Fortress Party Retrospective 2005

Fortress Party 2005 was the last at our old house, but a number of lasting traditions started that year. Most notably was the custom of having live music. This video has some highlights, trimmed from over 60 minutes of footage. 

And of course, there was tradition of having real live babies! This was Scarlett's first Fortress, and Grandma Tweetie came to town to help out. Scarlett stayed awake for the pre-game show, but fell asleep before the party started. 

 

This room was called The Bland Ole Opry, and it was the first time we had live music at Fortress Party. The straw bales gave it a real country music vibe, but the straw got absolutely everywhere. When we sold the house a year later, there were still little pieces of straw in the carpet. 

It was the single biggest Fortress mistake we ever made. Until we did it again in 2008. (500 points if anyone can remember the theme of that room before I publish the FP'08 pictures!) 

This is one of my favorite post-FP cleanup pictures of all time. It wasn't the biggest pile of sheets, but it was big enough to hold up the Wee One! 

With warmest regards,

Zach

Fortress Party Retrospective 2004

I don't think I have any video from 2004, so these excellent stills will have to suffice. 

 

Guests came in through the the garage, which was significant only in that it started a trend of using alternative entrances. I'm not sure what were going for exactly here, but I am excited to see my beloved Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight. That was height of luxury until the day I traded it in for $300. 

Most of the Fortress rooms still didn't have themes at this point. Rather, we named them after words that you could find if you looked up Fortress or Maze at www.thesaurus.com. This was The Muddle. I think that's fake snow on my head from another room. 

The couple in the foreground of the left picture, Tracy and Dan Moses, were good buds who I haven't talked to since about the night this picture was taken. I think Dan was reflecting on the end of our relationship, although he may just have been concentrating on finishing a really big jawbreaker. 

There had been Fortress Party theme rooms before, but Everest Base Camp was the first one that was supposed to be set in a real geographic location. We set up oscillating fans outside of the 'tent,' so the walls were constantly billowing.  

Lauren is about 6 months pregnant in this picture. But as you see, all the empty beer bottles are in front of her. The doctors tell us that is why Scarlett is only 5'3".

This room was called Beowulf's Meade Hall. It was pretty half-assed as a theme, but there is only so much you can do with a small unfinished, basement. 

So let's talk about the object in my hand. When I was about 4, we went backpacking on Isle Royale, and I found this moose tibia. Or perhaps my parents found it, but allowed me to believe that I found it. We called it the Battle Bone, and it was a staple of Fortress Party (and our Seder plate) until I lost it a couple of years ago. It has to be in the house somewhere, and I've done several clean-ups and purges, but it never turns up. How does someone lose a moose tibia?

With warmest regards, 

Zach

Fortress Party Retrospective 2001-2003, part 2

By 2001, I was four years out of college, and my friends were no longer converging on Milwaukee at the end of December. And my parents, of course, were weary of hosting. 

 

Fortress Gladiators did not realize survive the move to Ann Arbor, and that's okay. 

This video contains a shot of the first sign-in sheet with only one signature on it. I can't see who it is, but I think that should count as a position of honor. 

Fortress Party Retrospective 1999-2000, part 2

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for October is named for my teenage screen crush, "Sarah Connor." This is an important milestone for us, because it is the 50th Hard Taco song that starts with S. 

As we march towards December, we continue to have the Fortress Party takeover of the Hard Taco Digest. Since the last newsletter, there have been four new installments. You can catch up here:

• Fortress Party 1997
• Fortress Party 1998-2001, part 1
• Fortress Party 2002
• Fortress Party 2003

And at long last, video footage of early Forts, which may or may not have been faked on a sound stage. 

With warmest regards,

Zach

Fortress Party Retrospective 2003

Room themes: 

The Citadel

Nirvana

The Widow's Walk 

The first sign-in sheet! Estimated attendance: 30. 

This is the Widow's Walk, so named only because it is on the second floor of the house. This is the room that would one day be the nursery. 

This is the first time I remember taping a sign to a wall directing guests to different named Fortress rooms. 

Nirvana had fake snow, real rose petals, a backlit Buddha, and some Krishna Das music playing from speakers behind the curtain.  

                

And tortilla chips in a bowl. This is only remarkable because a few years later, we decided to stop serving snacks unless they were specific to the theme. Food requires tables, and tables take up valuable floor space. Plus, no matter how many snacks we bought,  they were always gone by 10 pm, leaving the unsightly dishes and crumbs everywhere. 

Since we stopped serving food, there have been a lot more guests getting sick from drinking too much, but I think that's a coincidence. 

The Leveques were always early adopters of the latest tech, so the camera she is holding is probably 3 megapixels!

This was the room called the Citadel. The name was chosen entirely because it was loosely a synonym with 'fortress,' rather than because it was actually a theme. Some guests found their first Fortress Party to be a little overwhelming. 

Steve was our first guest who traveled from a different state to attend the party. 

This was a couple weeks after Michigan beat Ohio State. These smiling fans don't realize that would happen only one more time in the next 17 years. 

