Kris and Deven's Anniversary Swing Thing, by Deven Science

My wife and I had our two year wedding anniversary party last weekend. We tried to keep the same theme of the wedding, that is to say, focusing on the style or the Forties and Fifties.

To encourage a potluck, we had a food contest. The categories were "Best Use of SPAM," "Best Use of Coca Cola in a Dish," and "Best Casserole." We made prizes for the winners of the three categories, and we had some decent casseroles and SPAM dishes. There were only two Coca Cola entries. One was these fucking awesome Coca Cola cupcakes that my wife made, and the other was Coke Floats. The person literally just dropped a 12 pack of Coke Zero, and a tub of vanilla ice cream. And that person won the most votes. Seriously.

A couple of other things we did was have a photobooth, which kept breaking down, unfortunately. We finally got it working well near the end of the party, and we have some great pictures from that. We also hired some dance instructors to give everyone some basic swing dance lessons.

Now, first thing I need to mention that made the dancing a complete failure is that we had way less people show up to the party than we planned. We were expecting forty, and I think we had about twenty-five or so. The next thing was that an even smaller number actually got up and participated in the dancing. At one point, we had only six people on the dance floor. It was embarrassing, and quite maddening. I paid a lot of money for those instructors, and everyone thought they were too damn cool to have some fun being a little silly, and learning some swing moves. Grr!

I'm focusing on the negatives here, but everyone raved to us about what fun the party was, so I guess it could be called a success. There was much socializing, and fun food, and many people dressed up for the event, though not as dressed as for the wedding.

We plan to make the themed party a yearly event, and this time I learned some things, so that next year we'll be renting the smaller VFW hall instead of the big one, and leave out the dancing.

I do have some cool ideas for the next one, and so maybe we can liven things up more this time next year.

A few photobooth pictures of the event: