Marla Mase has produced over 3,000 events since founding  PARTYpoopers  in 1991, its sister company partySWANK in 2009, and her latest venture  Amore da Matti  in 2019. 

I wanted to open up my own theater. It was the early '90s, we lived in Tribeca, and lots of storefronts were empty and available. My husband suggested we rent a storefront, make it into a theater, and as a way of supporting it, turn it into a venue for kids’ birthday parties. At that time kids’ parties was not a ‘thing’, there were two in the entire city. I thought, what is he talking about? We have no experience with this. We have no interest in this. We don’t have kids and we don't know the first thing about entertaining kids…we know nothing about planning parties other than the parties we made for our friends in our loft but that's just putting out some humus and pita, chips and salsa…there I was, once again, giving all the reasons why NOT to do something.

We woke up the next morning and there outside our door was a street fair for the neighborhood pre-K: facepainters, jugglers, balloon twisters, stilt-walkers, guitarists and children doing sing-alongs, arts-n-crafts booths, we thought FOR SURE IT'S A SIGN.

Three months later, Party Poopers, Inc. was born. It was the only venue of its kind in New York City at the time; we created these incredible interactive theme parties (we even had a haunted house downstairs, a set from an off-bdwy play), we had all these wonderful actors working for us, it was very theatrical. We ran it for almost six years at that location, closed the venue, and then began doing events and parties for people/companies of all ages, at locations all over the tri-state area.

I always say, there isn’t anyone’s party in NYC we haven’t done. Hah. But true.