Forcibly Ejected from My Sister's 50th!

Rather than just filing away all the little scripts, speeches, jokes and graphics that I am forced to create so that my kids can participate in the year-end home schooler's Christmas pageant, friends can turn a year older and their kids can get married and/or graduate, I thought I'd start posting them, so that others can adapt them for their own needs. Feel free to take and reuse anything that works for you.

My sister, Lindy, turned 50 in August. And, with typical disregard for what a person might actually want, family and friends plotted to ensnare her with a surprise party.

A surprise party is to me a way to turn what might have been a nice, quiet, relaxing, enjoyable time into an embarrassing, noisy obligation. They are also, ironically, predictable and thus notoriously difficult to pull off anywhere near the time of the event they are celebrating. My sister Lindy is known to have a quick and keen mind and the only way we could think of to keep her off the scent was for us all to act suspicious for the entire monty of July. She would certainly know that we were up to something, but we were determined to surprise her with the when, where and the what of it. In the end, the biggest surprise of this party was that we accomplished that.

At the first meeting of the planning committee someone suggested an election theme and the idea instantly caught fire. It seemed pertinent, given the outrageous election antics happening in the US, and pretty much everyone who encounters my sister suggests that she go into politics. She is a take-charge, cut-to-the-heart-of-the-problem person, and kind of brilliant, and everyone knows that whatever she's involved in will run logically, efficiently and successfully. In fact, amongst all her closest associates, she's the one who plans almost all of the major events. This is why we spent the rest of the meeting standing around asking, "What would Lindy do?" We were tempted to call her, but we all knew that Lindy would never have done that.

I wasn't asked to contribute a speech or write a play. Instead, I was assigned the role of a Freelance Reporter who would capture the "Candidate's" arrival at "Campaign Headquarters." Her sons donned dark suits and sunglasses and played Secret Service bodyguards. In this role, they ignored my credentials, curtailed my freedom of the press and physically removed me from their path during the candidate's arrival. I got it all on video!

Here is the link to the video: https://youtu.be/Hbt08LDfURI

I was also asked to create all the election signs, banners and birthday posters which I present to you in the pictures below. I put out an email call to all the invitees and collected as many of the worst pictures of her as I could. I think the signs came out looking pretty dorky, if I do say so myself. Maybe something here will work for a party you are planning.

Warning!: Some of this material is not politically correct... but then, when have politics and correctness ever mingled? Feel free to flex your internet troll finger muscles, if you think that will have some sort of affect on something.