In 1993 as our parents' 50th wedding anniversary approached, my sister Donna and I decided to throw them a surprise celebration.
Working long distance, I in Philadelphia and she in Dover, PA, we made arrangements for a hall in Wernersville, PA. Well, actually Jane and Allen (our aunt and uncle) found the hall and were helpful in so many ways.
Although we planned for months and had a guest list of over 40, somehow our parents never caught on. They were really surprised, as you can see in the video.
In fact, for years afterward they kept marveling at how we kept it from them.
Reed and Lou recorded a lot of the event on their camcorders, and in 2003 I took their raw videos and edited them into a 15 minute presentation. Which is embedded here.
The video is in two parts, to meet Youtube's 10 minute limit.
In 2003 our parents insisted they didn't want another party, so we took them to New York, New York to see The Producers and the Bernadette Peters version of Gypsy. By then I had my own digital camcorder, but I wasn't very adept at using it. Consequently, although I shot more than Reed and Lou did, I had much less usable footage.
So the resulting video is much shorter.
BTW, one of the fun things about watching these videos together is seeing how much their grandson (and my nephew) Kevin grew in the intervening years.
