Confetti queen’s NYC dream
As a new year begins, Frankie Suzanne Garr’s dream will be in a million pieces on the ground. Just the way she wants it. Frankie has been invited to join the crew that rains confetti from buildings in New York’s Times Square on revelers celebrating the beginning of 2017 down below.
All she had to do was ask. It helps that she has a long confetti history and a touching backstory about her late father. Oh, and her car license plate reads CONFET T.
“I’m nervous. I’m anxious. I’m excited. I’m still in disbelief that this is actually really happening,” she told me.
For the past 25 years or so, the Wauwatosa woman has developed a reputation for sending lots of greeting cards to family and friends — and nearly always with seasonal-specific confetti tucked inside. Tiny Easter rabbits, Thanksgiving turkeys, birthday balloons, you get the idea. She buys it at party stores.
People have come to expect it, and to be slightly irritated if they forget to open the card carefully and spill the sparkly bits all over the place.
In Frankie’s defense, she does not use glitter. You know, the microscopic stuff that’s still showing up weeks later on your face and in your vacuum cleaner bag.
“I try to mildly annoy people, not incredibly annoy people,” she said. “It’s like a party in a card.”
The recipient of many confetti cards was Frankie’s father, Francis Garr. (She is also a Frances, but uses the Frankie nickname.)
Francis was divorced from Frankie’s mom and drifted in and out of his daughter’s life over the years. He was a telephone lineman in Pennsylvania where Frankie is from. He liked the solitude of the mountains and his maple syrup farm. Frankie lived with him for one summer during her college days, and she moved to Wisconsin in 1989 after she graduated.
“My dad was not a sentimental guy. He was a tough and rough kind of guy,” she said.
Frankie kept in touch with him by calling and by sending cards loaded with you know what. Francis was 75 when he died in 2001 in the same Levittown, Pa., house where Frankie, now 54, lived as a baby.
When Frankie went out there to sort through her father’s things, she made a startling discovery. He had saved all that confetti from his only child, pouring it between the clear plastic layers of a lampshade cover that he never removed.
Frankie shared that story in a confetti-spiked letter she sent in March to Gary Winkler, vice president of events and programs for the Times Square Alliance. She found his name after Googling Times Square, confetti and New Year’s Eve.
She told Winkler that she had saved a Wall Street Journal article from 2004 about the challenges of scattering 3,000 pounds of colorful confetti at 20 seconds before midnight as the famous countdown ball drops. The story focused on mastermind Treb Heining, the so-called Confetti King, and told how he relied on 70 vol-