Yesterday we threw a 60th birthday party for my aunt. I hate organizing parties, and even more so when it's a surprise party. Don't get me wrong, I like being sneaky and lying to people, but making a party a surprise adds extra information to keep track of. You no longer just have to get your guest of honour to a certain place at a certain time but you have to have a background story of why you're going there that must be believable and also enticing enough to make the person actually want to go, or at least feel obligated to go. Even though I get stressed out doing this sort of thing I did it for my aunt for two reasons. One, she deserves it. She's the one who always organizes the parties in the family and keeps in touch with everyone. All in all, very thoughtful. Two, she reads this blog so I'd better say something nice.
The story I came up with to get my aunt to the party was that it was a rally for the Relay for Life. My aunt is a breast cancer survivor (that's another reason why I do the Relay and an especially good reason you should donate to the Canadian Cancer Society. On the right side of the page, there's red text saying "My Personal Page", this will lead you to the donation page. Thank you) and she is participating in the Relay this year. Fortunately she agreed to go to the "rally" so the ruse was working thus far.
As I mentioned above, I dislike organizing these things and I think it's because I'm really no good at it. I have the attention span of a gnat with ADD and can't keep track of all the things that need to be done for a successful party. If it were left entirely up to me I'd have everybody sitting on the floor in my apartment fighting over a half eaten cheese sandwich and the cake would consist of a yellow highlighter placed squarely in the middle of a Vachon
Joe Louis. I much prefer that somebody else does the organizing and just tells me what to do. Luckily (and surprisingly) I have friends that thrive on organizing and are no slouches when it comes to telling people what to do. The organizer extraordinaire is Jabberjaw. She created an itemized list for me that I would have been lost without. The other immense help for this party was my friend Yangalicious. She made a ton of food including a beautiful teapot cake (my aunt likes tea).
The PartyThe plan was that I would pick up my uncle and brother at 11:30am, drive them to the location, help setup and then leave to pick up my aunt and bring her there for 1:00pm. My car was quite packed with all the party supplies; plates, cups, decorations, table clothes, coffee maker, water heater, beverages and a box with six bud vases and one large vase, each containing flowers and water. I picked up the flowers the night before from Jabberjaw who had done a lovely job of preparing the flowers and packing them in an empty diaper box that mockingly had "no messy leaks" printed all over it. She had prefilled the vases so that the flowers wouldn't die immediately. The problem was that about a fifth of a second after I picked up the box the six bud vases tipped over and emptied their contents on the bottom of the box causing a messy leak. I managed to get the flowers home without incident and refilled the vases to keep the flowers fresh; but the bottom of the box was now very fragile. I had this box sitting on the floor of the front passenger seat. As my uncle got into the car I tried to warn him about the delicate condition of the box bottom just as he lifted the box up by it's sides and the six bud vases again tipped over and soaked the floor mat. My uncle turned the box upside down and used the relatively dry lid as the bottom. When we arrived at the party room my uncle grabbed the box by it's sides and the bottom (which was actually the lid) flew open, tipping the bud vases again. There was little water in them this time but the flowers did scatter over the car floor.
We went up to the party room and started setting up. Because of the flowers incident we were running a bit late so we scrambled a bit to setup. I left to pick up my aunt leaving the remainder of the prep work to my uncle and brother. As I left I asked my uncle to tell my brother (because he wasn't there at the time, not because we weren't speaking to each other) that I had brought my camera and to take some pictures of our aunt when she comes in so we can immortalize the look of surprise on her face.
I picked my aunt up at about 1:00pm and we were supposed to be at the party at that time. I had requested on the invitation that if you could not be there before 1:00pm to please come at least 15 minutes later so we wouldn't run the risk of bumping into each other entering the building and ruining the surprise.
We arrived at the building at around 1:20pm. The security guard that would normally let us in was doing his rounds (I think this means he goes to the stairwell to smoke) so I called Yangalicious to let us in. As I was on the phone I saw my cousin coming into the building. This was a potential surprise ruiner and even worse I couldn't blame my cousin because it was my lateness that caused the fiasco. I stepped in front of my aunt to block her view and signalled with my eyebrows for my cousin to make a run for it. I was on the phone remember and wanted to be subtle which is why I didn't use my hands to signal plus I'd been doing a lot of eyebrow exercises lately and wanted to put my effort to good use. My aunt, being nosey, sidestepped me and came face to face with my cousin. The cousin was sharp enough to make up an excuse about visiting friends in the area and that calamity seemed to be averted.
As this was happening I got ahold of Yangalicious and said we needed to be let into the building. She said, I'll send your brother down. I didn't think my brother was a really good choice because I was pretty sure my aunt would recognize him and that also might ruin the surprise. Plus, I asked him to take pictures and it's pretty hard to get a good shot of the surprised look on someone's face when you're standing behind them. But, this was at the same time my aunt and cousin were talking and I wasn't thinking straight. My brother gets off the elevator with a huge camera around his neck, my aunt says "Hi P-Dub (not his real name) are you the official photographer?" Again, we dodge a bullet as she thinks he's taking photos for the rally.
Finally, we get to the room, walk her in, everybody yells surprise, my aunt nearly has a heartattack and I run downstairs to grab my cousin and let her know it's safe to come up now.
My brother said he managed to get a few shots of my aunt looking surprised so it wasn't too bad. I later went to take some photos and realised that I hadn't put a memory card in the camera so even if my brother had captured a shot worthy of a Pulitzer it would have been for naught. In his defence he's never used a digital camera before so he had no idea that something was amiss. Good thing he wasn't the official photographer though.
After a rocky start the rest of the party went well. There was one awkward moment when my aunt and uncle (incidentally they're brother and sister not husband and wife) we're talking about two elderly women who lived with the family before my uncle was born. He said, "why don't you tell the story of how they came to live with us" to which she replied, "no, I don't really want to get into that" so he proceeded to tell the story that the day the sisters found out my grandma and grandpa would take them in was the same day one of the sisters decided she was going to kill the other and then commit suicide if they didn't find a place to live that day. Nothing like a jaunty tale of murder/suicide to get people in the mood for fun. I asked my dad if he could recount a few stories from his years fighting in Vietnam to get the party really rocking.
I think the most surprising thing about the surprise party is that I didn't end up punching anybody in the face, or getting punched in the face.
I'll end with a picture of the beautiful cake Yangalicious made. Yes, it does say Happy Bithday. She made it very late at night and can certainly be forgiven for missing one letter. If I had made the cake it would have read "It had to be a teapot, eh, assface?"
