James Bond Party!! (Fancy Dress Party)

Member Name: TigerTiger

Product:	Fancy Dress Party
Date:	08/11/00 (69508 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Something a little bit different, very memorable, can be highly creative

Disadvantages: Some people don't like dressing up and won't come, can take lot of preparation, can be more expensive

Ok, picture James Bond, Pussy Galore, Jaws and Miss Moneypenny walking round your home! This is the reality that I was faced with last year when we decided to host a James Bond themed party for the Millenium, ok it was a special year, but we are all in agreement that we would do it again as it was one of the most fun entertaining evenings I have ever had.

If you are considering organising any fancy dress party there are a couple of things to take into consideration. Firslty, there are people who don't actually like dressing up, it will put them off coming and if many of your friends are like this you could end up standing there in your costume alone. so, think about your guests and the true viability of having a party like this. Secondly, if you want people to dress up you must give them some time to do this, thus invitations I would say should be out at least a month before the night. You have to think about who you want to be and then whether you will hire or make your costume and this is all time consuming!

For my James Bond Party we were aware that we may end up with 100 men in suits as James Bond and lots of ladies ( and even some men - yes I have strange friends) in nice dresses claiming to be Bond Girls! In order to combat this problem we managed to piece together a catalogue of James Bond characters split into goodies and baddies from a James Bond book we bought. We then sent a copy with each invitation to try and encourage guests to be creative. Suprise suprise, this was a good idea and although we did get a lot of bond wannabees yet we also had some other characters which made it fun in that you really had to guess who people were. There are some people that I still remained puzzled as to who they thought they were!

The Bond theme gave us many ideas of things to do. For instance, we had a red carpet leading up the stairs to our house to emphasize the glamour of the night. On guests arrival they were offered Martini (shaken
not stirred of course). We had a punch as well (read punch opinion for details) but we could not resist the ultimate in Bond drink! The food was also kept to nice glamourous canapes to continue the theme.

There has been a lot of great bond music and this was played through out the night. For an hour we even ran "Bond Kareoke" with all the big bond hits like "Diamonds are forever", "Goldfinger" etc etc which was a suprisingly big hit as people found the opportunity to get into their characters. A great photo opportunity.

We tried to theme the rooms as best we could, we had all the food and drinks in the kitchen, a casino in the dining room (this was very popular even if not for "real" money)and the lounge was kept as a seating area.

The hightlight of the evening was midnight as shortly before an announcement was made that a warning had been recieved that there was a bomb in the house and everyone should evacuate into the Garden. Once outside and on 12.00 we had fireworks.

The party was so well recieved and we have had people asking us what we are doing this year and when the next one is. The main advice I have to give for anyone is that yes this is an excellent option, any fancy dress can be good fun, however it is not the easy option by any means and we spent months planning it and a lot of money as well. This was a special occasion though and I think if we were to host a fancy dress party again we would try and make it less costly. There are so many themes to choose from,more general themes like space (space men, aliens), sea(fish, mermaids, fishermen, octopus) or more specific themes like The simpsons or Disney. There really are no end to the opportunities!

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