2005

Best Picture: million dollar baby

Hooray! With nary a look back at Microsoft Word I finally obtain and learn how to use Photoshop (along with the drawing program software Illustrator), which opens up a whole new avenue for dementia on the invites. With my exciting new box of crayons in hand I start a (sadly short-lived) tradition of creating a (hopefully) interesting and/or amusing design for each of the Best Picture nominees, and get to be a little more creative with the other enclosures in the invitation. Even after everything was designed and ready to go it would take days to print all of the pages out on our dinky little printer, and cost a small fortune in ink and paper to boot, but I had a blast doing it.

The front-runner (and eventual winner) for Best Picture was "Million Dollar Baby", and in order to determine the winners for our prizes we had our guests square off in the ring in games of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. Most of the face-offs came to a sputtering end in the matter of about one second, but I seem to remember Steve Holstad engaging in a particularly long, drawn-out and vicious battle in which he just beat the hell out of his opponent. Way to go, tiger!

We also featured "The Wines of 'Sideways'" for our guests' imbibing pleasure. I never did track down a bottle of Paul Giammati's treasured '61 Château Cheval Blanc, but I did manage to find quite a few of the wines featured in the film. And, yeah, I helped put away my fair share during the course of the evening, but at least I never got to the point of embarrassing myself the way that Chase would at the following year's party...