Falling in Love With a Balloon Artist Taught Me I Never Wanted to Be “Normal”

My future was uncertain . . . A balloon dinosaur was tangible, even if it withered away in a week.

My husband Colin was a balloon artist when I met him. I was twenty-five and just starting my second year of law school; he was thirty-one and had spent his twenties playing online poker and teaching preschool before landing on balloon art.

The weeks after I first met him, my law school was humming with anxiety. The majority of my classmates who would go on to large, corporate law firms had just gone through the early interview program. Those interviews determined where they’d spend the next summer, which determined where they’d work after graduation.

The firms, all a jumble of last names, signified various levels of prestige. I couldn’t keep straight which last names were good and which were “bad.” Those were relative terms since, as I understood it, they all paid the same salaries: about $30,000 for a summer of work and an annual starting salary of $160,000. These numbers were in the air, common knowledge, imprinted on me, but the first time I brought them up in casual conversation with Colin, his mouth hung open. That shock felt so refreshing.

I had worked at a corporate law firm as an intern the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. I was assigned to assist with the firm’s defense of insurance companies trying to avoid paying out to the victims of Hurricane Katrina; I filed pictures of the victims’ ruined houses for twelve dollars an hour. Though I was only there for two months, I spiraled into a deep depression, the memory of which was still fresh in my mind when I’d started law school four years later. I knew I wouldn’t, and couldn’t, go into corporate law—the tiny taste of that work had sickened me. But knowing that also made me feel like an outsider in a school where corporate law was the most common path.

As a way of keeping my emotional distance, I put most of my energy into parodying the place. I directed the musical theater group, which rewrote the lyrics to pop and Disney songs to skewer the absurdities of law school. There were songs about everything: highlighting methods, specific professors, the rules of civil procedure. There was “Part of Wachtell” to the tune of “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid. (Wachtell was the name of a firm known for its intensity.) The climax of the song—the part when Ariel sings “up where they walk / up where they run” went:

They’re number one

’Cuz they’re no fun

And you will never again see the sun . . . ”

I went to class, usually, and did the minimum to get passing grades, but most of my spare hours during that second year of law school were devoted to the parody show and to learning to make balloon animals from the new guy I was dating.

The first balloon animal Colin taught me was a dog. He then taught me how to make a ladybug, which he shaped as an adorable little bracelet with huge eyes. He taught me to make a monkey, saying “this part still makes me wince” when he showed me how to separate the monkey’s eyes from its nose and rotate them around one another. I learned to twist balloons into mermaids, unicorns, dinosaurs, sharks, and a Spider-man/skeleton/alien (which were basically all the same balloon design, with a different head). I threw myself into it—learning each twist and fold. I couldn’t tell—and still can’t tease apart—how much real interest I had in the craft and how much I just liked the guy and was trying to make it seem like we had more in common than we actually did. But there was something very satisfying about learning the formula for a balloon and being able to reproduce it perfectly every time. Property law, con law, and contracts were abstract. My future was uncertain, since public interest jobs didn’t hire for two years after most of my classmates would have an offer in hand from a firm. A balloon dinosaur was tangible, even if it withered away in a week.

When Colin went from a “guy I was dating” to “real boyfriend,” I answered the same questions over and over from classmates and teachers: “So, what does your boyfriend do?” or more commonly “So, is he in law school too?”

I knew how the conversation went if I said yes to the second question, because I’d dated law students before. There was an accepted script, one that ended with the asker saying, in wide-eyed exclamation “So, two lawyers!”

My future was uncertain . . . A balloon dinosaur was tangible, even if it withered away in a week.

But now, I would give a little laugh, as if to preview for them that they were about to hear something wild. “No, actually, um, he’s a balloon artist?” Almost every time, they would mishear. I took to semi-shouting it, or over-enunciating. It didn’t help.

I tried other methods—calling him a children’s party entertainer, or saying he “has his own business doing party entertainment.” I would add, “He does, you know, corporate events . . . birthday parties . . . ” I would finish by vaguely waving my hands and trailing off. Nothing worked to help dispel the awkwardness, because on some level, I did feel awkward about it. It was a silly job, and I couldn’t fully pretend that I didn’t think otherwise. I loved the show 30 Rock at the time, which had a repeated joke about how Liz Lemon’s ex-boyfriend went to a “prestigious clowning academy.” The show’s implication—that it was humiliating to desire a man who would have such a job—had wormed its way into my head. It wasn’t just about the fact that this wasn’t a job with much earning potential. It was also the whimsy of the job, the fact that it could be the job of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in a rom-com. Sometimes the person would look at me for an extra beat to figure out if I was doing a bit.

“So, not a lawyer!” they would sometimes brightly say, once they knew I wasn’t joking. I started saying that line myself, which would then prompt the response, “No, definitely not!”

My parents expressed concerns to me, at first obliquely, then with increasing directness, about what exactly my financial picture would look like with a public interest job (that I had no guarantee of even getting) and balloon art.

But most of my friends loved him. I was drawn to those classmates who had something obviously different about them: two of my friends were in their late thirties and already had PhDs, two were ex-Mormons, and one was a guy who treated law school like a day job while pursuing professional acting at night. All of them talked contemptuously about the average member of our class: rich, white, twenty-two-year-olds who were motivated by little but grades and the promise of a future high salary. I liked running with a group that explicitly rejected those values . . . even though I was also white, also came from a rich family. I was twenty-four, and not twenty-two, but that seemed like splitting hairs. In the back of my mind, while I joined in on mocking the rest of our class, I wondered exactly what did make me different enough to hang out with the “obviously different” crowd.

When I started making balloon art on the quad with Colin, it felt like an answer to that question.

