EXCHANGING BODY FLUIDS WITH TOTAL STRANGERS; ALSO, MICHAEL KEATON THE PSYCHO KILLER, AND 100% IRONY-FREE SENTIMENTALITY.
On May 9 in New York, Anthem will be hosting a benefit concert for DKMS Americas, the international bone marrow registry, at Santos Party House. Coincidentally, on May 6, your Senior Editor’s father will be having a bone marrow transplant—at a comparatively unhip hospital in North Jersey that is, unfortunately, not co-owned by Andrew W.K.
We’re excited about this benefit show for a million reasons. Four of those reasons are the musical acts who’ve agreed to perform: Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic), Cale Parks, The So So Glos, and Real Estate. The other reasons, while a bit less sexy, are of the awesomely altruistic variety.
There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about bone marrow transplants. Most people still assume that becoming a donor means agreeing to a gnarly, gut-wrenching surgical procedure in which an enormous drill, possibly manufactured by the Caterpillar corporation, is jabbed three million times into your pelvis. This is not true. In fact, the process in general is so smooth that you really have no excuse not to consider becoming a donor. (Hear that noise? That’s us plucking your heartstrings, one by one.) We’d bet money that it’s a whole lot less of an annoyance than jury duty, for instance, although there are more needles involved. And jury duty doesn’t provide you with the boatload of instant karma that saving a stranger’s life does. (Unfortunately, it’s not as exciting as this bone marrow-based psychothriller starring Michael Keaton as a serial killer. But what is, really?)
This isn’t my father’s first bone marrow transplant. That one was back in August of 2004. The donor—though we wouldn’t know this for another two years, due to confidentiality laws—was a 30-something German woman who had entered the database through a DKMS drive. My father befriended her over the Internet after her identity was no longer a secret. He flew to Germany to spend a week with her family and kids. Later, she came to stay with us—her first time in the United States. We rode the double decker bus through Manhattan, went bowling in central New Jersey and got a bit teary when my mother put Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” on the jukebox. (Okay, it’s a gay pride anthem, but who’s keeping score?) The experience was as weird and wonderful as you’d expect it to be, and I officially have no other basis of comparison—no other “this was like that”—to dredge up. It was like befriending a total stranger who showed up at JFK airport with her suitcase and accent and phrase book and the simple fact of having saved your father’s life.
After four cancer-free years you’re not supposed to need a second bone marrow transplant. But hey—stuff happens, as Donald Rumsfeld so memorably reminded us—and thankfully the registry is expansive enough that my father has managed to find a second total stranger whose Byzantine internal codes just happen to match his own. That wouldn’t be the case if not for organizations like DKMS. The most exciting element of the May 9 charity event will be the possibility for attendees to register on-site—all it takes is a 30-second cheek swab and a bit of paperwork. You could be the one, a few years down the road, flying to Germany or Sweden or Australia to hang out with the person whose life you saved. Personally, that sounds pretty fucking cool.
Buy tickets to the May 9 event at Santos Party House, and visit DKMS’s website for more information about donor drives, bone marrow transplants, and everything else you could want to know. (And if that campy Keaton thriller is out at the video store, find Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale instead. The holiday drama—starring perennial Anthem favorite Mathieu Amalric—uses a marrow transplant to drive its plot. There’s also plenty of good-looking French people arguing extravagantly and having a lot of sex, as the French like to do.)
