Colin and AJ’s 3rd Annual Christmas Singalong Bash

The 2015 iteration of the party featured another composition with narration by AJ.

The party was hosted on the fourth floor of the Centene Center for the Arts in Grand Center, right across from the Fox Theater. The Broadway musical Wicked was in town at the time, so parking was very difficult for most party guests. The program start was delayed by more than thirty minutes.

This party had a few features unique to itself:

• We ran our own bar program. We gave away free beer from Urban Chestnut and sold two different cocktails—a green one and a red one. They were terrible.

• Colin kicked off the evening with his “State of the Christmas Address” in character as the Mayor. Peter Linck wrote the speech.

This was the first year that introduced any “meta” content into the party and program. The Mayor of Christmas, Choo Choo Jack and Danny, and AJ were all characters within the story that accompanied the music. The on stage set reconstructed the Christmastown from the story as well. Future parties would go on to do this kind of thing time and again.

The party favor was a booklet telling an expanded version of the story in AJ’s narration for the music. We originally wanted it to feature claymation-style images of scenes from the story and bought a bunch of clay to create said pictures. Of course clay moulding is not something either of us knows how to do, and we quickly abandoned the idea for simple line drawings.