Tonight I'm Gonna Party Like It's 1989

'It's an eighties party,' my wife tells me. 'It's Mari's husband's birthday.'

I know I've probably met Mari being as I've met quite a few people from the place where my wife works, but as usual I can't summon a face. The other two factors here are that I'm not really big on parties and I hated the eighties.

Okay, that's not entirely true, but given that when we say the eighties we usually mean either music or whatever music happened to be wearing, my eighties was characterised mostly by bands no-one had heard of or which were at least an acquired taste. If asked which names of that decade have left an enduring impression on me I'd have to say acts like the Apostles, Test Department, Einstürzende Neubauten, and whatever Jim Thirlwell was calling himself that particular week. Many persons whom I knew during the eighties now seem to spend a lot of time taking quizzes on facebook, particularly quizzes resting on whether or not one is able to recall that Spandau Ballet existed. I actually do recall that Spandau Ballet existed and if forced to say something nice I'd have to admit that Instinction was a decent song, but let's not go crazy. It was a decade like any other, no better, no worse, and all the really, stupid stuff only appears significant when it's your childhood and you haven't had much going on since. Personally I think the seventies were funnier with marginally better music, or at least the rubbish wasn't quite so bad, as illustrated by Bros making the Bay City Rollers sound like the Sex Pistols; but then it's all subjective.

My wife has chosen to approximate Madonna with big hair, lace, and a ton of jewellery. Following Halloween, I'm reluctant to let fancy dress become a way of life. Maybe I could go as Paul Mex or one of Opera For Infantry. In the end I just wear the suit and tie I wore for Noah's Bar mitzvah. It's a skinny tie like Joe Jackson favoured - or if that doesn't work, I'm one of those guys who wore a suit and tie in the eighties. Let's just pretend I was in a synth band who had a hit single about androids or something.

We drive out to Cibolo, a town about half the way between San Antonio and New Braunfels. Mari lives in the suburbs, so it takes us a few minutes to find the place.

I remember her immediately, a Latina with a face which makes it appear as though she's always excited about something. She doesn't quite look old enough to remember the eighties; and she is apparently married to Slash from Guns 'n' Roses. Also present are a number of goths as distinguished by backcombing, black clothes, and t-shirts of bands I didn't like even then. Introductions are effected.

Yes, I'm from England.

'Dude,' bellows Slash jovially, 'the eighties in England, man - punk rock and the Clash...' His point is that I don't seem to have made much of an effort in the wardrobe department, which is true.

This is the juncture at which I remember I'm in America, and everyone else's eighties was different to mine. Once past the brief splash of colour provided by Prince, Madonna, and the occasional British artist, the American eighties seems to have been mostly hair metal and related bands I've customarily spent my life crossing the road to avoid. Heavy metal, and specifically the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, was pretty much the village idiot of the musical landscape of my youth, and everyone in the town where I grew up fucking loved that shit except for me. Of course there are exceptions - Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and a few others managed to crank out a few decent tunes without falling over - but the rest...

Unemployed pipe-fitters from Studley pretending to be Vikings, a weird sort of pride taken in being a bit of a cunt, and a shitty sludge of widdly-widdly-guitar-solo music which never fucking realised that Spinal Tap was supposed to be funny: it's not that rock 'n' roll really needs 'O' levels as such, but it's nice when it can at least tie its own shoelaces. The Ramones managed it fine, and no-one ever accused them of talking down to their audience. Heavy metal is a man who realises he's pissed himself, and continues to piss himself even as it's pointed out to him, and instead of shuffling off to make use of what facilities are available, he roars with laughter and calls for more ale; and somehow they loved all that cartoon crap over here - Judas Priest, Saxon, Def Leppard, Cinderella, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Twisted Sister...

I help myself to food, then head into the garage in search of beer. The garage doubles up as a man cave. There's a fridge full of beer, a flat screen television, weight lifting paraphernalia, and a humourous information poster listing the rules of the man cave as a series of bullet points. I'm too scared to read it because I don't want to think ill of anyone, although in any case the light is not good, flashing red and green and provided by some piece of disco equipment.

I take a Bud Light, which tastes about as interesting as I thought it would but gets the ball rolling. I have a second can back in the kitchen as more guests arrive and I study the posters on the wall - mostly films in which Michael J. Fox taught the adults a lesson about what it means to be young. Hopefully the posters have been put up for the sake of the party.

