The latest moment of suspense: Will gender party cake be blue or pink?
One of the solemn missions of this column is to give readers a heads-up on the potholes that may lie ahead on the road of life.
Potholes such as gender parties.
Gender parties are the newest entries in that genre of female-sponsored get-togethers that give women opportunities to engage in serial giggles punctuated by frequent shrieks.
Their men sit around in self-conscious boredom, keeping anxious eyes on their watches lest the giggles continue through kickoff time at Williams-Brice Stadium or Death Valley.
The gender party is the newest wrinkle in the social fabric created by modern technology, specifically the sonogram.
Before the sonogram, the seven or eight months between initial signs of pregnancy and the actual delivery were full of delicious anticipation: Would the stork bring a boy or a girl?
Until the child actually made its delivery-room advent, nobody knew, which made the choice of stork-shower gifts a bit dicey. Should you give something pink on the chance the infant was a girl, or should it be blue in anticipation of a boy?
I never figured out why that was so important. I never knew a newborn girl to kick off her Pampers because they were decorated in blue instead of pink, and I don't think a newborn boy is going to be ostracized by his nursery buddies if his chemise is pink instead of blue. But it's important to mamas and grandmamas, and I suppose the kid will be grateful in later years if its baby book reflects the proper colors.
The sonogram has wiped out the anticipation and the dilemma. Before the baby bulge has grown beyond a barely noticeable belly bump, the mother-to-be has presented herself at the ob-gyn's office and has come home with a precious photo of the kid-to-be.
Prospective mamas proudly show the photo to all their friends, who gush over how much the blob looks like its daddy and how wonderful it will be to have a girl (or a boy) around the house.
I have never seen a sonogram image that looked anything like its daddy, or like any other human. You could tell me it was a frog, and I wouldn't dispute your word. And just as I can't tell a boy frog from a girl frog by visual examination, I can't tell a girl sonogram from a boy sonogram by looking at it.
If everybody were like me, there would be no occasion for a gender party, which is the subject I started out to tell you about.
Up to now, when a couple announced their engagement, you could look forward to at least a couple of giggly events: A bridal shower and a stork shower - the latter, one hoped, following the former at a decent interval. In some cases, the girls would give the bride a lingerie shower, which would be especially dense with giggles.
Now the girls are cramming a gender party somewhere into the interval between bridal shower and stork shower, or between baby bump and birth in cases that lack a bridal dimension.
The gender party is planned after mama-to-be comes home with her sonogram, affirming the sexual category of the kid-to-be. The girls then get together to celebrate the future boyhood or girlhood of the child.
Here's how a gender party works, or so I'm told:
The girls all get together for a light meal, which is the only socially acceptable kind of meal where women predominate. Somebody who can be trusted with a secret has been commissioned in advance to bake a gender-party cake. The icing is a neutral color.
At cake-cutting time, everybody gathers round with bated breath. What color will lie underneath the icing?
The knife slices through the cake, the first slice is revealed and the shrieks go up as the color of the cake's insides is revealed.
"A girl! Who would have thought!" they exclaim, assuming the color is pink.
Well, guys who are accustomed to calculating the Las Vegas odds on the Gamecocks vs. Georgia or the Tigers vs. Georgia Tech could tell them: The odds were roughly even on a boy or a girl.
I've had one irreverent man speculate on what would happen if the inside of the cake turned out to be chartreuse or mauve instead of pink or blue. My guess is that the shrieks would be louder and of a different quality. But that's not likely to happen.
With all the ambiguity gone from the gender question, the girls would consume their cake and punch, then head happily to Target or Walmart to do their shopping for the stork shower.
The guys would head for the nearest sports bar to enjoy the Clemson or Carolina game over beer and cheese fries. And the only color question would be whether orange or garnet would predominate. I'm not sure the guys would enjoy it quite as much if they knew the final score in advance.
I haven't yet been to a gender party, and I'm not sure I want to go to one. All my kids arrived in the pre-sonogram days - even in the days before fathers were admitted to the delivery room.
Being gender-neutral myself (I don't care what sex it is, as long as it's healthy and normal), I found the suspense to be a welcome diversion while the mother was in the delivery room.
It was like waiting to learn whether your team was going for a touchdown or a field goal on a fourth-and-goal situation.
The sonogram is just one example of progress toward eliminating delicious anticipation.
Birth-control technology has devalued the marriage ceremony to the point that marriage becomes advisable only after the couple has decided to conceive.
Instead of eagerly awaiting the joys of the wedding night, the bride rolls over on her wedding day, shakes her groom by the shoulder and says, "Wake up, honey, it's time to go out and get married." And the honeymoon is just another shared night at the Hampton Inn.
But at least they can look forward to the gender party.
Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.
Gene Owens is a retired newspaper editor and columnist who graduated from Graniteville High School and now lives in Anderson.