Party, Party!!

A week ago Sunday, we had about 50 people over to our apartment for a very memorable music party. We have so many good friends who are phenomenal musicians that we decided we just had to get everyone together, with their instruments, for an afternoon and evening of musical performances and plain old jamming. For an additional element of interest, we encouraged everyone to come dressed as a pop star or rock star. (Actually, a few of our friends actually were pop/rock stars just a few years ago, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch for them.) As you can see from the photo below, many came wearing a costume, and some were barely recognizable to us.

Yes, that’s me in the front row dressed as Jimi Hendrix. It seemed like a natural choice, given my mane of thick, curly black hair. And that’s Doris the flower child next to me.

Poom and I performed a couple of songs together, though the tunes definitely were much tamer than the ones Jimi used to play.

One of our friends, Ton, brought his complete drum set along and accompanied many of the musicians. The drums also enticed a lot of others to try out their own drumming skills.

Doris and our very talented friend Fern played some classical music for us.

Some of our friends helped Doris with food preparation, and we arranged for the rest to be catered in.

And virtually everyone took a shot at performing karaoke, using a new system I recently purchased in the Philippines (with much appreciated help from friends). I’m inserting below several pictures of people enthusiastically belting out tunes while the words appeared on our TV screen.

We provided supervision in a separate room for the children, and here are some of the kids, a few of whom took great delight in trying to look like pop stars, too.

I have to say that the talent displayed by our guests was truly astounding. I’ve sat through quite a few talent shows and “open mic” nights when the audience collectively stares at its shoes during performances by determined but musically challenged amateurs. In contrast, we happily would have paid good money to hear the songs that our friends performed. Here are a few more photos of our friends playing and singing and enjoying music.

Finally, I'm inserting photos of some of the very best rock-star looks, though many others deserve to be featured here, too.