WHEN COVID19 CRASHES THE PARTY

Zoom comes to the rescue, but don’t forget to plan ahead, clue your guests in and offer tech support

It was my father’s 80th birthday, and he couldn’t have been less excited about it.

Dad didn’t want a party — he didn’t feel that his age merited celebration — but his wife and I decided he would be happy once we threw one. So we set the date for April 21, drew up a guest list of 30 and booked a private dining room at a restaurant in Manhattan. I sent out the invitations and bought our plane tickets.

The surprise? Not that coronavirus crashed the festivities (you already knew that), but that, in many ways, the Zoom party I threw turned out to be better, and better suited to my father’s needs, than the original.

“The people there, from all over the United States, some I had not seen for years, collectively gave me a birthday party such as I could never have had in a restaurant,” said my dad, Irwin Wall, who mostly lives in New York, though is spending the pandemic in my hometown of Riverside. “And even if they could have come together, I could never have had the chance to talk to each separately. It turned out to be one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.”

With continued uncertainty over the feasibility of large, inperson gatherings, people around the world are resorting to videoconferencing for all

manner of celebrations from weddings to proms to milestone birthdays. Of all of these, the birthday may be the most challenging to transpose online: Birthday parties lack inherent structure. Even the birthday serenade can be dicey, as anyone who’s tried singing in unison over videoconference knows.

And attending a Zoom party with little structure, populated with unfamiliar faces, can be just as awkward as showing up to a party where you know no one, or more. It’s harder to read faces and body language on our screens, you can’t just introduce yourself to the person nearest you, and no one will hand you a drink to take the edge off when you can’t find the unmute button.

But difficult need not mean impossible.

“Advance planning is key. Otherwise it’s hard for a Zoom party to flow naturally,” said Stacy Wichelhaus, event planner and designer at the San Francisco company They So Loved Events. “And you can’t expect the honoree to be in charge.”

Mine was planned down to the micro detail. I started with a theme that lent the event a solid structure: “This Is Your Life,” based on a TV show in which a celebrity is surprised by appearances from long lost friends and colleagues.

The maximum length my dad could sit in front of the computer was 2½ hours, I figured. And now that the party was virtual, I could expand the guest list considerably; we were no longer limited to only those friends and family in New York. I broke down the event into fiveminute segments, and made a spreadsheet of when every guest was to have their five minutes with him. Each guest was welcome to stay as long as they wanted, but they were told they would be muted except for when it was their turn.

“You are welcome to share a favorite memory with him, or something you love about him or some kind of short toast,” I instructed his guests in my preparty email. “Please do NOT talk about the coronavirus or ask how he’s holding up under q get exhausting for

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