Ideas for parties

I had some ideas for parties you could have:

Beach Party Massacre
I’ve actually done this one. Back when I worked at the school paper at university, we were racking our brains to come up with a theme for an upcoming party. I was usually no help at this, considering I usually came up with an excuse to just wear a bathrobe no matter what the actual theme was. But this time, someone suggested, “Beach party.” Everyone said, “Eh.” Then I added, “… massacre.” And everyone said. “Yeah!” It was a hit. “Beach party massacre” is a great theme. Whether you go with a shark attack idea or a serial-killer-on-vacation format, with skimpy beachwear and gory makeup, what’s not to love?

Future Retro
When I was a kid, I loved the TV show Quantum Leap, in which Sam Beckett traveled back in time from the amazing year 1999 to right all kinds of historical wrongs. Now that it’s 2006, my favorite thing about Quantum Leap is to look back at the outlandish shiny suits that his buddy Al used to wear, and say, “Hey, remember that? Remember when we all wore those shiny suits all the time? Boy, I can’t believe that was ever the style! What were we thinking?” (No one ever seems to get this joke. They always seem to take it as though I’m saying, “Hey, remember that show Quantum Leap? That guy had shiny suits!”) The point is, we live in the future, in the incredible 21st century. We’re supposed to have the flying cars and robot maids now. It’s fun to look back on an earlier, simpler time, a time when we were supposed to have just gotten the flying cars and robot maids. (There’s even a term for this celebration of romanticized earlier depictions of the future: retro-futurism.) So throw on your shiniest jumpsuit, throw in a copy of Prince’s “1999”, and throw down on the dance floor.

Night of the Batmen
The idea here is that everyone comes dressed as either Batman or Batgirl. No Robins, no Jokers, no Catwomen, no Huntresses, and certainly no Wonder Women. This defeats the point. This is not a DC Comics party. It is a Batman party. Batman is a solitary, grim, brooding figure. It is not normally a lot of fun to hang around with Batman. Therefore, to see multiple Batmen all happily mingling and generally having a sense of community is a refreshing and ironic change of pace. Besides, the Batman costume is all latex and sexy and fetishistic, so if you can’t have fun with that, you might as well be out poisoning a city reservoir. What actually brought this to mind was that Jay started a thread on his forum a couple of days back called “Throw a Batman Party”, which brought on a sense of déjà vu until I remembered that I actually started this post in February and then set it aside in the draft folder. Now I’m glad I did, because thanks to Jay’s post about a Google ad he’d found, I now know that there are all kinds of Batman-related party favours you can buy. Add a copy of Prince’s Batman soundtrack, do the Batusi, and go from there.