Dinner Dates

I’m still not exactly sure where this got started, but Mom (and usually Nancy Rowberry) was famous for her crazy dinners. It was a favorite date to bring a group back to my house for dinner where Mom and Co. would dress up in all sorts of crazy get up and serve dinner with some crazy, whacked out theme. For the majority, I was part of the staff. But I played the part of customer here and there, too.

I remember one Halloween doing a spooky theme. I believe there were plastic spiders in the ice cubes, even. The menu was filled with all sorts of gross things that you’d never want to eat. They had three-ish courses with three choices in each. (Perhaps I’m mixing up numbers? This was a long time ago.) Each person would order something, then up in the kitchen we had a decoder. But even better, there was a different decoder for each person. So everyone could have ordered the same thing off the menu and received a different dish.

Another one we brought home Big Juds for the group to eat. But we tied all of their hands to each other. So your right hand was tied to the left hand of the person next to you. Just hope everyone is right-handed, then just ignore your left hand doing the will of the person to your left. To top it off, we had Jud’s sister and her husband (both really skinny) come and entertain as Big Jud siamese twins. They each fit into a leg of a pair of Jud’s pants and put one of his shirts around them. Then they tried to climb up and down the stairs and play the violin. (Cello? I don’t remember.) It was quite entertaining.

There were hillbillies and French artists. I don’t even remember all of them. But I remember never laughing as hard as I did those nights.