We stand out in the back garden for a while because it's now cold and dark, which is a novelty in Texas, and Slash's brother has built a small wood fire which blazes and spits and smells good. It makes me think of bonfire night back in England, back on the farm - the bonfires we built at the back of Rex Harding's house with dead conifers dragged all the way from the spinney.

Bess is having a great time but I'm still feeling awkward and slightly out of it. I need more drink. Slash's brother is telling us how many important people and big knobs were once in the scouts. He seems to think this is a good thing but to me it makes the scouts sound like the Freemasons.

I try jello shots which either Slash or Mari have made. I've never had them before. In fact I'd never heard of them until I saw Parks and Recreation, but I gather it's jelly made with vodka or similar, or jello as it's termed over here. There's a tray of them, red and orange in little plastic cups. Slash demonstrates, holding one up to his mouth, his head tipped back. 'You squeeze it at the sides, then like flip it out onto your tongue,' - he swallows - 'and back like an oyster.'

I've never eaten an oyster either. I try, but it doesn't go smoothly. I'm stood in a stranger's kitchen apparently giving a demonstration of cunnilingus to a little plastic cup of orange flavoured jelly. It tastes alcoholic but not so strong as I expected, so I have another.

Fuck it.

Back in the man cave, Slash is playing Kiss, which is okay as they're one of the few bands who got this sort of thing right. I Love it Loud comes on, which is one of my favourites.

'You're from England, ain't you? Judas Priest, man...'

Again, I am unable to grasp the thrust of his thesis but I nod anyway, which seems to be the right answer. Slash grabs me a beer from the fridge, from his special collection. It's in a bottle and I've never heard of it, but I notice that it was next to a bottle of Flat Tire in the fridge. This seems ominous because I don't like Flat Tire, and sure enough this one has a bit of an unpleasant tang too it - like barley wine or Special Brew, one of those things designed to get teenagers as hideously pissed as possible thus alleviating their boredom.

Bess and I talk to one of the goths, and it turns out that she grew up in Suffolk back in England. Her family are American but they lived in England for a while. She remembers the day Channel Four first went on air, but not Brookside.

Never mind.

She works at San Antonio zoo, which is sort of interesting because Bess and I are regular visitors. Slash continues to ply me with whisky in shot glasses whilst howling things from time to time. He's one happy guy.

A black dude arrives with his wife. He's gone for the metal look, whilst his wife is something in the general direction of Madonna. Our host changes the music to rap, specifically the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J. Bess and I exchange an uncomfortable glance, but I suppose it's no more weird than people cueing up to relate their anecdotes of the time they went to England, or the English guy they met fifteen years ago, or the eighties in England, man - punk rock and the Clash...

I somehow impress my wife by immediately recognising the voice of Ice-T and knowing the words to Public Enemy's Bring the Noise.

Doesn't everyone?

I'm drunk, but not drunk enough and I guess I never will be, so we leave. We've managed three hours which seems like plenty to me. I've had a good time whilst nevertheless feeling awkward for most of it. I never have been a party guy, and I don't really like getting drunk, and as for the music...

Three nights later, Bess has one of her semi-regular Mom's Night Out meet-ups. She gets together with Andrea and Jana and a few of the others for food and drink and to talk about mom stuff. For the first time ever, I am invited along because the numbers are down what with everybody having gone away for Thanksgiving, so I go along as a sort of honorary Mom.

I fit right in.

Wah! Wah! It's So Unfair!

I was an awkward teenager, or at least I felt awkward. Whether my awkwardness was apparent to those around me was something I never discovered, and I lacked the apparatus to deduce what anyone thought of me at any given time; so mostly I assumed they regarded me as idiotic just to be on the safe side. I was occasionally clumsy, both physically and mentally. I often found myself lacking the words with which to express myself, which was probably for the best. Had I greater intellectual agility, I probably would have realised that I didn't actually have anything much worth expressing.

