parties

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 2

August 11, 2011 by krisis

When I left you hanging a month ago I was planning my best friend and bandmate Gina’s bachelorette party with two of her other best friends, and we were all determined it had to be the best party in the history of all parties.

On a Rt. 36 trolley during the actual bachelorette party, as shot by Kelly's partner Gudrun. Wondering what the pins are and what our shirts say? Keep reading. (Oh, and is that Gina in the background? What is that thing she's wearing as a hat? Hmm...)

One month out from the event we were still trying to piece together dozens of ideas for an Amazing Race-style event when I had an epiphany: Gina’s party would be a video game. Here is my actual verbatim pitch to fellow BFFs-of-Gina Kelly and Mikki:

I know I am completely insane and you can say no to this, but what if the way we put a wrapper on the entire day is not that it’s Amazing Race but that it is a giant Gina-themed video game, a la her lyrics in “Fisher Price”? It wouldn’t change any specific task, but it would give us a way to theme the events. We could even make up a little “Strategy Guide” to give to her at the beginning with hints and stuff :)

Or, I am insane.

Even if I was insane, Kelly and Mikki are equally so, and they immediately bought into the idea without a moment’s pause and continued to fire off increasingly more ridiculous plans for the day, such as:

I was thinking it would be fun to get gina a labcoat for the chemistry [demonstration]…decorated and bedazzled of course.

Kelly's party favors, all based on 8-bit video game graphics. I have one of these pinned to my book bag and I still have not the slightest idea of how they were assembled or how Kelly worked out the patterns.

While I was excited that they liked my idea, I was also terrified that I now had to transform a day wandering the streets of Philadelphia with 20+ guests into a live action video game. Not just any video game, but a decidedly retro one that would click with a group of people who grew up on classic Nintendo – and, for many of them (including my co-planners), hadn’t played a video game since!

It was at this juncture that I pulled out my Nintendo and SNES and started skimming through instruction booklets.

Most old-school video games share a basic architecture. A character has to accomplish something (return home, free the princess, kill all the zombies, etc), defeating increasingly difficult challenges (monsters, puzzles, etc) along the way. Their victories yield rewards (points, items, etc) that serve to increase their sophistication (levels, powers, etc).

Gina’s journey was clear – she had to complete all of the previously disconnected Amazing Race challenges to move through the city. We were lucky to have a starting point on South Street and an end west of the city, making a sensible (if not linear) world map.

Mikki's stencils, corresponding to our various city challenges. Note the mix of incredible realism (the amazing camera, the pig silhouette, the Kanye glasses) with pixelized video game ephemera. Click through to see a larger version of her handiwork.

I drafted an intro to Gina’s game booklet as a sort of proof of concept of merging 80s video game hyperbole with our shared pithy sense of humor:

Gina F____: Chemist By Day, Rock Star By Night – The Almost Married Edition! is an epic adventure that will take our hero, Gina, on a journey from one end of Philadelphia to the other to transform her from Chemist By Day, Rock Star by Night to Chemist By Day, Rock Star By Night, And Also Bride!

In GF:CBDRSBN-TAME!, Gina will visit key locations of power to defeat challenges, level up, and energize her POWERFUL BRIDE POWERS. Along the way, complete special tasks on the TABLE OF PERIODIC ELEMENTS OF GINA & WES board to complete her special WESLEY QUEST.

Gina won’t be able to defeat GF:CBDRSBN-TAME! alone – she will be abetted by friends and buoyed by special power-ups during her journey.

Powers? What powers?!?

This is where my cohorts saved me from writing our event to death with their amazing creativity. While trying to dream up rewards, Kelly thought of making a grab bag of pixelated party favors. Meanwhile, after hearing Kelly’s idea for the favors, Mikki began to design a series of elaborate stencils. The idea was that each one was based on one of our challenges, and could be sprayed onto the shirts we planned to give to all the guests.

With a cohesive visual interpretation to tie the video game concept together, the layout of our game was suddenly much clearer. Now I simply had to figure out how Gina could play this game along with twenty of her closest friends.

Tune in next time to hear about my concept of gameplay as our preparations became increasingly frantic with less than two weeks until Gina would take the controls of her own personal video game!

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 1

July 5, 2011 by krisis

This weekend was Gina’s (she of Arcati Crisis, high school, and many madcap adventures in between) bachelorette party.

