William Chong

Big party! Millions of people showed up. Well, almost.

Spent Friday and Saturday:

• setting up things like fairy lights, lanterns, oriental pizazz
• cleaning a really scungy chilly bin from its last outing
• setting up speakers and making sure they worked across two different rooms
• scanning heaps and heaps of baby photos for slideshows
• food prep (Tommy made Mantou, RB had her sushi etc)
• drinks prep (setting up a faux-bar)

At about 4pm we started experimenting with different feijoa vodka martini mixes, eventually settling on one that RB was happy with:

30ml 42 Below Feijoa Vodka
60ml feijoa juice

Shake with ice, strain into martini glass.
Add 30ml lemonade, garnish with feijoa slice.

Some cool things throughout the party proper:

• degrees of separation! Turns out Laurence’s friend Ray knows Sonny, and tall Michael knows Paul, and relatives of someone had various connections.
• The cake was fantastic – two-story heart-shaped, included about a 1/3 bottle of Cointreau orange liqueur in it
• Great outfits – RB’s and Rebecca’s seemed to have been done by the same Southeast Asian tailor
• Lots of food from Fong Mei! My favourite!
• All of RB’s fantastic artwork scattered across the walls.
• Seeing lots of familiar faces and having a decent time catching up!

Dubious points:

• Some people obviously came for the drinks, and then left without any decent farewell.
• Spiked vodka and grenadine fruit punch. Most of the Christian congregation left RB’s party red-faced (and not from embarrassment either!)
• In-house noise control.
• Who the hell gives someone a Striptease DVD as a birthday present?!

The only formalities came about from me asking people to share something about RB. Speeches were mostly short and simple, and focussed on RB’s positive attributes such as her intellect, artistic talent, loyalty and her onion-ness! (Shrek: “I’m like an onion.” Donkey: “You make people cry?” Shrek: “NO DONKEY. I have LAYERS.”)

Then they cut the cake, etc. Lots of people sang “Happy Birthday”. I’m glad you made it RB

Most people left quietly, without saying anything – even Laurence’s ride back to West Auckland left! Luckily a couple of us decided to hit town: RB, Laurence, Cheryl, Ray, Tommy, Colin and Marcy, May and Joseph. We were unfortunate enough to decide on The Lounge on High St – we hit it on a $5 cover charge night and a scratch-happy DJ trio, all who had unanimously decided that changing the song every 30 seconds was artistic merit (yeah right). Nevertheless, RB got free drinks from the bar and it all went wobbly-knees from there.

I think I slept at 4, which wasn’t too bad.

Good times!

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