After two years of temporary tattoos, we upped our custom swag game and had these balloons made. 

I go through thousands of clothespins, and there is no better place to keep them at the ready than the then in a 6 inch radius around the navel.

Fortress Party Retrospective 2002

And then one day, Fortress Party moved to Ann Arbor. We bought a house because of the name of the street it was on... Roon the Ben. 

Home ownership confers many benefits, but foremost is the privilege of hardwiring the house to be fortress-ready. We installed about a dozen screw eyes into the wall a few inches below the ceiling to hold up the line. 

We used drywall anchors so we could put them wherever we wanted. It would be a few years before I learned what a bad idea anchors were. The weight of the Fort loosens them, and they eventually pop out, leaving holes in the wall, and sometimes causing a corner of the Fortress ceiling to collapse. Learn from my mistakes, future Fortress-builders, and always screw your screw eyes directly into studs. 

This Fortress was about 500 square feet, filling the ground floor of the 2-story house. A few leftover temporary tattoos from 2001 made it onto guest bellies.

This couple would eventually get married. Did they meet at Fortress Party? Maybe, but even if they didn't, this event clearly solidified their bond.

Note the little paper sign taped to the wall that says, "Control Room." This was the first time a Fortress room was labelled to represent its theme.

The "Control Room" contained a TV that was hooked up by a 10-foot cable to our Mini-DV camera, which was pointed at the front door of the house. When people came in, we saw them and shouted their names drunkenly. (We were not drunk; we were just shouting drunken-LY. It was part of the theme.) 

The music at FP'02 was... cassettes!

Another future married couple who may or may not have met at Fortress Party.

The London's early board game collection. Pretty sorry, even by 2002 standards.

These two would eventually become BFFs. Is it because of FP '02? A lot of people are saying so.

Ignore the Franzia wine stand for a second, because any party can have that. What's cool about this picture is that this is the first Fortress that included any rooms with uncarpeted floors, and we already knew that was unacceptable. In this case, an afghan was placed on (though not yet taped to) linoleum floor in the kitchen. 

Fortress Party Retrospective 1998-2001, part 1

Fortress Party1998

I have not been able to find any photos from Fortress Party '98, but there is an artifact that has survived, and it is one of my most precious possessions. 

This sign was drawn on six connected sheets of perforated printer paper. It's the earliest documented appearance of the term, "Fortress Party," and it encapsulates the excitement and terror of being only 13 months from the next millennium. The drawing on the sign were supposed to represent our predictions for the year 2000.

From left to right:

• A hand holding a DIVX disc.
• Some kind of malevolent space god cursing a farm in a crystal ball
• A retro rocket ship
• A nuclear explosion at the North Pole
• A laser blaster
• The gravestone for Jim O'Keane (Who I think was Jeff Bercovici's middle school English teacher?)
• An envelope with a 34-cent stamp
• A small (but apparently futuristic) shovel.
• A sinister bug-creature
• A robot with an oscilloscope on its chest
• An alien
• A tower in the clouds with a nearby flying saucer

Fortress Party 1999

I only found one picture. The centerpiece of the evening was Fortress Gladiators, in which hosts and guests would put on costumes and beat each other up. Note that we were in the middle of the Fort, and the ceiling was high enough to stand up. 

Fortress Party 2000

As you can see, things turned out pretty much as we predicted in 1998. (34-cent stamp not shown.) 

The reason this picture is wonderful is that it shows a bottle of custom Fortress Party beer. My dad was going through a home-brewing phase and produced two different custom beers for the event: Fortress Tonic and Fish Piss Fortress Brew. 

I think there were 6 of each beer, and the handful of guests had a chance to sample both. Everyone agreed that both were delicious, but we argued fiercely about which brew was better. 

The next day, my dad confessed to me that while he had, in fact, made several bottles of beer for the occasion, he deemed it too good to waste on Fortress Partygoers. What we had been drinking was Milwaukee's Best that he had relabeled. 

Even with that knowledge, I maintain that Fortress Tonic was better. 

Fortress Party 2001

Lauren and I had moved to Ann Arbor by this point, but we were weren't sure how to introduce this concept to a whole new crowd, so we decided to do one last Fortress Party at my parent's house in Milwaukee.

String lights (or as the gentiles say, "Christmas lights") have become a staple of Fortress Party. They are clothespin-friendly, and provide consistent low levels of light and fire risk. In this picture, you can see them only vaguely through the green sheet and reflected in the TV. 

We had three custom temporary tattoos made. The The first was a two headed horse with the words "Fortress, etc." 

The second temporary tattoo was a smiling factory with the text "FP '01." 

The third one was red, and I can't remember what it said. 

A Ronald Reagan quote book was awarded to the year's Fortress Gladiator champion. 

Turns out, he wasn't a fan. 

And before I forget: Please bury me with this Superfriends sheet.

Fortress Party 98-01 will be back!

I found mini-DV footage from these parties, and we took them to Costco to have them turned into mp4s. When we pick those up in a couple weeks, we'll discover together what other magic and mayhem happened in the peri-millennial Forts.