it was a SURPRISE PARTY for kevin’s 50th birthday on saturday! this is what he looked like walking into my parents’ house.
that last entry i typed on saturday, i only did it because i thought kevin would check the site and i wanted to make SURE HE DIDN’T KNOW.
but i had a horrible suspicion that he did, indeed, know all about the surprise and everything was RUINED. i spent most of saturday afternoon worrying and being mad that he’d found out and deciding there was nothing i could do about it anyway. plus i was looking at the radar map onlin every
three minutes because it was suddenly raining.
it all turned out well. the rain did cool things off a little, and he was completely surprised.
here he is with his birthday sash and crown.
whew, a surprise party can be a little bit maddening. i missed him when he was off at fencing coaches college but there’s no way i could have planned the party if he’d been here. i had almost two weeks to cook things and buy things and organize and find lots of old photos of him. i wish we’d taken photos of the photos; i blew up six of them and mounted them on foam core, and i made six more photo montages of different things in kevin’s life, like the many cars he’s had. one of them was “kevin’s other women,” and i included a couple of photos of mollie, and i found some random photos of different women, none of whom i recognized. there was a great slide of him in high school in a tux with a YELLOW jacket, his date in a yellow formal. i think i’ll see if i can take some photos of those photos because many are very very funny.
there was another woman i didn’t recognize, and he said that was his first wife. i’d never seen a picture of her up till now. there are also some very very funny photos of kevin in college, posing for some fencing photos. HILARIOUS, i’d say. i’m going to frame at least one of them and display it in the living room.
i made way way way too much food for the party, because i usually manage to do that. i made a cake in the shape of a guitar and it turned out pretty well. here it is.
i addition to all the cooking and baking i did, i also had to make two pizzas and then freeze them. kevin had said he wanted pizza for his birthday, and amy said that he would DEFINITELY FIGURE OUT it was going to be a surprise if i didn’t make him some pizza. i wasn’t serving pizza at the party because it would have been a logistical nightmare to make other people bake all of the pizzas, but i made two and froze them and that’s what he’s carrying into my parents’ house.
i was so happy he was surprised, and happy that he had a good time. we played a “kevin trivia” game, where i asked people different questions about him. i made the questions, but i didn’t know the answers to some of them. kevin had to try to figure out how many cars he had over the years, but i’m sure he missed a few (i think it was around 35, maybe?).
my family worked hard helping with the preparations and by saturday i couldn’t do anything at all to help, so they had to do it themselves. it went ok except at 4:30 when mom called me and said IT’S POURING DOWN RAIN, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?
there was nothing i could do about the rain.
later we also played kevin pictionary, where people had to draw things on photos of kevin. personalized pictionary is all randy’s idea, and it’s always a popular game. but at that point we totally forgot to keep score.
jill helped a lot with last minute things, too, and here she is.
oh, and here’s mom and randy in front of one of the blown-up photos of kevin.
bev also helped a lot; here she is now helping kevin with the cake.
she looked really nice in that flowy orange skirt; she’s also in “li’l abner,” so she’s usually just wearing some show t-shirt and jeans, or else in the play she wears mismatched outfits.
the play opens FRIDAY NIGHT, by the way. at new salem. get your tickets soon, they’re selling like hotcakes.
surprise! i think that’s the last surprise party i’m having.
or at least that’s going to be my story, in order to throw people off the track when i start planning another one…
ok ok ok,
wednesday grace.