Myself and a few others formed a band when we were at school. We had a couple of instruments which we couldn't play very well, and we used cardboard boxes for drums. Every weekend we'd convene around a tape recorder to improvise scatological interpretations of children's television theme songs. I still have all of the tapes. Unsurprisingly they're not quite so funny as we thought them at the time, although some are funny for reasons other than those intended. Here's myself telling a joke at the end of one of these tapes, specifically Nine Inch Turd in the Cassette, my debut solo album recorded as the Post-War Busconductors;

There's this pig and er - hold on. Oh yeah. There's this pig- this farmer buys this pig and erm... at market one day, and he takes it home, and he's very proud of this pig and erm... gives it a bit of food and er... he's okay and then one day he catches this sort of disease and he's walking along eating this apple, and he walks past the pig sty, this farmer... and he's just finished it and he's got the core and he thinks ah the pig can have the core, I mean they eat anything don't they? So he throws it in and erm... you know the pig up until then, it hasn't had anything to eat because it hasn't been his feeding time yet and so erm... anyway he gives it this apple core and er... you know - later on he feeds it, and er... That night he goes to sleep. He has this funny dream. Then when he wakes up in the morning he thinks hey, that's funny - my alarm clock can't be right. It's still dark. And so he er... well, you know looks around, opens the window. Well he just manages to... press it open, and this smell of shit comes in. Oh God - it's horrible; and er... and he realises that all this is shit because incidentally this farm is in a valley - a really bad place for a farm, all the same and erm... so er... luckily the telephone is upstairs because you know the shit just comes up to the top of the stairs; and he phones up all these people and eventually they dig him out, and after a few months he slowly works out where all this shit is coming from. It's the pig, you see. It's caught this disease, and even if you give it a tiny little something - you know like erm... give it an orange slice or something. it does a massive great pile of shit - an average of one inch of food - one square inch of food to about ten square yards of shit, so you can imagine it's pretty bad...

To cut to the chase, the agriculturalist stops up the pig's anus with a cork and sells him to three African gentleman of differing heights - the traditional big one, normal-sized one, and little one of so many children's racist jokes - crucially neglecting to mention the creature's digestive issues. The three African gentlemen return to the jungle with their newly acquired pig, and to a sadly inevitable encounter with a representative of a species of Cork Pulling Monkey. The punchline, for what it may be worth, is you should have seen the monkey trying to put the cork back in.

It takes me over six minutes to tell the joke, and it just isn't that funny. The most depressing aspect of this is that, without access to either my diaries or the cassette tapes recorded by me and my friends, I would date this to when I was twelve or maybe thirteen, because that feels about right. The material transcribed above was recorded on Thursday the 1st of January, 1981, so I was fifteen, two thirds of a year short of turning sixteen. I'm not sure if it's simply that I was a late developer, or that I now have a disproportionate quantity of friends who had already read Plato's Republic by that age, but the fact stands that at the age of fifteen, I probably didn't have much going for me beyond some rudimentary aptitude for drawing pictures.

More recently, roughly half way through the nineties, I couldn't help but notice that as I approached thirty, I still suffered from a certain social ineptitude. I felt awkward around people almost regardless of whether they were friends or complete strangers. I was prone to stupid, melodramatic utterances, things which I thought might impress my peers yet which I would later recognise as idiotic; and I was hardly what you would describe as a hit with the chicks. I lacked confidence in some respects, and I suspect this was because on some level I was at least sufficiently intelligent as to have recognised my own limitations.

I experimented with blaming my parents, as I expect most people do at one point or another. They hadn't loved me, or had never said so out loud. Neither of them had ever hugged me, I reminded myself whilst ignoring the obvious point that we simply hadn't been that kind of family and we found such ostentatious demonstrations of affection awkward. They had separated and divorced when I was seventeen, leaving me traumatised, which was proven by my being unable to remember anything much of that year. It had been so horrible that I had forgotten all about it, just like all those guys who fought in 'Nam.

I told myself this stuff because it was as good an explanation as any, and it seemed in tune with the zeitgeist, Kurt Cobain and others issuing forth with primal screams lamenting that day the school bully had taken his milk and called him a gaylord. The problem was that it didn't ring true. I knew I'd had an average but generally decent childhood, perhaps not one speckled with gold stars of well done, Lawrence, but no-one had ever beaten me, and I never went hungry, and the old pee and em hadn't driven me over to Banbury and left me with Gary Glitter when they fancied a night out; and I knew that in the unlikely event of my ever becoming a father, my parenting would probably be of about the same standard as their's had been.

