Selfie Does a Back to the Future Bridal Shower
In case you couldn’t tell, one thing that brings just general joy to ol’ Self’s life is a well-themed event so when it was time to plan a bridal shower for a beloved friend, I knew we had to do it big. I quickly brought in the pros - and by that I mean I enlisted my friend Sarah of @dayofdarling for her party/planning prowess.
A brief pause to brag on this woman. In addition to being an amazing attorney doing really important work that’s led to her being featured in InStyle, NPR and numerous other publications, she also does day-of coordination for weddings. Why? Because she loves it which is both crazy sauce and amazing which makes the fairly detailed theme of this bridal shower probably make more sense.
The Theme
The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance is maybe not what people would go with when planning a bridal shower but our (Marty Mc)bride LOVES Back to Future so we put out heads together to come up with a theme that would work for a lingerie shower and ended up with the rather lady-like 50s school dance.
The Decor
Decor is something that really falls under Sarah’s auspices and uh...we really went for it. In fairness, we both already own a weird amount of Under-the-Sea decorations.* To get that school gymnasium-vibe we needed, we ensured the decorations separated the living room from the rest of the house. We put up tons of classic school decorations - crepe paper and tinsel. The real stroke of genius came from Sarah when she indicated she had her heart set on balloons and man...it really did the trick especially when we pulled up the rug.
Sarah also handmade the epic dance poster which perfectly captured the movie prop and made banners, as well. We had a few issues with hanging things because...the Selfies live in the “venue” so hanging things requires the best non-damaging hangers we could find. This meant that things that were super heavy -namely the mirror balls - had to be used elsewhere. Sarah also brought in finishing touches like sea-plant-type floral arrangements and seashells. Oh, and Obvs, we had to have a Sea-Throne for gift opening. You know, normal standard stuff.
The Food
The food was a more last-minute brainwave. Sarah had the idea to do diner food and were trying to figure out how to loop that in. But the second I realized we had a small enough group to individually plate, having the party “catered by the Hill Valley High School Cafeteria” made perfect sense. Lunch consisted of your classic school lunch of hamburgers, tater tots and jello. The burgers were elevated by becoming Brie-and-Jam burgers on grilled GF buns. For our one friend who is vegetarian I made a burger out of a marinated portobello mushroom.
The tater tots got adulted** by becoming loaded tater top skewers and the jello? Boozy, gold, champagne jello, of course.***
To round out the 50s food style we also had deviled egg^ and very boozy mimosa punch. All of these were served on a cute, on-color-theme trays we procured from the toddler section of Target.^^
The Extra Touches
Beyonce knows Selfie and Sarah like to keep it extra but it’s normally the little added touches that make the most impact. Sarah created a B2TF drinking trivia game where we all had banners with out initials on them which we raised to give our answer. (You had to drink if you failed to answer or drink twice if you have a wrong answer). She also made sure to have the perfect playlist and duh, a copy of Back to the Future which we watched while the afternoon slipped into the evening.
We, of course, had to have a photo booth because...Selfie don’t throw themed parties without one. Sarah brought the awesome metallic backdrop and we added pops of blue to finish out our theme. The name of this area of the room? The Shell-fie station.
All in all it was an epic afternoon celebrating our amazing bride and basking in our longtime friendships. The bride and two of our friends drove in from out of town and we just relished the time spent together which has become more of a rarity in our working lives. While we worked hard to make the party look great, at the end of the day, hosting a party is all about spending time celebrating your loved ones and their big life events - that’s exactly what we did.
How about you? How do you go about tackling big parties like wedding or baby showers?