Festive Juice

OK, not feeling quite so out of place at Juice as I was the other night at Minus 11. Actually, I was feeling very at home with Juice having gone all in with the festive theme, complete with faux snow billowing down from ceiling throughout the evening. That's something that I can fully get behind!

On top of that, we were treated to a set of festive remixes by Perrie; someone who takes a lot of pride in being the only DJ to spin at a community event in recent times and not earn my ire for playing a totally inappropriate selection of music. She gets the assignment and delivers something that pairs well with a party's theme. Take note other DJs - be more like Perrie.

Crimbo Party Time

A Christmas Party really should be impossible to get wrong. You literally don't need even the slightest bit of imagination. Just lean on the tired and trusted festive tropes that you will know will serve us all well.

So when I arrived to the sight of 20 dancers strutting their stuff to generic EDM, my heart sang. Really, how hard is it to book some DJs who will actually play something with a Christmas flavour? It's just fucking deja vu from one community party to the next. And I know that I'm not the only one who is sick but here we are having to talk about it for the umpteenth time. 

OK, that's my negativity out of the way. I hope...

On the flip, my calls for a kissing booth with mistletoe were finally listened to so that was a definite plus point. And yes, I did try it out! As soon as I pointed it out to Emmy, she marched me there for some tonsil action. 

It was pretty dreamy but I had to cut our time in the booth short as a queue was starting to develop and I know that we could have easily hogged the place for the whole evening if we weren't being considerate towards others. Instead we found a nice quiet bench to make out on until Jess and Father Christmas showed up for some sexy photo ops.

Of course, it wasn't the really Santa. Just Oliver Cream dressing up as him once again. OK, that can be another plus point for the event for a nice bit of guest engagement. 

And, actually, there was a nice little selection of places to stop and pose for some quick snaps or just hang out. Various little cabins for food and drink, gifts and souvenirs or just to straight up fuck in if you were feeling horny.

Or you could venture up into the hills if you felt obliged to pay a visit to church or just wanted to find some slightly more secluded chalet for, you know, fucking in.

Ok, so now that I've warmed up to it, apart from the shitty music and ridiculously sized dance team as the focal point of the Crimbo arena, it was actually pretty nice. Very festive feeling except for probably the easiest part to get right.

And, what's more, they even had a second chance to play so festive jingles for us to dance to. Obviously, the complaints of the last few events being over-populated and an absolute nightmare had been heard, as they opened up a second arena this time to allow guests to be spread between two locations instead of just one.

It actually did a very good job of combatting the overcrowding problem, although it did make the event feel a little less unifying for the whole community. On balance though, I'd say it was worthwhile doing. It's just a shame that the second location also played the same shitty EDM as the first one we visited. Apart from that though, I'd say that the second location did a better job than the first.

Like I said before, the first impression of the first location was pretty negative but that wasn't the case with the second location. Well, apart from the same shit coming from the speakers. But the dance team situation was much more under control and tasteful at location 2 and it just felt a lot more about guests having a fun time instead of grandstanding from the organisers to make the biggest impression possible, regardless of whether it was a good one or not.

I mean, I got to sit on Santa's lap (and boy was he big!), snuggle up to the Grinch, hang out with a snowman and chillax with a cute penguin.

At the end of the day, whilst both locations looked stunning and there were some thing to do at both places, ultimately the thing that makes these things truly enjoyable and, on this front, this event came up trumps for me.

In Jess, I had my usual event buddy back. She brought Chris with her, who I did my best to entice into some pics with the Jess, Emmy and I but he was having known of it because apparently people only want to see cute girls. I did manage to snap him dancing with Jess but its a shame we couldn't get a nice team photo of all of us together. 

Add Perrie's banter into the mix and that's a fun little pose to party with. And, as a bonus, my elusive husband even showed up and joined us. I was starting to worry that he'd been sucked into a blackhole after note seeing him for months. 

So yeah, it turned into a really fun evening but more so because of the company I had than anything else. And I think I'll leave it there on that positive note.

Halloween Bash

Somewhat mixed emotions about the latest community event. 

On one hand, it feels like the organisers listened to some of the feedback from previous events that were very underwhelming. For example, they avoided the miserable failing of the Valentine's Day event by actually hosting the event in a well themed venue that very much had a Halloween feel to it. Similarly, they made sure that there were plenty of photo opportunities for guests to pose and make some memories for themselves to keep.

On the other hand, the layout of the venue made it almost impossible to find anyone, even if you knew they were in attendance. By going for a long but narrow layout, it really congested everyone into a very tight space. The cynic in me says that was a deliberate ploy to make the crowd as dense as possible in an attempt to make it look as impressive as possible. All it ended up doing was, like I already mentioned, make it super hard to find anyone in the crowd and, when you did eventually spot them from across the room, make it an absolute pain in the butt to actually make your way across to rendezvous with them.

Possibly that comes some way towards explaining why I found the first hour and a half that I was at the event to be a pretty miserable time. Because it literally took that long for a single person to even acknowledge my presence there. Not until Jess finally turned up, did I get so much as a greeting! Despite deliberately choosing to sit away from the dancefloor in a slightly more visible location. 

