Theme: Whistle for the Thistle

Location: Foosball Palace + Sky Palace, San Francisco

Year: 2000

Art: Paul McGhee

Invite backstory:

We doubled-down on the ‘Madness’ theme here with the ‘Son of Sam’ font, the traced Artichoke lady lending a blurred out-of-control feel and by using frenzied language like ‘scarf scrum’, which as you will see becomes the theme for Artichoke Madness #6.

We again made each invite unique by manually tracing each invite with a crayon over a sand-paper template. First time since kindergarten and it still works (below)!

Party Highlights

This party was the year I moved into the Spectacular Sky Palace, one block over from the Foosball Palace. Halfway through the party we gathered everyone up, asked them to grab the food, and paraded to the Sky Palace behind a bagpipe player. We also brought the Skybar, which my brother Tim had set up to fit inside the Bay Window in 3 positions - stool position, chair position and, most importantly, sushi position (picture below).

It was a bold party move and a great party - I remember my cousin Jamie was in town being somewhat dazed at the ambition as he carried one end of the Skybar to the Sky palace.

Tim had also made another beautiful wooden Skybar for the porch of new place which became a very popular party spot (below),

This was the year Giant’s stadium opened and it was just 3 blocks away. My neighbor was leading tours at the ballpark and suggested we make it a party event, so we did!

The Kids party was growing every year as my friends started having children and also as they got comfortable with Eli and his wife, our great Kid Party leaders. Eli had been my nephews pre-school teacher and the kids loved him. This year’s theme was 'Dinosaurs.’