Fancy turns Forty

Meet my friend Robyn. She's fancy.
And a fancy friend deserves a fancy birthday.

The Fruit Bowl takes our birthday parties very seriously. Maybe that's why Oblivious Rob called us in to handle this one. After all, Dave called them in to handle mine and LOOK WHAT HAPPENED.

Right away, we knew we had our work cut out for us. Robyn, after all, is the most complicated of the Fruits. While she is kind-hearted and generous, she is also extremely competitive and a very sore loser. She is a vegetarian who never drinks soda, never eats donuts and considers granola bars junk food but her fast food joint of choice is Taco Bell. Her house looks like a 6 page spread in Southern Living without a spec of dirt around and she is a germaphobe but yet she's always to first to volunteer to babysit for anybody and everybody. She is a fashionista who's made only one grave error in fashion judgement since I've known her (which resulted in the greatest practical joke of my career). Her body temperature is so low that she considers a 70 degree day reason enough to wear gloves and a scarf and yet she loves to snow ski. She's a former metal head/beauty queen/child bride. She takes her Fantasy Football league almost as seriously as she takes her Sunday school lesson. And she's fancy. Really fancy.

So what kind of party does one throw for such a complicated creature?

Well, for starters we did for her what we NEVER do for anybody else. We got all dressed up.

We started out with a nice dinner in downtown Nashville at Sole Mio. We chose this place partly because they offered Manicotti on the menu. (While playing a party game a couple of years ago we were listing our favorite comfort food. While the rest of us wrote stuff like Krispy Kreme donuts, fried chicken and Little Debbie snack cakes, she wrote Manicotti. See what I mean? Fancy.)

A tradition at Fruit Bowl parties is, of course, the inevitable song and dance routine. Robyn knew this and it was fun to watch her throughout the evening nervously waiting for us to break into song right there in the resteraunt. We even orchestrated a mass exodus during dinner. All the girls got up one by one and went to the foyer while Robyn was left alone with the guys wondering what was going on. We waited about 5 minutes then marched back to our table single file just to see the look on her face. That's the kind of stuff we like to do to Robyn. Her gullable nature takes a real beating around us most of the time.

The song and dance was coming of course, but not until we met back at CoolShellyT's house for some carrot cake (her fave) and a sweet slideshow put together by Oblivious Rob. Then, it was time for The Fruit Bowl to get into costume and spring into action.

I composed a song called "Robyn's World" to the tune of "Jesse's Girl", one of Robyn's favorite 80's songs. The song reflected on all the different aspects of her personality and each of us was assigned a "Robyn". I called dibs on Red Dress Robyn early on. She's my favorite.

Here are all the Robyns from left to right: Rockin' Robyn (Shelly), Competitive Robyn (Andrea), Red Dress Robyn (Me), Vegetarian Robyn (Angela), Clean Freak Robyn (Trisha), Freezin' Robyn (Tracey), Beauty Queen Robyn (Ashley) and Child Bride Robyn (Nicole).

Here are the Robyn's gettin' our groove on:

After the performance we put together some games we knew she would enjoy (ie. games she COULD NOT LOSE). We called them the "Robyn's World Series". Everybody's favorite was the bow making competition which pitted Robyn against Price & Dave.

I should point out we also had a "All About Robyn" trivia game and "Name that Vegetable" game, both of which she almost lost. Seriously.

The sweetest part of the evening was when we presented her with her present. It was all CoolShellyT's idea. She gathered pictures from all of us including old family pics from Rob and made her the most beautiful photo book. There were pics of all our kids together, every party we'd ever had and every pyramid we'd ever built. We laughed. We cried. We all hinted that we'd all really like one for our next birthday.

In the end I think the party was alot like Robyn. It started out fancy but the later it became, the sillier it got. And when it was over we felt like we'd received more than we'd given.

It really is fun to live in Robyn's World.