Valerie's 70th Birthday Party

Firstly I would like to thank everyone for coming.  Some of you, Keith, Veryan and Tom, have travelled from as far away as the UK.  Others, such as Carol and Irwin have travelled more than 50 feet.  Some, who wanted very much to be here, such as Voake and Jane, were unable to come but send their love.

I also want to thank the Irwins and the Bavarian Inn for all their help and their support of our family. 

Finally, and I would propose a toast – to Julia for putting all this together.  The photo display is amazing.

Val truly is an amazing woman and I swear that someone should write a book about her life.  Not only would it make great reading but no one would believe it and we would make a fortune.

She has and continues to do so many things that Julia and I are amazed.  What is wonderful, however, is that while she does these incredibly cool and worthy things, there are always hysterical “Only Val” stories that go along with it.  While you all know that she was a ballerina and danced with folks like Nureyev and Fontaine and all that good stuff, the best stories were the ones such as the time she was dancing St George and the Dragon, and she was the dragon and, dancing out on stage as the dragon, wondering why the audience was laughing, realized that the coat hanger for the dragon costume was hanging out of the mouth and dangling.

Or another time when she was dancing in, I think it was Swan Lake, and some famous designer had created a forest set made of huge metal trees and as Val was jeteeing across the back of the stage, got caught on a metal leaf and spent the rest of the act just hanging from the back.

Val spent many years as a Navy wife, which meant that not only was she incredibly proper but she had to do a huge amount of entertaining.  These parties were always huge successes but usually not in the way she intended.  There was the one where she decided to do a Sunday afternoon brunch and serve Black Velvets (a lethal combination of champagne and Guinness) which resulted in half of the joint chiefs of staff passed out under bushes in their back garden.  Another involved serving a delicious pork roast to the son of the Sultan of Johore.  (Was it beef or pork?).  One of the best was early in America when she had to entertain some important embassy officials and bought this incredible beef tenderloin, prepared everything to strict time schedule, banished Julia and I under pain of death to go upstairs and not make a sound, and promptly turned the oven to clean.  She only realized this after the appetizers had been served and then burst into our room and demanded that we go downstairs and entertain the guests and keep refilling their drinks with the strongest pours we could in the hope that if we got them drunk enough they would not notice (or remember) that there had been no main course.

Val’s involvement with charity and politics has been nothing short of inspirational.  She has testified and lobbied at the local, county, state and federal levels.  She has been involved in so many fundraisers and sat on so many boards and the difference she has made has been staggering.  From the beginning of the AIDs crisis and her involvement with Whitman Walker, the AIDS network, Act up and others to her founding CASA, working with the Friends of Music and so many others in this area.  She has been recognized so many times and be given so many awards - all of which are so well deserved.  Here again, though, in the middle of her work with organizations dealing with truly horrifying and life and death issues there have been moments of hilarity.

Probably the most famous ever Valerie story involved a black tie fundraising event many years ago for the Mautner Project for Lesbians with Cancer.  In the late ‘80s they discovered a causal link between lack of breast feeding and cancer and that lesbians were at a hugely disproportionate risk for this.  Val and Cliff (and Julia, Gary, Thom and I) were very involved with Mautner.  So, anyway, they held their first ever black tie dinner and Thom and I and Val and Julia attended.  The Washington Hilton ballroom was filled with thousands of power lesbians and as we entered, this group of women who we know very well, along with a whole bunch of women that we did not know, came bustling up and were effusively greeting Val.  “Oh Val, it’s wonderful to see you, thank you for coming, how wonderful for your support…..Where’s Cliff?”

Now, Cliff was on a business trip in Holland at the time and Julia and I could both sense what was going on in Val’s head.  She was thinking “Cliff is in Holland but do Americans know it as Holland or do they know it better as the Netherlands and of course, Americans are not great at geography so how do I explain that Cliff is over in Holland, the land of tulips, the Dutch, the little Dutch Boy……Ah!”

“Oh, darling” she says brightly, “Cliff is over in Holland on business, he probably has his finger stuck in a dyke somewhere!”

Leaving this group of stunned lesbians, half of whom were quietly convulsed with laughter and the other half who looked like they had been pole axed, Julia and Val headed off to the bar to get a drink.  As they walked away, Julia whispered to Val “finger……in a DYKE?”   “Oh My God” sputtered Val, suddenly realizing what she had said.

Anyway the point of all of this is that not only is my mom an incredible woman without whom none of us in this family would be who we are, but that she has and continues to fill our lives with laughter and joy.  (and sometimes drive us all crazy in the process).    We would not be here without her.  We would not be who we are without her.  We would not have all the different interests, successes and passions that we do without Val having engaged,  provoked and pushed us and we certainly wouldn’t be the, in my humble opinion, the super and close family that we are today.

As Cliff has said on many, many occasions, “Your mother truly is an extraordinary woman!”  and I think all of us in this room wholeheartedly agree with that.

So, on that note, Val, we want to wish you a happy birthday and tell you how much we all love you.

Happy Birthday.