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Normally, Phoenix Swords is hired for one to two birthday parties a year. For whatever reason, today we did our third in 2009 and have another a few weeks from now.
A lot of faires aren’t going on this year, but apparently birthday parties are going better than ever.

Last weekend was a “knightly” birthday party in Rhodes Island. In the 7 years of Phoenix Swords, that’s only the second RI show. While on the far side of the state from us, it is the smallest state in the country, so it didn’t take too long to get there.
We stopped at a McDonalds on the way there for lunch, and I saw something very strange.

Yes, it’s a dog ordering from the drive through.

Now, I don’t know about RI. But, in Massachusetts, dogs are not allowed in the restaurant. So, I guess the drive through is their only option. But, given the driving age is 16 human years, it is still not something I see very often. (How many people wait until they are 112 to learn to drive?)

The party went well, but the birthday boy hadn’t been feeling well, so wasn’t into a big party. Still the kids seemed to have fun.

perrin_o_ravnos’s GPS said there was a Chinese restaurant 4 miles from the party. So, once done, we set off. We found that the GPS measures as the seagull flies and didn’t take into account the salt marsh in the way. But, we got there.

They had Japanese food as well and I got a VERY tasty box meal.

This weekend, we were doing a Jedi birthday party for the son of one of my coworkers and his cub scout friend.

I passed my Vader duties over to Tom for the occasion.

While he did not have the complications of getting into the costume while in a janitor’s closet, he still took some help getting into it.

But, once into it, it looked like it fit well enough.

He did bring his own cloak, that didn’t really seem to be a Vader thing.

Several of us thought it looked like Darth Vader has snuck into the Emperor’s closet and started trying on clothes.

The other Sith were not so sure about this.

But, we warmed up at Hoops before heading off to the job that was only 10 miles from our practice area.

There were some fit issues for Vader.

But, off we went.

For many years we’ve had a large inflatable Darth Vader. 10 years ago when Phantom Menace came out, Burger King restaurants had a promotional thing with these on top of their stores.
One of our Consulting Advisors of our troupe won one of these in a radio contest five years ago. He agreed to loan us to it and if we used it at a Jedi birthday party we’d give him a cut of it.
Five years later, we never had taken it out of the box.
But, Jay wanted it for his son.

There was one hole that needed to be patched, but it inflated without to much trouble. But, it didn’t really inflate as we expected.

Jay was on hand to witness the whole thing, I’m not really sure what he thought of it.

The very small air pump it came with inflated most of it quite quickly.

But, his face and helmet had to be inflated manually.

So, I had to give a giant Darth Vader mouth to mask resuscitation...

The owner of the house who hosted the party loaned us his compressor for the helmet. That was probably just as well.

Then, it was just a mater of getting it into place.

For a Sith Lord, he was pretty grabby.

But, it worked out well.

He did have a bit of trouble with the wind. So, we ended up propping him up on Jay’s car in the direction the wind was going.

The performance went OK. A bunch of young boys are hard to keep focused. We’ve got to work on better ways to do that. The “probe droid” pinata didn’t work well because it was too cold for the tape that holds it together. But, we got through it.

Then, we had to deflate the Vader.
The pump theoretically goes both ways. But, even a little bit of air in it made it much bigger then went it started.
This made it hard to get in my car.

(In case you’re wondering, Tom is trying to squish more air out as it is half in the car...)

The good news was, it was a short drive back with it. So, once there, out of the car and into storage.