FULL ANNIVERSARY PARTY-CULARS

Ready for the guests.

Our party at the Yacht Club was a blast – from the past!   The memories of all the happy (many after getting exhausted, completely saturated, and gale-blasted) times we had spent there came back to us strongly.  There were also friends and relations we hadn’t seen for some time, so a good deal of catch-up jabbering happened.

The cake somewhat less elaborate than the one of fifty years ago shown in the picture!

Younger daughter had gone to town with décor, and arrangements of laying on a DJ and the works.  The music was almost exclusively from our era.  A looped slide show of wedding photos ran throughout.

Matching party dresses.

(Sad that my Nikon has given up the ghost.  The Handycam stills are not exactly great quality.)

When it came to the speechifying, I welcomed and thanked guests and organisers and all that jazz in very conventional style … well, admittedly, I did kick off with: 

I think it’s up to me to look this opening part up …
*reads* Without being uppity, people who are up on speaking have the up-pinion that the upside of the art is – before people get upset or throw up – to stand up, speak up, and shut up.

In paying tribute to Much Better Half for extreme fortitude and heroism in putting up with me for four years of courtship and engagement and another fifty of marriage, I announced that I had written and orchestrated a waltz for her.  When it came to the lyrics, I admitted I had a problem because my normal style was to write something like The Ugly Bunny (I recited it to them).

The DJ played the CD of the waltz, and then played it again muted in the background while I spoke these words against it (my singing voice would repel even a crow):

Once a young lad, while still as a teen
Met up with the most striking girl
that he had ever seen,
Merry and bright, complexion most fair,
So startling a contrast
against her deeply midnight hair.

Squeezed behind seats in a tiny car,
Went out on a drive
which was not all that very far –
As it turned out, would both of them take
Out onto the edge
of a picturesquely pretty lake.

They chatted and found
that their dreams were in tune,
Then went out together,
and it was quite soon
They had become inseparable;
They tarried, but then they married,
And so are they, still –
Through half-century it carried,
And so, always will!

It was played for a third time while the two of us danced to it.  Then, after the buffet supper, we did some more dancing.  Our guests had no stamina – we out-waltzed, and out-rocked-and-rolled them completely.   It was a wonderful party!

© Colonialist December 2013 (WordPress)