I have seen a psychotherapist, or at least a person with psychiatric training of some description, on three separate occasions. Each time the spectre of the dramatically bifurcating family life of my teenage years has been brought back as a possible source of delayed trauma. On one of these occasions I was invited to hug a massive Teddy whilst crying in order to let it all out, or something. I complied, miming the release of repressed emotions because I'd realised it would be easier than explaining that I really didn't feel anything about it, and all of this delving around in the supposed depths of my allegedly tortured subconscious was getting boring, even annoying.

Here's what I remember.

My parents were married. Occasionally they would have rows, but nothing overly dramatic or involving broken crockery. My mother didn't seem particularly happy, but there were things that made her happy. My father was the same, although I don't remember a whole lot of traditional father-son stuff because I don't think we really knew what to say to each other. I suspect he regarded me as being a bit weird, which is probably fair. I vaguely recall one incident of my going out to the garden to fetch something or other, slipping my feet into my mother's platform heeled sandals just for the sake of having something on my feet. I was wearing brass curtain rings on the fingers of one hand, four in all - one for each Beatle.

'Do you think he's all right?' I heard my father ask a few minutes later, clearly bewildered and probably envisioning my future life of casual homosexual encounters in an assortment of opium dens; and I remember this when I find myself inspired to ask similar questions of my stepson, who is presently twelve.

My mother took a degree in English literature, and then a job. I have the impression that something of an extra-marital nature may have occurred between herself and someone at her workplace during this time, an impression formed mainly from the contents of rows which began to flare up with unusual frequency as I was turning sixteen. One row seemed to refer directly to me, and I heard my mother lamenting that he just goes on and on and on all day and he won't shut up, which I found upsetting because I had assumed that she found our apparently-not-so-little talks fascinating. It upset me so much that my cries of anguish were heard from downstairs, and so my father came up to console me.

He talked about your mother and I, and I knew then that there was something seriously wrong because he was addressing me as though I were an adult, and that whatever was wrong wasn't just about me.

Then they separated, or specifically my mother vanished, and a couple of weeks later it turned out that she was renting a flat in Stratford-upon-Avon. She'd been unhappy for some time, and it was just one of those things. I lived alone in the house with my father for six months, and then moved away to live in a student house in Kent as I took a degree. He had seemed like a broken man, going to work, coming home, not saying much but just trying to get through to whatever came next.

More recently I discovered the diaries I kept at the time, but details referring to my parents' imploding marital situation are limited to occasional references to them rowing yet again, then the faintly acidic acknowledgment of occasions of my mother deigning to grace us with her presence in the immediate wake of the separation. Considering the reams of shitty portentous poetry I was inspired to write at that age, you might imagine some of it would refer to betrayal, generational disillusionment and so on, but no - it's mostly the torment of some girl at school failing to notice me, which was usually because I was still working up the courage to speak to her.

Contrary to my later yearning for something to blame, my parents' separation left little impression because it had occurred just as my small world was already experiencing upheaval, and because most of it had occurred off camera, expressing in details discovered after the fact. It left me with little reason to apportion blame because it really was just one of those things, a situation which became shitty simply because we aren't living in a perfect world, and a situation which resolved itself in a particular way because it had no other option; with the bottom line being that I probably would have done the same in any of the available roles.

We're all still alive, and all still talking to each other, and with no-one under any illusion regarding what actually happened, what hadn't been working right and so on; and so I suppose this means that for all of my incoherently idiotic qualities, for all of my development seemingly having been scheduled about five years short of my physical age, I was at least sharp in some respects, specifically in being unable to endure so much of my own bullshit as to rewrite circumstances and misfortune as unrequited trauma. If I was kind of slow, at least I understood some things, and knew uncomfortable truths to be preferable to appealing lies, if that doesn't sound too pompous.

So here, against all expectations and contrary to anything I could have predicted, here I am married and living in Texas with a stepson who is probably more or less as I was at the same age, give or take some small change. The more I dig into my own childhood, the better I seem to understand him, and the more I'm inclined to let it go when he talks rubbish or appears to behave in a selfish way.

I'm just making this stuff up as I go along, but it turns out that this is all any of us are doing, or have ever done. It's the best we can do, and usually it's enough.

