When I was on my Mediterranean Dreams contract summer before last, I remember looking at the smattering of well-intentioned decorations that made up the Venetian Ball every other week, and thinking to myself – though I dared not voice the thought aloud with the wrong people in earshot, that…this was not a Ball.
It was a lovely party, but it wasn’t a Ball.
Standing in the midst of the showroom turned ballroom this afternoon after we finished decorating, taking in the silver shimmers of the massive clusters of balloons and the great lengths of black and silver lame hanging in carefully arranged swathes from the towering ceiling…all highlighted with exactly the right lighting…
Standing there, with a glass of white zin in one hand, I thought;
Now this…this is what a ball looks like
That said, none of us were quite prepared for the ball to be so busy. Busy enough that we couldn’t even make our way inside for the first 45 minutes – this was mostly due to the grand prize raffle that was being held (when you’re raffling off a prize worth well over $1000, you can’t blame people for showing up in droves!) by the time the crowds finally filtered out and we could abandon the greeting line to go in and socialize, there were only a few songs left – but it’s much better to see a “sold out” even than a rejected one after all! And, as always, the important thing is that everyone had a good time.
Once the band played their last chart and the music changed to the ridiculously upbeat BGM, the CD switched his mic back on and gives the order for the entertainment team to commence “Operation tear everything down and throw it away”…which is when we start clambering on chairs and pulling down streamers and glimmer walls, and grabbing balloons off of tables and attacking them with scissors (we may or may not use the deflating of balloons as a means of relieving aggression, I make no comment either way…)
As has almost always been the case with these things, the afterparty was more lively than the ball itself (Grand Balls, by nature are just…meant to be elegant affairs, After Parties? Rather the opposite), but having forgotten to pack my proper dance shoes this season my feet were screaming to get out of the Cinderella slippers a little sooner than usual…