Evelien's Dagboek

Party

Saturday evening we had a big party. We were celebrating Julia’s 65th birthday. We had rented community center “De Rondweg”, arranged DJ Silvia, ordered a meal for 61 people and invited our good friend Jos to be the host and ceremony master.

Fortunately we didn’t get the usual boring ‘story of your life’ speech. Jos welcomed all the guests and presented a beautiful book full of photo’s and clipping to Julia. So the ‘story of her life’ is in the book and we can look at that at our leisure at home. He also unveiled a beautiful work of art created by all our guests: Everybody had made a little tile with a personal message to Julia and Jos had assembled all these onto a big tableau.

A few months ago Jos had phoned me to ask for photos he could use for the photo book, but I have no idea where Julia keeps her photos so I asked her. Oops, I shouldn’t have done that of course! From that moment on Jos kept me out of all the preparations because he was afraid I would be an information leak.
Of course Jos also had contact with the guests who wanted to sing a song or do an act at the party and he had contact with all the guests about the tiles they had to make, but he didn’t contact me at all. That was a pity, because I felt I should do something at the party myself too. So I secretly prepared my own performance. I am not good at lying and cheating, so it is a miracle Julia hasn’t noticed anything. I had been practicing my song for a few days. It is a song to the tune of “Hello Mary Lou”:
[See abridged translation below the Dutch text]

Hallo Julia
Lieve Schat
Mijn Julia wordt 65 jaar

Ja hallo Julia
Lieve Schat

[Abridged translation:
I was in the gutter
Julia rescued me
For a while we were OK
But then my real self came to the surface.
Whatever I do,
Julia stands by me
That's why I love her so much]

Many people were touched… Including Julia of course. She wasn’t expecting me to make any contribution, let alone sing. I can’t even sing! But oddly enough she said I was even singing in key. My voice did tremble a little, because this was a scary thing to do and because I was touched by the song myself too…

It was a great party. All good friends and relatives of Julia and myself. There were more people who sang a song and there was delicious food.

After dinner Linda sang a beautiful song to the tune of a well-known Dutch song with a sing-along refrain. The text was written by our friend Mieke. Unfortunately it is untranslatable…

At a party like this you get to meet many people you don’t see very often, so there was a lot of attention for my female appearance. Of course I was again wearing one of these outfits from the department store, completed with pumps with hiiiigh heels. I got a lot of compliments.

In this final picture you can see Julia as a happy grandmother amidst her grandchildren. Linda was hired to take care of the little ones, but she turned out to be a good singer as well (see above).

We want to thank everyone who has helped to make this a great party, that is Jos and Maarten and Mieke and Linda and Silvia and Merel and the volunteers from the community center and the cook and his assistant and the people from Mutua Amicitia and all guests and, and…

Related posts:

1. Party
2. The Dutch T-Party
3. Party Drug
4. New year’s party
5. Missed a party