Manhattan-based musician Jeannie Myers has fond memories of singing with pop legend Neil Sedaka. Back in 1969, she spent time baby-sitting his kids while working at Esther Manor in the Catskills, which was operated by his wife’s family. Once she sang a duet with Sedaka in the inn’s parlor: “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen.”
Today, she can’t get that song out of her head. As one of the world’s estimated 5 million leap year babies, Myers is celebrating her 64th year today — which also happens to be her 16th birthday.
For most, the odds of someone your own age sharing your exact birthday are 1 in 365. The odds of sharing a birthday with a leap year baby the same age: 1 in 1,461.
On years when there is no Feb. 29, Myers says her phone rings with birthday wishes starting at midnight on Feb. 28, and continues through March 1. “I was born at 8:30 in the morning, and my mother asked the doctor to change the birth certificate to the 28th,” she continues. Her mother, she says, thought a Feb. 29 birthday would cause “great confusion in life.”
But the doctor refused, and a nurse at the hospital assured her that “leap year babies have special talents.”
While she remains skeptical about this theory, Myers does have a trick up her sleeve: She can tell a person how many letters are in a sentence the second the speaker finishes saying it. (When asked, “Can you really count the letters in a sentence?” she answers without hesitation, “38.” )
Leap year baby Peter Brouwer is a co-founder of leapyearday.com, the Web site of the Honorary Society of Leap Year Babies — an organization that claims 10,000 members. “For younger kids, there is a cheated aspect when they realize their birthday isn’t on the calendar,” says the 56- (or 14-) year-old Brouwer. “[But] as you get older, you think it’s pretty cool.”
Brouwer says he’s convinced a couple of calendar companies to acknowledge leap day, but that it’s been an uphill battle. “We want it on the calendar [just like] Groundhog Day or Labor Day, but we have to get a senator to sponsor a bill, and that’s not going to happen.”
Political candidates looking to pick up the support of America’s roughly 200,000 leap year babies may want to listen up. As Brouwer points out, they’re all born in presidential election years. “We’re the year of the Summer Olympics,” continues Brouwer of the leap year bond. “We’re all Pisces, and in the Chinese horoscope we’re all either rats, monkeys or dragons.”
Brouwer spends his winters in Clearwater, Fla., where he’s celebrating tonight by going to see a Radiohead concert.
“We stay younger at heart because of it,” Brouwer claims. “We don’t think ‘another year older’ every year.”
Also turning a youthful 56 today is Upper West Side native Anna Lou Newcomb, who will spend tonight celebrating near Southbury, Conn., where she now lives.
“I’m a teenager!” exclaims Newcomb. She has been the center of attention on her birthday since, well, she was a day old. “I was in the newspaper. They had a picture of me as a leap year baby,” she says.
Cari DeCoons, 32, who just became a mother herself three months ago, is preparing to throw herself an 8-year-old-themed birthday party this weekend, complete with board games and ’80s decor.
“I was supposed to have been born on Valentine’s Day, but I was late,” says the Manhattan-based marketing director at funbars.com, who makes a living throwing parties.
Though Facebook only sends birthday notices to her virtual friends on years when there is a Feb. 29, DeCoons says her real pals never forget to wish her a happy birthday. In fact, they got the party started early last weekend with a surprise trip to Atlantic City. Deciding 29 was a lucky number, the group headed for the roulette wheel.
“Everyone was playing 29 for a couple of hours, and it didn’t hit,” says DeCoons. Then, around 11:30 Saturday night, “I put my last $15 of chips on 29, and it hit.”
Her birthday present: $529.
– Additional reporting by Gregory Miller