. That started an inferno, despite the guests trying their darnedest to douse the fire by squirting at it with their bottles of Smart Water.
Local law enforcement hasn’t decided if there will be criminal charges against the happy couple.
They aren’t the first clueless parents-to-be to set the wilderness ablaze.
In fact, the 2017 Sawmill wildfire in Arizona was accidentally started by a 37-year-old off-duty border patrol agent and an expectant daddy, who shot his rifle at a package full of highly explosive Tannerite that was supposed to provide a colorful clue about the sex of his baby. Next thing he and his guests knew, 45,000 acres were charred and the agent was arrested. He eventually entered a plea agreement that put him on probation for 5 years and required him to begin paying $8 million restitution in monthly installments.
People reports that these parties are getting progressively more adventurous. One couple used an alligator to reveal the sex of their child. Another accidentally built a pipe bomb.
Pamela Kreimeyer, 56, was killed on Oct. 26, 2019, after being hit in the head by a piece of metal that was part of a gender-reveal announcement. Members of the Kreimeyer family had been testing different types of explosive material and had inadvertently created a pipe bomb, which resulted in authorities finding Kreimeyer, a wife, mother and grandmother, dead at the scene.”
According to the New York Times, the person to blame for this insanity is Jenna Karvunidis who hosted the first recorded gender-reveal party in 2008 and shared it on her blog.
She seems filled with regret.
“Ms. Karvunidis, who lives in California, said in a telephone interview that she had ash on her house from another wildfire that was burning in the Angeles National Forest northeast of Los Angeles. “Could we just stop having these stupid parties and then the problem would solve itself?” she wrote on Twitter. “Thanks.”
I remember my first gender-reveal party. It was November 10, 1988. There were only about five of us at the “venue”. I wore a fetching hospital gown. Everyone else was in scrubs.
At 7 p.m. exactly the nurses chorused, “It’s a girl!”
Then they stuck a pink hat on her head.
One of my happiest moments.