The Arrow of Light

Bess and myself were eating chicken flautas at Blanco's when I noticed the poster selotaped to the window - the familiar serpent devoured by an eagle, the national symbol of Mexico, and The Vision of the Lake: Mexico-Tenochtitlan with a date and a venue in smaller print. I had a closer look while my wife paid at the till. It was Sunday lunch time, and this Vision of the Lake could be seen at the University of the Incarnate Word at six the following evening.

'Did you see that?' Bess asked, indicating the serpent devoured by the eagle as we left.

'Yes. I was trying to work out what it might actually be.'

'Maybe we should just go. Monday is our night and it looks like entrance is free.'

So we went. Junior was with his father. His father had phoned to inform my wife of the boy having his Arrow of Light ceremony that very evening, but we usually need a little more notice than it's happening in ten minutes - I'm stood outside right now. The Arrow of Light ceremony is held when a Cub Scout becomes a Boy Scout, a sort of graduation deal. I was never in the Scouts, having learned early on to avoid joining in, becoming a team player, or otherwise volunteering myself for anything at all. It sounded mysterious to me. My friend Eggy had been a Scout, or at least he had been a Sea Scout, which may be something different and was in any case back in England. It wasn't something which Eggy had deigned to discuss with the rest of us in any detail.

The University of Incarnate Word, I realised, is chock full of nuns, it being a private Catholic university. This wasn't a problem for me, although as we entered the smell of overcooked food assailed my nostrils - and that's probably the first time I've ever used assailed in a sentence. Father Jack, the terrifying alcoholic priest from Father Ted loomed up from my imagination to scream Nuns! in apoplectic panic.

We were directed to the place we needed to go. The room was full of very, very old people, and there was a projector screen in front of which the speaker was setting up her laptop. We were handed a sheet of paper informing us that The Vision of the Lake: Mexico-Tenochtitlan was the second of ten presentations in a series called The Wisdom of Ancient Mexico: Anahuac, a lecture with slides, which was roughly as anticipated on account of the venue.

I've visited Mexico on five separate occasions, and have been studying its pre-Colombian culture on and off since 1995. It's the one subject about which I can claim to be informed in any meaningful sense. This isn't a boast, because I'm not really bothered as to whether or not it impresses anyone, but it means I am at least sufficiently armed for kicking arses with authority whenever some facebook dwelling clown begins a sentence with the ancient Aztecs used to believe that...

There was a vague possibility that I had come to The Vision of the Lake: Mexico-Tenochtitlan for the pleasure of shaking my head and growling no no no no no every few minutes, sort of like Dennis the Menace pulverising Walter the Softy for the sake of exercise. For some reason, my wife derives a weird sense of pleasure when I do this, and I imagine my contempt may serve to turn me into something approximating a retired colonel and that she enjoys the excess of Englishness. There was a vague possibility that I had come in order to take umbrage, but it was not a conscious decision, and as we occupied our seats I entertained high hopes, expecting either that I might learn something or else would enjoy revisiting familiar names and places.

The assembled octogenarians mumbled amongst themselves about trips to Cancún, and our hostess began, musing over how little any of us really know about our Mexican neighbours. I knew plenty about our Mexican neighbours, but it seemed too early to pick a fight so I kept my mouth shut and my eyes and ears open. Initially she stuck to the script, and the objections I could have raised seemed minor, or at least no worse than could be expected of your average history channel documentary. They were:

• No they didn't. I think the term was popularised by William Prescott in 1843, although he probably got it from the guy who wrote that earlier history, Clavijero or whatever his name was.
• They weren't, because the stem is metz- so you still have the tz- left over, which is why People from the Heart of the Century Plant makes a lot more sense, quite aside from Mexitli, from whom the name is derived, translating as Maguey Hare.
• The serpent heads represent the blood resulting from her beheading, the act of sacrifice, and subsequent regeneration to a lesser extent. You're not supposed to take it literally.
• No they didn't.
• So where did that eighth tribe come from?

'Excuse me,' some woman sat near the front interjected with a hand in the air. 'Might I ask a question?'

'Sure.'

'Well, I'm a writer, but I'm unfamiliar with this word you use - cosmogony,' she pronounced it with a hard g, like in mahogany.

Our hostess provided a definition of cosmogony for our writer, and I vowed I would use a variation on this line myself at some point. I'm a writer, and I was wondering do you have these in a smaller size?, or I'm a writer, so yes, I believe I shall have fries with that.

