Theme: Vegetable Love

Location: Foosball Palace, San Francisco

Year: 1999

Art: Paul McGhee

Invite backstory:

This was the formal introduction of the main ‘Artichoke Madness’ branding with an artichoke related sub-theme. ‘Vegetable Love’ refers both to my love for the artichoke and to the famous line in Andrew Marvell’s famous poem ‘To his Coy Mistress’, which we included on the website. “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires / And more slow.'‘ As you may have guessed, in 1998 I was single and interested in meeting women.

The design for my Artichoke Lady emerged after realizing a simple image best matched my drawing skill. After hundreds of attempts, this calligraphy-like version with the jaunty, knowing, playful air was the one I liked the best.

Every invitation was unique - we added the ‘v’ and the ‘l’ in vegetable love by hand after the flyers were printed

Party Highlights

This was the first year with Human Foosball - where you strap yourself onto a pole with your teamate and can only run side-to-side like in table foosball (pictures below). It’s really fun and 10 people can learn how to play immediately so a great party game. It took 3 years to talk the Harbor Master into letting us use the little park in front of South Beach Marina for Human Foosball but eventually he succumbed to the charm offensive.

This was also the first time we gave the Kid’s party a theme - Pokemon!. I would call up my sister Mary Grace to find out what my nephew Tecali was into and that would be the theme.

The third innovation on the fourth party was the ‘save the date’ mailer. This was 6 months before the party and I hadn’t come upon my final design yet so you can see one of the earlier iterations (below).