*

Balloon artists don’t call themselves balloon artists—too much of a mouthful. I learned the first time I went with Colin to a “Balloon Jam”—in their parlance, simply a “jam”—that they called themselves “twisters.” I went to balloon jams in hotels, in diners, in the backyard of balloon artists’ houses.

There, I got a different question: “So, are you a twister too?”

“No, um, actually, I’m in law school?”

That, too, killed conversations quickly.

It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to fit in with the balloon artist crowd any more than I wanted to fit in with the corporate lawyers. And I wouldn’t have, even if I tried, because twisting wasn’t my job, and the jams were, in their own way, networking events. But at the jams, like in law school, I felt like an observer rather than a full participant.

A “jam” looked a little like a knitting circle, but with balloons instead of yarn. They would bend, snap, and shape balloons, while trading war stories. Candy, a face painter and balloon artist, told us how she had been in a character costume as Hello Kitty when she realized she was about to faint. She kept waving happily to a group of kids while looking around frantically for a chair large enough to hold her in the giant cat costume.

At the jams, like in law school, I felt like an observer rather than a full participant.

I listened, feeling like an anthropologist. I couldn’t imagine re-telling the stories I heard at these jams to anyone else in my life—friends or family—without making the whole thing sound like a wacky joke. But I didn’t think that the people there were jokes. They had a hard life, a life of hustle and skill. Some of them were the same age as my law school classmates, but they all looked older.

At one jam, I ended up next to Joe, an intense, bearded guy, who shared his trick: Always make a few balloon rings to hand out as soon as you arrive at a party.

“There’s usually a mom, maybe a grandma, an aunt. You give them this gold and silver ring. And they parade around the house, showing it off, acting all silly. And do you know what you’ve done right away? You’ve given yourself a voice at that party.” I nodded, seriously, and said “That makes sense.” Then I added, “But you, know, I’m not really a twister.” I regretted it the second after I said it. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t just let it go, why I had to constantly make sure that whoever I was talking to knew I wasn’t one of the group.

During the days that summer, I worked at a public interest job, reading endless pages of children’s foster care records. One of the attorneys I worked for asked me what my boyfriend did for work and, when I told him, he looked me right in the eyes and asked with a little pity in his voice, “Is he a clown?”

My fellow summer intern, Carl, was my favorite kind of person: a young person who acts decades older than his actual age. Carl listened to a lot of German opera and had a well-groomed dog named Walter. He got an appetizer, a main dish, and dessert every time we went out to eat.

Carl also always seemed to be doing a performance piece about being a law student, rather than actually being one. He was unruffled, and unrufflable. He reacted neutrally to all news, which made me want to tell him everything about myself. I don’t actually remember telling him that Colin was a balloon artist, but I am sure he reacted with his standard “Ah, yes,” with a sage nod.

When Colin and I got engaged three summers later, Carl felt like an obvious choice to officiate the wedding. His manner of speaking gave gravitas to a drink order. I could picture him saying, in a deep voice, “We are gathered here today.” When I asked him to officiate, he told me that he would be honored and that he considered officiating a wedding to be “a form of secular maturity.”

The wedding day itself felt like a play, moving in slow motion, for which I had not fully rehearsed. A bridesmaid told me, after the fact, that I stared intensely at every person, as if trying to move them with telekinesis, to read the poems with the right inflection, to make everything go just right. I watched my own wedding, in other words, with the same stiff intensity that I had watched the law school musicals as the director, wanting to make sure the timing of the jokes landed and the blocking was perfect.

The only moment in the whole wedding that brought me out of it was when Carl began his remarks and I realized that his hands were shaking. He spoke in a trembling voice. He, the unrufflable, was ruffled. And I thought to myself, “I guess this is a really big deal.”

He said, his note paper quivering, “Sarah and Colin have this really childlike quality about them—this capacity for joy and wonder.” I remember having just half a beat of thinking—is that how people see us?

The wedding looked very adult, traditional as far as Brooklyn park weddings go, with no balloons in sight. But it looked that way only because my parents had paid for it. I wondered if, perhaps, we weren’t fooling anyone into thinking we were real adults, including our own officiant. I knew that Carl had meant to say that we were different in a good way, but all I could hear was “different.” But if I didn’t want to be different or stand out, why was I marrying someone who went to work wearing a “monkey on a tree” balloon hat?

We have a two-year-old daughter now, an apartment, taxes. Colin takes balloon gigs only occasionally and now has a job that doesn’t raise eyebrows. I am still a public interest lawyer, but can’t stop making sure everyone knows that I’m really a writer.

Our daughter’s daycare recently asked that each family bring in a book to read to the class that was special to the family. There was no reason we couldn’t have simply brought in Frog and Toad, or a Frances book, or Winnie-the-Pooh. But still some part of me wanted me to mark us as different. And what was the point of spending all those hours learning balloons if we couldn’t use that knowledge? So, instead of reading a book to the class, Colin made a giant balloon octopus. It stayed on the class bulletin board for weeks.

I felt equally proud and embarrassed, looking at the picture that the daycare sent around of him affixing eight purple balloon legs to a round balloon head. “Well, we’re that family,” I thought to myself. The zany ones, the weird ones.

Or maybe we’re not. I bring it up, almost compulsively, when I meet other families in the class. “We’re Alice’s parents. And, you know, the balloon octopus . . . ” Sometimes they don’t know what I’m talking about, which feels a little disappointing.

I have lamented, both in private and to my friends, that I seem to never fit into any group I try to join. But as I’ve repeated this pattern over and over, I’ve realized I also must like it. Why else would I keep seeking to prove my difference over and over, in every choice I make? It’s embarrassing to admit, but every time I don’t fit in, I get the thing that I want more: proof that I am different, and exceptional. Though if I really believed it, I don’t think I would keep needing to prove it to myself, over and over again.