SURPRISE! (Party)

I hate the idea of parties, but I usually find myself enjoying them. Other people's parties, that is. My own, I'm just really not into, so it really says something when I'm willing to throw a party in my own space. It's not that I don't enjoy the party planning aspect of it, or spending time with the people I love, it's that I really don't like people getting up in my stuff and judging who I am outside of the real world. Somehow I thought it would be a good idea to throw a surprise party for one of the women in my life.

It was the middle of summer and Dee had been living on the mainland for quite a while. She had been talking about coming to visit the island for a week or so before everyone went back to school, and, since her birthday would be coming up in the last weeks of August, Anika and I decided that we would throw her a party. A surprise party.

My parent's house was the obvious location, as it was easier for people to get to their place than it was for people to get to Anika's. Also, my parents had abandoned me (again) while they were off on an Alaskan cruise (again), so we would have the house entirely to ourselves.

First, we were deciding on what we would do at this party. Since my parents are of the classy variety, they have a really nice set-up on the outdoor patio where they often host parties, so Anika and I decided on having an outdoor dinner party. Easy enough, right? We had these big tiki torches set up along the perimeter of the patio to keep the bugs away, a string of icicle lights that would be tented over the table like a swarm of fireflies, and enough room for roughly twelve people to sit comfortably and welcome Dee into the next year of her life.

What we would be having to eat, we had no idea. Anika and I liked to set our sights really, really big, and I'm pretty sure we wanted to have a full-on Thanksgiving dinner in the middle of summer. Anika and I had never cooked anything before in our lives, so why we assumed we could pull off a turkey, I have no idea.

Our thought was that we would cook the turkey and the mashed potatoes, the gravy, and prepare a few veggie platters. We were also considering the possibility of cooking a ham to go with the turkey, because that would have been completely within our abilities and not at all a disaster. Anything else, we were going to ask the guests to bring, kind of as a potluck.

That brought up the subject of who we were going to invite. We threw a bunch of names around, came up with a list of nearly thirty people, and then decided that that was maybe...a little too much. So we whittled it down to thirteen, including ourselves, and made a second list of five or six 'alternates' who we would have called upon if one of the original guests was unable to make it for whatever reason.

Anika and I tend to get...caught up in the details, and then we also tend to completely ignore any problems that we may have set up for ourselves. So we set about inviting all of these people to the party, and just as we were about to start phoning them, we realized that we had no idea when Dee would be arriving on the island, and, if we were going to invite anyone first, it should really be the guest of honour. So we phoned Dee, and tried, very awkwardly, to suss out when she would be coming to see us. Unfortunately, she wasn't quite sure yet, but said that she really wanted to be on the island for her birthday and a few days before and after. So Anika and I decided that we would have her party the day before her birthday, have her crash at my place that night, and then she would be free to visit with her family on the actual day of her birthday.

So, now that Anika and I had a plan, we started phoning people and asking them if they were busy the day before Dee's birthday, because we had a tentative plan to throw her a party. The responses we got were "so...you don't have a set date yet?" and "what do you mean you might have to change the day?" So we thought it would be best to stop calling them and wait a little closer to the day of, so that we would have a more set plan.

Instead we changed gears and started thinking about what we would be doing at this party. Dee loves dancing, so, naturally, we would clear off one side of the patio to get our groove on. She also loves games, so we devised our own party game.

As the guests would arrive, they would be given a blank flash card on which they would write their fondest memory of Dee. It could be a story, something that Dee had been really passionate about that stood out to us, a joke that Dee really loved, pretty much anything that reminded us of Dee for whatever reason. We would then hide each of those cards under the plates around the table, and, during dinner, people would read the card (which would be placed at random) and we would all try to guess who's memory was being read.

The second game we devised was...largely the same, except it would be something about Dee that we admired, and we would put all of the ideas on tickets, and all of the tickets in a bowl at the centre of the table. We would be reading out one of the tickets every time that anyone did something clumsy, which...in our group, would be quite a lot.

As the day of the party drew closer, Anika and I scoured cook books to figure out exactly how we were going to pull off this fantastic dinner. We then realized that we didn't have a cake, so we would have to ask one of our guests if they would be willing to bake one for us. Even though we didn't have Dee's schedule completely figured out, she thought that she would be arriving on the morning of our party, so we felt confident that we could just set up the party and have her arrive once all of the guests had shown up.

We had confirmation from only half of our guests that they could show, while the other half were a good possibility. Everything was working out smoothly...and then we phoned Dee to ask what time she would be arriving.

As it turns out, Dee was unable to get the time off of work, so she would be spending her birthday on the mainland with her boyfriend. For Anika and I, this meant calling everyone that we'd invited and uninviting them. We briefly considered having the party anyway to hone our cooking skills, but we both figured that we would screw up the dinner and give everyone diarrhea, and if we couldn't share that with Dee, we didn't want to share that with anyone.

In anyone else's circle of friends, this would be the end of the story. Instead, Anika thought it would be a good idea to tell Dee that we had planned a party for her.

"Don't tell her," I pleaded, "you're just going to make her feel bad that we wasted all of this effort!" Anika shook her head, "this is going to make her happy! You don't know what you're talking about." No matter how much I protested, Anika insisted that we tell her, and then went ahead and told her, then called me afterwards to say "you know, I'm really surprised that it made her feel bad!"

And now I've blogged about it so Dee can relive the experience.