After about twenty minutes of this I began to lose confidence in it getting any better. The story, such as it was, was narrated with reference to illustrations and passages of text projected upon the screen, passages of text we probably could have read for ourselves; and the woman was a lousy speaker, mumbling, pausing in awkward places, and employing what sounded like a fairly doubtful pronunciation for most of the names involved. Her monologue had the quality and rhythm of someone nervously popping their way through a roll of bubble wrap, and at the twenty minute mark, she somehow found a way to make it worse.

'The snake is a symbol of wisdom throughout many cultures,' she began as images of Greek and Hindu Gods appeared on the screen. I tried to recall how this idea might have been reflected in the Valley of Mexico prior to the fifteenth century, where the serpent symbolised many things - renewal, generation, and the earth in particular, but nothing specifically to do with wisdom. This was generic new-age landfill, and our hostess may as well have segued into a summary of the early years of ZZ Top for all that it had to do with her subject. Then a statue of Bochica appeared on the screen, the latest in a succession of Gods of conspicuously non-Mexican derivation. Bochica hailed from Colombia, our hostess told us. He had been a white man with a beard.

'I've had about enough,' I muttered.

My wife's expression confirmed that we were of one mind. We shuffled from our seats and padded as quickly and quietly as we could towards the door, hunched over as though dodging bullets.

I know nothing of Bochica, but recognised the motif of the wise white God and his beard appearing in the fresh-faced land of the Indians many years before Columbus, usually with some sort of prophecy about how ships will one day arrive and bring word of Baby Jesus and everything will be like really awesome, yeah? Roughly the same story is told of Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, and people get so carried away with it that no-one really cares that the story appeared in no indigenous record until some fifty or so years after the conquest, the event it supposedly foretold. The legend is interesting in terms of the criteria by which history was once recorded and how its principal function was often to explain the present, but as mythology it's dog shit. Nevertheless, it is still trotted out from time to time by people who should know better, gushing BBC television presenter Michael Wood for one, and now our speaker, our expert.

We raced across the parking lot.

Bess looked at her watch. 'We might be able to make the Arrow of Light, after all.'

We were there in five minutes, entering a silent hall as awkwardly as we had left the previous venue. We found seats at the back. The boys - eleven or twelve of them - stood on the stage at the front, each with a parent. Junior was with his father. The proceedings were orchestrated by one of the Scoutmasters, Mike Osterhage who, by peculiar coincidence, is also a popular weatherman for our local San Antonio television network. It still catches me out when I see him on the screen, smiling as he predicts another week of not much rain. There's the dad of that 1950s kid, I think to myself, surprised as usual.

Mike's boy is Junior's age, also a scout, and he too is on the stage. He's older and taller now, but he was an impressively cute kid a few years back, freckles, big grin and a military haircut, just like the American children I'd seen on television when I was his age. He always looked happy, like he'd sold enough copies of Grit to friends and neighbours to buy that life-size monster ghost, guaranteed to obey his every command, with enough small change left over for a propeller beanie and some Popeye comics. He now looks older, more serious, but they all look serious.

A drum begins to beat and another kid emerges from a door just behind us. He is wearing a feather headdress and assorted robes of vague Native American design. He walks slowly to the centre of the room and makes a show of addressing the four cardinal directions.

The Arrow of Light, as I later come to appreciate, is a lengthy and fairly elaborate ceremony serving to reiterate the core values of the Scouting movement, and for what it may be worth, these core values seem mostly noble. The performance appears perhaps hokey, and is undoubtedly a dubious appropriation of Native American lore in many respects; but as we watch, it dawns on me that this is at least truer to the older histories of this continent than the testimony of the woman for whom the serpent is a symbol of wisdom, purely because she finds it comforting to join the dots between disparate theologies. I would rather have the hokum which means something real to those involved, than the version which has been recycled as a relaxation tape for the benefit of an audience which wants nothing more than a spectacle by which to keep itself distracted for an hour or so.

After the ceremony, the children all begin to bounce around, having been artificially induced to stand still for far too long. Junior refuses to let us take photographs of him in his uniform, maintaining the face he always pulls when there's a camera in sight - a variation on the expressions Don Martin once drew in the pages of Mad magazine. He acknowledges that we were here to watch him, yelps a few times for good measure, and then runs off to join the other kids, all stuffing their faces with complementary cupcakes served from a table at the rear of the hall.