The Hip Housewife did good!

Yesterday was the Hip Husband's fiftieth birthday.  (!!!!)  I've been planning his birthday party for almost three months and the big event was finally last night.

I booked a couple of bowling lanes and a karaoke room at the Highball, one of our favorite restaurants/bars/event spaces in the city.  It's decorated in late fifties/early sixties style.  Lots of gold glittery vinyl on the chairs, red walls and these fantastic wall-hanging light fixtures.  They have good food and an extensively stocked bar. 

We ordered up some Dr. Pepper glazed ribs, fries and onion rings to share with our friends while we knocked the pins down.  The bowling lanes are vintage, from the Rock n Bowl in New Orleans.  The Rock n Bowl moved from it's original location and the lanes, pins, machines, the works were all purchased for the Highball.  This involves manual scoring, which nobody wanted to do so everyone just took turns throwing the ball down the lane.

When we'd tired of that we went into the big karaoke room, decorated in tiki lounge style, for the big dramatic presentation of Scott's birthday gift.

Back in April, I was looking at a Gretsch White Falcon guitar on ebay.  I was trying to figure out if the seller had Bill Me Later through Paypal.  I was trying to do this on my old phone and ended up accidentally buying the thing.  After hearing from the seller that he'd received funds, I asked him for three days to make sure the payment wasn't going to bounce.  In those three days I sent out a lot of emails to a lot of people asking if they'd like to chip in on the guitar.  And I got an amazing response. 

Inside of a day and a half I had enough to cover the purchase price and had it shipped to my house!  Then I had to hide it.  I left it in our front hall closet for a day before getting up really early the next morning to sneak it out to my car.  Then I made and excuse to go out and ran it to our friend Linda's house.

She kept it safe, polished it and got it in tune.  She brought it to the party last night and I gave a pretend eulogy. Then I told Scott he was getting his gift that everyone in the room knew about but him.  Linda brought in the case, Scott opened it up saw that Gretsch White Falcon took a huge step backwards and said "Holy fuckin' A!" 

And we all laughed and applauded. 

Then many of us had some more cocktails and didn't sing karaoke so much as shout karaoke.  We had a big group sing along of "Open Arms" by Journey.  Our friend Eileen and I did "Baby Got Back" and "Come on Eileen".  Our friends Alex and Erin won the award for the night with their energitic rendition of "Total Eclipse of the Heart". 

I served Cupprimo cupcakes and shared out the extras with a couple of random people outside when we left. 

Scott and I shared a cab with our friends down the street.  Their kids were at sleep away camp and our kids were next door, spending the night. We left the Highball around 2.  At our house we sat out back and had a cigar, well, not Eileen.  As we puffed we watched Kevin fall asleep in his chair and drop his cigar. 

Finally, about 3, I took off my black suede, peep-toe, wedgies and called it a night!  To those of you who were there, thank you so much for making Scott's birthday so much fun! 

I'm going to put the video of the gift presentation on YOutube and will have the link here shortly.

I rock!!!

Amanda's beauty tip of the day:  No matter how tired you are when you come home from a night out, wash your face!  You don't have to do your whole routine but you must at least rub your face with a wet washcloth.