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"You Mean All Night at F .A.O. Schwarz?"
Before mountains of candy, Miss Peppermint Twist, wearing hot pink chiffon and white fur,
announced to a bevy of bouncing ponytails that they might take one ounce of candy each.
Then Miss Twist corrected herself. "Oh, did I say 'one ounce? Excuse me, I mean one
pound." She twirled in her lifesaver-covered tutu. "You do need nourishment."
Fifteen girls squealed with glee and filled plastic bags with as much nourishment as
they could grab.
So, you are a 12-year-old girl who asks to have your very best friends sleep over for
your birthday. Your parents agree and rent out all of
F. A. 0. Schwarz to fulfill your heart's desire. And that is how Maggie, a seventh grader from Miami, one baby sister and 13 other
girls came to have a slumber party last Saturday night in the mother of all toy stores on Fifth
Avenue....
Starting at 9 p.m., after the three-floor store had closed to the public, the girls were
greeted by Prof. Perry Winkle and Tabitha Teazlebee, their adult hosts, dressed as safari
leaders in pith helmets and khaki. They gave each girl a survival kit with knapsack, camera,
water bottle and talking watch, which burped and made other unmentionable sounds.
The nightlong gigglefest began.
Over the next 11 hours, the girls snacked on pizza; conducted a scavenger hunt for
Pokemon Power Bouncers and other toys on the overflowing shelves; tattooed their arms; had
their hair braided with beads; made ID bracelets; sat in a photo booth to make stickers; and,
best of all, were allowed to touch, try on and wear whatever pink, leopard or purple dress,
shoe or boa they fancied anywhere in the store. At 8 a.m. on Sunday morning, after bagels
and cream cheese, they were presented with $100 gift certificates to shop before the store
opened to the public.
"Who could ever have an experience like this?" said Alana, the birthday girl's sister, 8. "I
mean after tonight I can walk by F. A. 0. Schwarz, look over and say, 'I slept there.' Who could
ever say that?"
As it turns out, a growing number of children can in this
peppermint- flavored, pink-fizz economy, where extravagant children's parties are a recurring theme. The price for F. A. 0.
Schwarz's Ultimate Slumber Party, $17,500 for 15 children, is no deterrent. It was introduced a
year ago, and the next open Saturday night is in April. Last week, a slumber party the store
donated to a charity auction conducted by Rosie O'Donnell was bought for $18,000 by Frank
and Kathie Lee Gifford....
Writers about raising children may preach modesty in birthday parties or advise inviting
one guest for each year celebrated; but allover New York, parents are ignoring them. "We
have never been busier ," said Chuck Santoro, a k a Professor Winkle, who with his partner, Liz
Nagengast, a k a Ms. Teazlebee, runs In Tandem Productions, which puts on elaborate
children's parties. Besides playing host to the F.A.0. Schwarz parties, they offer Madeline
brunches for girls and Batman brunches for boys at the Four Seasons Hotel for about $4,000.
The American Museum of Natural History lets members have birthday parties among its
exhibits for $1 ,500 and up. There are party packages at the Warner Brothers store on 57th
Street, at Wollman Memorial Rink in Central Park and at Chelsea
Piers.
"People are spending more money than they ever have for kids that are younger and
younger ," said Katherine Wyse Goldman, author of "New York's 50 Best Places to Have a Kids
Party" (City & Company, $12), which lists plenty of inexpensive settings, too, like Miss
Majesty's Lollipop Playhouse on Grove Street, where tickets are $8.
Nancy Samalin, an author of child-raising books, who holds workshops for parents in
Manhattan, is appalled by the trend toward excess. "A child doesn't need 15 gifts or 15
parties," she said. "A child needs a parent that will spend time with him. The message you're
sending your little darling is so far-fetched. It's sending a totally messed up sense of values,
totally mixed-up idea of how they should deal with money."
Whatever could she mean?
Santoro told about a party for which the mother asked that her Park Avenue penthouse
be cleared out to create a carnival space, complete with motorcycle ride, for her son, 3, who
loved motorcycles. "She told us to do anything we needed to do to create the carnival," he
said. "Even if it meant breaking down the doorway to get in the motorcycle." (He found a
small one. )
Maggie's father defended his gift to his daughter, a combination birthday and bat
mitzvah present. "Maggie barely asks for anything," he said. "When she found out about this
and asked for it, we were shocked. We just had to give it to her."
He is an entrepreneur who owns restaurants and clothing factories in New York and
Israel. He agreed to let a reporter and photographer attend Maggie's party on condition that
the family's last name not appear, to protect his daughter's privacy and because he did not
wish to be criticized for excessiveness.
Maggie, a sweet, unassuming girl, lived until recently in
Scarsdale, N.Y. She moved with her mother to Miami after her parents' divorce. As her friends, most of whom attend
Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy, a Hebrew day school in Riverdale, the Bronx, frolicked through the
store, she took pictures. She said the party wasn't as extravagant as her brother's bar mitzvah,
when the family rented Madison Square Garden so guests could play basketball. (The Knicks
were away.)
Maggie and her friends were well mannered. Not like some other children Professor
Winkle and Ms. Teazlebee recalled. There was one boyof 13, he said, playing in the
radio-controlled car pit on the lower level, who asked, "Are we going to really sleep down
here, because I don't get good reception on my cell?"
-- Monique P. Yazigi, New York Times, November 14, 1999
J. P. Morgan, seldom portrayed as a radical, maintained that no corporate chieftain should
earn more then twenty times what his workers were paid. Things have changed since Morgan's
day. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House, the typical C.E.O. of a big
American company was taking home about forty times the annual earnings of a typical worker
on the factory floor. Reagan, it will be recalled, didn't think that this reverse redistribution
had gone far enough -- "We're the party that wants to see an America where people can
still get rich, " he told one Republican gathering --and by the time he left office even more had
been done to alleviate the suffering of C.E.O.s. In 1990, they took in about eighty-five times
as much as factory workers.
Still, the rewards that senior executives enjoyed during the Reagan era were mere
hors d'oeuvres compares with what was to come. Between 1990 and 1998, according to a new
study published jointly by the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the advocacy
group United for a Fair Economy, the annual "compensation" of C.E.O.s at large firms rose
from $1.8 million to $10.6 million --an increase of almost five hundred per cent. Workers'
wages also rose during that period, but their rate of ascent barely kept pace with inflation.
Last year, big-league C.E.O.s pocketed, on the average, four hundred and nineteen times the
earnings of a typical production worker.
--John Cassidy, in The New Yorker
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