Beatnik boys

Our friend M celebrated her 25th birthday with a Beatnik party. I joined in the fun with Mr hazelh and gbees.

Everyone dressed up beforehand. I wore a vintage 1960s black velvet mini-dress with chiffon sleeves (unearthed from the bottom of the dressing up box at my parents' house) with long black patent leather boots. Mr hazelh and Jaffa the dog arrived at the party in almost identical outfits, as you can see from my blip.

As well as the usual eating/drinking/chat/music/birthday cake that one would expect at such a celebration, we also had a go at "composing" Beatnik poetry. Our efforts first involved listing nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs on scraps of paper. Then we passed a volume of Allen Ginsburg's work around the table and each person took a turn replacing random words in Ginsberg's lines with the group's vocabulary suggestions. Some of these "improvements" were hysterical. My favourite involved an octopus (rather than a car) crawling along a deserted road.

To can get a sense of the atmosphere of the party, take a look at gbee's blip of us gathered around the table.

Exercise today: morning loops in 28'30", sit-ups and weights; walked to work and back (2 hours); walked to the party and back (40 minutes).