In 2008, my bachelor party (planned by Gina and four of my other closest friends) was an 80s Prom entitled “Like a Virgin.” It came complete with DJ, decorations, catering, and friends dressed in period fashions – with hair to match. Plus, the DJ was actually a karaoke emcee, and all of the 80s tunes were sung by my friends and I.

Now, I am more than a little competitive. Not in the playing sports, head-to-head, high score kinda of way. I could care less, but not by much.

No, my style of competitive is “anything you can do I can do better.” Like, my blog is the longest running in Philadelphia, or I have the most expansive guide to collecting X-Men on the internet, or when Bruno Mars tracks came out for Rock Band 3 I wouldn’t let bro go to bed until we had 100% and were ranked in the top 30 internationally of all harmony vocalists.

Thus, when I was charged with planning Gina’s bachelorette party along with her best friends Kelly (a chemist in Belgium) and Mikki (an architecht & non-profit organizer in Seattle), I had something to prove. I had to conceive of the most memorable, most epic, and most fitting Bachelorette Adventure possible without actually having Gina go on tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young.

My first impulse was to plan something with music and the 80s, but… surprise! Gina had already won the “Best Party Ever” designation in that category.

As Kelly, Mikki, and I talked about it over the course of several months, we kept coming back to a “this is your life” tour through Philadelphia landmarks. It was a cool idea, but didn’t sound fun. There’s your house! There’s your high school! Isn’t this awesome!?

No.

We kept talking. What if it was a City Chase version, with special clues and teams racing the city? Cooler, but not the best format for celebrating around a single person. But, what if each location held a special challenge for the team – half Amazing Race, half Double Dare?

Now we were getting somewhere. We picked some locations and made up a few challenges. It was sounding somewhat entertaining, but not EPIC. It was lacking a grand scale and a clear theme, other than walking around Philly for eight hours.

Then, I had a not-rare-but-not-nearly-common-enough stroke of mad genius while idly humming one of Gina’s Arcati Crisis songs, “Fisher Price,” which goes a bit like this…

There comes a time when you realize
That you don’t get anymore chances
There’s no extra lives
You don’t get big from a magic mushroom
And you don’t find coins in an underground room.

My epiphany? Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure would be a video game. A real life video game that was part Super Mario Brothers, part Grand Theft Auto, and part live-action role playing game – all with Gina’s favorite parts of Philadelphia as its world map.

It sounded suitably epic, but would it make any sense to Kelly and Mikki… or to Gina and the 20 friends she asked us to invite?

Tune in for the next installment to hear how our motley trio planned to turn Philadelphia into a massive game board, and how having crafty and artist co-conspirators elevated my insanity to a whole new level.

http://arcaticrisis.bandcamp.com/track/fisher-price

something like life

November 4, 2010 by krisis

I’ve got this elaborate editorial calendar telling me what to write and when to post, but if I just stick to the calendar that sucks a bit of the me out of the blog, eh?

Life continues to be a non-stop whirlwind of communications and music, which is exactly what I’ve always wanted it to be, so yay for the continued status quo! When not in actual rehearals I’m writing songs (for the soundtrack to Eric Smith’s novel), a novel (for NaNoWriMo), and a blog (just because, and for NaBloPoMo).

As it happens,Gina is also writing songs (at the moment, as a soundtrack to Boardwalk Empire), a novel (she’s the one who convinced me to do NaBloPoMo), and a blog (she is not the only one of us who exerts peer pressure).

I think this is pretty much what I imagined our adulthood would be like as a seventeen year-old, except for I’m married to someone way hotter than I imagined and Gina is engaged to a lawyer.

Speaking of: Elise, who has the same hectic rehearsal schedule as me but less of the writing, has starting painting the house in approved non-vomitorious colors. I think it’s very “nice” that she’s painting, which is to say I think painting (and, in general, decorating) is something people with too much money and spare time do to occupy themselves.

The only photographic evidence of us as Lucas and Corey from Empire Records, courtesy of our friend Tina, who was such a perfect Rachel Berry that it was a little disturbing. Note E's gold star, awarded from Rachel.

(Lest you think I am debuting this sideways insult of my wife here on the blog, she’s been hearing it for years. I’d wager she’d be happy if I just blogged about it and stopped whining about it in the house.)