Or maybe people saw me there but none of them had any interest in talking to me. I mean, who am I kidding? Feeling sorry for myself for being all on my lonesome in a room with over 400 people in, is so totally typical of me. In which case, I'm just unfairly projected my own frustrations on to the event. And things did pick up for me as a few of my favourite girls started to trickle in as the crowd grew to over 500 peeps. But, if we are being brutally truthful, that probably speaks volumes about the current state of the community more than anything.

With all of that being said, let me refocus back to the organisation of the event and there is definitely one area in which previous feedback was completely ignored. And that meant they wildly missed the mark, not for the first time. And that's the music. Once again, we got random, generic dance music for a themed event where it should have been a no-brainer to select spooky and sinister tunes. Based on my conversation with other people, I know that I'm far from alone in thinking that too. It really shouldn't be difficult to get something as fundamental to a party as the music right but they consistently seem to prioritise the names of the selected DJs over what they will actually contribute to the event in terms of settings the atmosphere.

The next event has already been announced for in a month's time and will be the annual anniversary event. No themed music required for that one so I guess I'll be able to skip repeating myself for that one but the Christmas Party will be up after that, and if they cannot get the music right for that one, there is literally no hope that they ever will...

Anyway, thinking beyond my own personal experience, which started out pretty negatively but then improved to being a decent night out, the general response from the community seems to have been pretty positive. Like I said at the out said, the organisers certainly addressed some of the past complaints and I think a lot of the guests recognised and were grateful for that.

I should probably also touch on the main thing that everyone surely associates most closely with Halloween and that's the dressing up. Now, I think I'm a bit old-fashioned in that I feel like Halloween costumes should ideally reflect the spooky them of the day. Monsters, creatures of the night, supernatural beings and any other sort of scary characters are what I instinctively think of. I seem to increasingly be an outlier in that regard though as, these days, it is becoming ever more about just simply dressing up as someone or something.

It would be foolish of me to grumble about that as it obviously massively opens up the various options to pick from. Especially if, like me, you're not great at creating your own costumes so need as many options to pick from as possible. To my credit, I actually managed to come up with 4 or 5 costumes to pick from. 

Of course, I left the final choice to the last minute. Mostly because I was a little torn. One of my outfits was, in my humble opinion, absolutely spot on and a great reproduction of the original. However, it was a little too niche and I didn't want to force people to keep asking me who it was. So I went for probably my most basic but also recognisable option. And, funnily enough, it kind of ticked the box for being scary themed because it was my favourite zombie-killing badass babe; the wonderful Ms Jill Valentine from Resident Evil. 

But you probably already figured that out from the pics above, right? Right....?!

For the record, the other choices I produced were Yumeko Jabami from the anime Kakegurui (which was the one I was actually quite proud of), 2B from the video game Nier: Automata, Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop and, finally, Kim Possible, which was the first idea I had and one that I was quite keen on but the outfit really didn't turn out to be up to the standard that I had hoped for. I did spot one other person that did go as 2B and her effort was almost identical to the one that I prepared, so I'm glad I didn't pick that one. Perhaps next year though...

And, contrary to my prediction at the Juice Halloween Party, this year didn't become the year that everyone goes as Wednesday Adams. Perrie reprised her role as Wednesday from Juice, albeit in a slightly different version of her costume, and they only other one that I actually remember spotting was Emmy. Then comically, we all ended hanging out in a little group together.

To be fair, there probably other Wednesday's there. In fact, I would wager there were. They were simply lost in the crowd that was crammed into a space that was much too small for that many people. Along with all the other great costumes that I undoubtedly didn't get to see. Actually, as I write this, I remember seeing another pair of Wednesday there. Strange how they seemed to keep coming in twos!

But do you know who wasn't dressed up at all? Mr Party Animal himself, Gizmo. Or maybe, in his eyes, not wearing his customary beanie hat is considered dressing up by him. I mean, Lisa's cow outfit (at least I hope that's what it was) wasn't the biggest effort that I've ever seen, there was some token effort there. But zilch, nadda, none...from good old Giz. Disappointing...

Someone please get him an outfit for next year!

Juicy Halloween

A quick break this month's pink programming to acknowledge my first Halloween party of this year's spooky season. It's not the 'big one', so no dressing up for me. You'll have to wait until next week's mega party to see that... assuming I can actually come up with a costume that I can put together in less than a week. I find it hard enough to come up with one idea so 2 in the space of less than a week is totally out of the question.

And I'm actually glad that I didn't dress up for this one because I spent most of my evening at Juice dancing with the gorgeous Reena Rain, who was looking incredible in her Playboy bunny outfit. No way  I can compete with that sort of raw sexiness so better not to try. 

Especially since I have come to the conclusion that she is in fact a goddess who walks amongst us. The crowd on the dancefloor literally parted for her as she strode out in all her glory. Just no point trying to compete with divinity. At least she saved me from propping up the bar all by myself though.

All of that being said, there were plenty of other great costumes on display. None as fucking hot as Reena's but still great in their own way. I, in particular, liked Perrie's Wednesday Adams outfit. I feel like we could be seeing a lot of those this year. As someone suggested to me; Wednesday will be this year's Harley Quinn. I don't doubt that for a second!

Other costumes appeared to literally just be a hat and not else. So not as much kudos for those.