As I mentioned a couple of months ago, Jason and I recently achieved unprecedented dancing fame and by “unprecedented dancing fame” I mean fame that is not satisfied until unprecedented amounts of dancing have occurred. Our most recent performance was at the Festival of Trees, an annual fundraising event for Primary Children’s Hospital. Here are all the twists and twirls of that affair.
Our group had a great time preparing and performing together.
In addition to the significant stints spent at our regular dance class, our group of twelve performers practiced almost ten extra hours to perfect our routine. Although these rehearsals sucked up so much time that it seemed like all Jason and I did everyday was go to work and prance about, preparing for FoT was tremendously fun. Laughter and banter erupted so frequently at our practices that they felt more like hangouts than workouts.
Many vintage dances are done in a round.
Soldier’s Joy is one of my favorite vintage dances. It involves a lot of spinning.
Our show at FoT was half an hour long and included nine different songs. We had a few wardrobe malfunctions, namely flying shoes and falling pantaloons, but our on-stage romping proceeded relatively smoothly otherwise. The crowd of onlookers started pretty small but it grew throughout our segment.
The Oslo Waltz is a very elegant dance that is performed in a circle.
When wearing a massive skirt that flips regularly, appropriate undergarments are necessary.
For me, the greatest challenge of this recital was my costume. My proper 1860s attire included a corset and a hoop skirt that was nearly as wide as I am tall. I can’t convey how preposterous trying to dance is when you have a five-foot girth and are bound up tighter than a mummy. Leaping Jehoshaphat! After our performance, Jason and I walked around the exhibit hall where I was constantly bombarded by children (mostly girls) that wanted to talk to or have their picture taken with a princess. Yes, that “princess” was me with my excessive skirt. My royal ascension was unexpected but amusing.
Out of all the enormous skirts in our group, mine was the hugest.
I suspect that Jason and I will be prancing around town more frequently in the future. Our Festival of Trees premier was so enjoyable that I’d even willingly submit to hoop-skirt ungainliness again for a chance to repeat the experience.
My Bunko group has been gathering once a month for over a decade. However, lately it’s struggled somewhat with consistent turnout. Since November was my month to host, I opted to make things a little swankier than usual to bring back the crowds and the enthusiasm. (“Crowds” in this case refers to a total of twelve women.) Yes, it was time to bring in an upscaling professional.
Close to our complete dozen attended.
Chef J. is an executive chef and a friend of an acquaintance. Because I’d sampled his work before and my stomach had wholly approved, I decided to hire him to make some heavy-duty small plates at my Bunko event. His menu for the evening consisted of Underground chicken skewers with a blood orange aioli sauce and warm tortillas, cold soba noodles with raw vegetables and a coriander wasabi sauce, and dark chocolate mousse with a mocha rum sauce. While everything was delicious, the mousse was definitely my favorite; I could have eaten a mountain of that stuff, or a molehill at the very least.
Chef J. served his foods in a fun fashion.
My fancification tactics were satisfactorily successful. Nearly a full dozen ladies showed up ready to high roll and gobble some hired grub. Hooray for gaming made gastronomic!
October is a busy month for us. So busy in fact that sleep and sanity are often sacrificed. However, we love Halloween too much to abandon all of our favorite seasonal activities in the name of party planning. Hence, this October we made sure we still got to experience some of the screams and silliness of our preferred holiday. Here’s a synopsis of those shrieks.
Devilish attire seemed appropriate for the Witches’ Ball.
A queen of evil or just your average fiend?
Jason and I attended the Witches’ Ball at This Is The Place. It’s essentially just a costumed dance party but we had a lot of fun jiving in peculiar attire and plan on attending again next year.
There was a number of friendly owls at the Witches’ Ball.
As has been our custom for a number of years, we spent on evening getting startled and lost at Cornbelly’s with a group of our buddies. This outing involved wandering through mazes of both the corny and the scary variety. Romping around in shadowy fields with friends and chainsaw guys is always amusing.
Cornbelly’s brings out childish behavior and that’s a good thing.
And who says aerobic exercise is only for the breathing? Jason and I, along with Jason’s dad Keith, ran the Night of the Running Dead this October. Are you livingly challenged? Do you crave a tasty brainiac on occasion or enjoy scurrying for your life? If your answer to any of those questions was yes then NOTRD just might be the race for you. Both humans and zombies may enter. The humans get a modest head start and then the trackside snacking begins. Jason and I, per our rotting flesh, ran with the zombies. That’s no bombshell but it may shock you to hear that Jason, Keith, and I all won first place in our respective age divisions. How did we manage? Some things are better left buried.
Jason and I took a break from our snack break to show off our newly acquired medals.
Jason and I also hit a couple of other Halloween hangouts. We toured the Haunted Village at This Is The Place and explored Evermore’s Pumpkin Fest. What did these hair-raising parks have to offer? At the Haunted Village you wander through the night from one tiny building to another. These structures, historic replicas, are effortlessly eerie but they leave much to the imagination…and my imagination has a big imagination. Evermore also has a different spin on spooky. Its ghostly landscape is very interactive and guests can go on quests through sinister graveyards and forsaken temples. I’d recommend checking both of these places out.
Evermore, along with its abundant haunts, had pumpkins aplenty.
Every year, Jason and I look forward to our Halloween dinner. The two of us spend an evening preparing a meal full of fall shapes and flavors. This time those morsels were broccoli-cheese soup, cheese puffs disguised as pumpkins, and popcorn balls. All three of these recipes turned out great so we were more than happy eating their leftovers for days.
From broccoli-cheese soup served in pumpkins to cheese puffs dressed as pumpkins, our Halloween meal was squashed.
We made popcorn balls the old-fashioned way using our stovetop.
Decorating our house for our party wasn’t my only design task this October. The company I work for encourages each department to spruce up their area of the building for Halloween and gives them a small amount of cash to do so. I was nominated by my team to head up our bedecking. (Gee, I wonder why.) After much debate, we decided that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban would be our theme. I’m pretty proud of what we created on a little budget. House banners colored our ceilings. Dementors drifted above our stairs. Sirius Black posters, cleverly photoshopped with one of my teammates’ faces, covered our walls while hand-painted Patronuses protected them. A cauldron, jars of potion ingredients, wands, and the Marauder’s Map were at the ready, waiting for the magic to begin. I dressed as Hermione and even wore a Time-Turner. One of my coworkers, the poster child, came as Sirius Black.
I made sure chocolate frogs and bars were in ample supply to counteract the Dementors’ effects.
Leo the Lion, the mascot for the Real Salt Lake, showed up at our office as a Halloween treat.
Speaking of decorating, Jason and I discovered recently that the kids in our neighborhood call our home “The Halloween House.” This name was bestowed upon it because, in the words of one child, we “always have the best decorations and the best candy.” I can never give out just one treat to each of the roughly 125 youngsters that come a knocking every year. So this time, instead of providing handfuls of snack size sweets to every kid, I offered full size candy bars and giant Pixy Stix. Surprisingly, the Pixy Stix were vastly more popular than the candy bars. According to a preliminary survey, this was because they contain a greater quantity of sugar. And who says kids don’t understand economics.
With only a $50 budget, we threw together house banners, flying Dementors, and a potion station.
Most of this Patronus was my doing. My sketching skills are few so I’m pretty proud of this small accomplishment.
That brings me to the end of our seasonal adventures. We brewed, we screamed, we crawled through fields of corn. October was hectic but we still stopped to smell the rotting corpses.
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