Theme: Pan to Fire

Location: The Rainforest Retreat, Seattle

Year: 2022

Art: Paul McGhee

Invite Backstory:

The out of the pan and into the fire refers to getting out of the pandemic and into the post-pandemic. The fracturing collage artichoke lady reflects some post-pandemic madness and the negative space in between the pieces turned out to be an unexpectedly cool effect.

Party Highlights

The big addition this year was live music by the Porch Pals. The Porch Pals started up during Covid and played on a porch in Kirkland every Friday for over a year. We started with 4 players - keyboards, a singer, a bongo player and me on trumpet. A professional guitar-playing neighbor heard us and showed up to play and then brought in a bass player and drummer so we are now 7-strong.

We play lots of folk pop - Beatles, James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkle, Van Morrison, Neil Diamond, Bacharach and Sinatra. We also play songs with famous trumpet parts like ‘What a Wonderful World’, ‘La Vien en Rose’ and ‘But Not for Me’ as well as our singers speciality - Latin tunes - like ‘Besame Mucho’, ‘Girl from Ipanema’ and ‘Amado Mio’,

Some of the people who heard us play during Covid started hiring us for their parties so we’ve been playing ever since. The band is great - you’ll love it!

The traveler dinner started to really hum this year - two of my sisters came, my nephew and his partner, my cousin and her partner, two high school friends and their partners, a college roomate and his partner and a swim buddy all made the trek..

Locally 50 neighbors came, including Heidi and Scott who sent an epic follow-up note characterizing the party as Amazing, Resplendent, Tantalizing, Inventive, Cerebral (thinking maybe not a lot of C options?), Happy, OfftheHook, Killer and Exciting (below).