piratey things

One of the biggest things I did to help with banquet decorations was to stain numerous treasure chests that we used for table decorations. Steve did the shopping and I got to stain them. I stood up for 3 hours one afternoon and just did them all. Jenny came and stained two of them. It was a pretty tedious project. They looked great on the tables though!

We threw an overhead transparency of a pirate ship silhouette that can be purchased from a prom catalog for $100 onto the wall. After about 20 minutes we had it traced and cut out. Instant decoration! And the entire roll of black paper was only $14 and we only used a little of it.

Laura helped stain our biggest treasure chest the next day in my office. It was good that it warmed up because we had the windows open for a while trying to get the smell of the stain out.




We decorated in the cafe from about 6 until 11. I had to run a quick errand to get the black tablecloths from Party City. The SA officers did a great job and we all worked well together to get things put together quickly. It's fun to work with a flexible group of people. Some of them were getting a bit loopy by the end, I have to admit!

table centerpieces - stained chests with gold (chocolate) coins, jewels, and mardi gras beads

one of our masts with the fog machine behind

our parrot - "hanging" around in the lobby

the pirate ship silhouette the girls helped me make

When I went out to look for a pirate shirt Sunday morning (that I didn't find), I came across this nice little parrot for $0.99 at Walgreens and decided I had to have him. The kids kept asking how I got him to stay on my shoulder. I told them "Safety pins . . . He screamed a lot . . . and now I can't get him to talk . . ."

Steve had the greatest costume ever. He got it off the Internet somewhere. Janelle's costume was good too, but I didn't get a picture of her. We had to go outside and shoo the kids toward their dates to get the banquet started. The girls were outside after evacuating due to our fog machine setting off the smoke detector.


Ruben, Cassie, & Anna

I love this picture of Olivia, Becky, and Gabby. Olivia apparently was the only one paying attention. Her face might be the scariest pirate face I saw the whole afternoon. I had fun taking pictures of the two girls in front of our different props. Their family came to the play with us afterward too.

Our SA president Jenny and her boyfriend Marc. Jenny's dad is an eye doctor and sent her lots of fun colored eye patches. (I wore an eye patch for some of the meal and it really throws off your depth perception!) They're sitting in front of the sign I painted early that morning.

Carson had fun running around with my plastic sword. He was a very cute little pirate.













"X" marks the spot of our (mardi gras?) treasure of beads. You can see in this picture that we covered the brick part of the cafeteria walls with paper that looked like wood. It took us about 5 hours to decorate and 45 minutes to un-decorate.

Ryan and I rode on the coach. You can see that almost everyone dressed up. One of the girls ended up adding quite a lot of eyeliner to the guy in the row behind her during the trip. Ryan and I were constantly getting poked by Matt's dead rose from the seat behind us.

On the way down, we had a problem with the yellow "ship." It had a pretty low tire that we had to deal with. I was just glad we got down the ridge ok and were able to fill it up and keep going. It was pretty funny to have the pirate drivers and sponsors all standing around the bus in a gas station parking lot!

Our surprise destination was on the west side of Nashville. We took the kids to the Darkhorse Theater where a group called ACT 1 put on "Pirates of Penzance," a Gilbert & Sullivan musical. It was really entertaining and we were impressed at the skill of the actors. They all had great voices and put on a great show.

Me with the SA officers and members of the cast. They hung around and talked to us afterward and seemed to get a kick out of everyone's costumes.