As someone with neither money nor spare time, the whole process is perplexing to me. She had to use special gray primer on our dining room walls, which took an entire day to paint on and when she was done I was like, “Awesome, it’s gray, can we leave it like that?” and she had to explain that it was just the primer.

I’m all about gray. I think grays are totally exempt from every being vomit-inducing. Now the dining room is cranberry. I hear that’s supposed to aid in digestion, so I stood in it while I was eating raviolis before rehearsal last night. I ate them pretty quickly, but I think that’s just because I hadn’t eaten anything for about 22 hours. I’m not sure about the digestion angle.

The one downside to my constant flurry of words and sounds is it doesn’t leave a lot of time to interact with people I’m not writing or rehearsing with (or for taking things out of the dryer, but that’s another story). I think my next availability for a dinner with friends might be in December.

A snapshot of the last ten days of my life: Saw three concerts (one in New York), rehearsed three times, started three new songs for my soundtrack to Eric Smith’s book, tried to find a way to post three times daily here at CK (still working on that), wrote almost 7,000 words for my NaNoWriMo novel, and dressed as Lucas from Empire Records for a Halloween party.

Oh, and occasionally ate, slept, and watched 30 Rock.

If you did more than that in your last ten days then I want to know what else you could have possibly fit in and kind of vitamins you are taking.

Please note: methamphetamines do not count as “vitamins.”

I #blamedrewscancer for being a Philebrity

December 11, 2009 by krisis

I have a story to tell you.

I met half of the #blamedrewscancer crew at Fuzion at around seven for the Philadelphia Area New Media Association (PANMA) holiday party.

That is not the story.

We were at PANMA for some brief networking and catching up with friends, but our end destination was The Trocadero, where Philly blog fixture Philebrity was holding their non-denominational X-Mas party slash year end awards.

Blame Drew’s Cancer was up for the “Outstanding Do-Gooders of the Year” award. Polling had been open and transparent, so it was easy to see that we were getting creamed by Phillies’ Shane Victorino from day one. As such, we didn’t marshal much of a vote – eventually coming in fourth, behind even Mayor Nutter for his ballsy budget bluff.

The four of us – Britt, Mikey, Libby, and I (plus Libby’s awesome husband, another Peter) rolled in to the Troc fashionably late, and occupied the “Reserved” table closest to the stage. Our innate rowdiness took over shortly, and we were hooting at the house band (shout out to BC Camplight) and yelling “Hut!”at any reference to Lady Gaga.

Okay, maybe that was just me.

Suddenly, it was time for our award category. Philebrity Captain and one of my personal Journalist heroes Joe Sweeney read down the list of nominees. When he hit #bdc we cheered, the crowd cheered for us, and he continued down the list.

End of story? Not quite.

Joey Sweeney: So, Shane isn’t here tonight, so we’re going to give this award to Blame Drew’s Cancer.

Team Blame Drew’s Cancer: ???

No, he was not joking. Suddenly we’re being gestured at and motioned towards to the stage and then we’re on the stage and then I’m hugging Joey Sweeney and then, inevitably, I am standing in front of a microphone gaping at a rather large crowd seated at round tables all Golden Globes style and I am like, omg I think now they want me to talk.

Luckily, there is video to document my surprising coherent trip through award show aphasia:

Philebrity Awards from Mark Magliocco on Vimeo.

(Take note of my neck-bobbing walk down the stairs, as it figures in to the next bit pretty heavily.) [Read more…] about I #blamedrewscancer for being a Philebrity

Our Battlestar Galactica Halloween as Baltar & Head Six

November 1, 2009 by krisis

Last night E and I dressed up as Head Six and Dr. Gaius Baltar, respectively, from the cult Sci-Fi hit Battlestar Galactica.

E is not in Six’s standard spaghetti-strap dress, but Six can be spotted in this style at least once in the series.

Also, note the spot-on bracelet and ring, which E made herself.

My costume was much more subtle, as I was effectively E’s accessory for the night. I simply grew some scruff and slicked back my hair. For fun, I carried two corner-cut Vice-Presidential memos (as we were ostensibly circa seasons one and two – post appointment to VP, but pre swearing-in as president).

One memo was the results of tests with the Cylon Detector. The other was a draft of Gaius’s inaugural speech, complete with parenthetical asides to Head Six (presumably floating over his shoulder in devilish fashion as he wrote it). Writing in the Dr. Baltar voice was very fun.

Out of two parties four people knew who we were. The best comment we received was by far: