If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails by Barbara Corcoran, Bruce Littlefield Page B

back down. Our salespeople had the same thrill as we did as kids when my dad jostled the wooden ladder beneath us on top of the hill.
    One year, a five-thousand-pound elephant and a spitting camel waited on the front lawn to give safari rides, and yet another year, we leased ten Thoroughbreds in full gear and everyone got to run them up and down the back fields.
    Perhaps the best surprise was the year everyone arrived to find that there was no surprise! An hour later, with hundreds of people picnicking on blue-checked blankets, a motorcycle gang of tattooed guys dressed in black leather and chains roared up onto the lawn, revving their engines and circling the frightened crowd. I jumped up and indignantly shouted. "You're on private property! Leave-or I swear 111 call the police!" As someone ran to call 911, one of the bikers removed his helmet and revealed that "he" was really a "she'' with a big smile, bright blue eyes, and long blond hair. The gang turned out to be my sister Mary Jean and her born-again Christian motorcycle club that came all the way from Pennsylvania to "crash" our party.
    "So," I asked my shocked guests, "who wants a ride?
    People most resistant to fun need it the most.
    People sometimes resist fun simply because they've never had it. All they need is a little encouragement. Our most proper Park Avenue ladies were the first to hike up their skirts and hop on the back of the Harley-Davidsons. They blissfully roared up and down the back roads, clutching their pearls as tight as they held on to the drivers.

    4. Change keeps fun fresh.
    When our company outgrew picnics at my house, we invented new ways to keep the party going. Instead of corporate Christmas parties, we began a tradition of "February Sweetheart Parties." In real estate, as in many other businesses, February is the slowest, most depressing month of the year, and it's the month when people need to party the most. Also, since few parties are planned in February, the best places in town are available at the cheapest rates.
    5. Themes make teams.
    Our first black-tie Sweetheart Party took place in an abandoned warehouse in Queens. My guests' adrenaline started pumping when they were greeted by a huge man holding a gun in the graffiti-covered industrial elevator. The elevator opened into a ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse my brother Tee (cabdriver turned caterer) had transformed into a speakeasy.
    Every year, people eagerly look forward to the announcement of the February party's theme. When the theme was "Diva or Drag," men and women cross-dressed for the occasion and laughed about it for months to come. We held our "Stars on Broadway" party in a theater on Forty-second Street, and a few days before the party, we took our managers to rummage through the city's largest costume shop in search of perfect star costumes. Our wardrobe outing turned out to be a party in itself. The moment I opened the party as Carol Channing lip-synching "Hello, Dolly," the party was a success.
    When the theme was "The Glamorous Forties," I tromped through every costume shop in New York trying on and rejecting a series of 1940s ball gowns because they were just what people expected me to wear. Still without an outfit on the morning of the party, I spotted a cardboard box marked "Girdles" in a Greenwich Village drag queen shop. Five hours later, I walked

    into the glamorous Rainbow Room high atop Rockefeller Plaza wearing a 1940s girdle and 46-double-D bra stuffed with two softballs. seam stockings, and an ice pack pinned to my head. As a "1940s woman with a morning-after hangover," I was the belle of the ball.
    6. Fun always follows the leader.
    In my 1940s costume, I got more kisses and gropes from mv salespeople and employees than I got in the last ten years of my marriage. My insanity made the gossip columns, and, most important, I made a big deposit in our company loyalty bank simply because I was smart enough to be stupid.
    7. Make the party a madman's plan.
    Fun