Fortess Party 2014 Retrospective, Part 1: The Museums of Michigan, The Womb Room, and The Devil Went Up to Michigan

The Museums of Michigan featured a half dozen of costumed dummies along the walls of a dark room. They were supposed to represent the animatronic mannequins that you might find at one of Michigan's many underfunded museums. When guests pushed a shiny red button, the name of a museum would appear on a computer monitor, spotlights would come on on some combination of the the dummies, and they would start talking. 

Sean Murphy rigged the lightning rig to illuminate the correct characters for each short sketch.  The sound all came from speakers on each side of the room, but we panned the voices so the sound would come from the general area of the appropriate mannequins.

The party got pretty loud, so even if you were there, you may have missed some of the subtleties of these great educational audio clips. Here they are now, in their unadulterated grandeur. 

The Gerald Ford Library and Museum

"Ford's Early Life"

"Gerald Ford at College"

"Great Sayings of Gerald Ford"

"Ford's Unfortunate Death"

The Michigan Shipwreck Museum

"Remember Them All"

"Moose Carcass"

"The Fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald"

"You Don't Believe in Shipwrecks?"

The Henry Ford Museum / Greenfield Village

"American Life As Lived"

"An 80-Acre Time Machine"

"On the Porch with Henry Ford"

"The Wright Brother"

"Thomas Edison Invents the Phonograph"

"Those People"

The Soo Locks Visitor's Center

"Barely Legal Lock Action"

"Barge on Barge Action"

"Recreational Areas"

Fort Mackinac Museum

"The British are Still Here"

"The Mysteries of Mackinacus"

"Anne Boleyn Upsets Henry VIII"

The Quincy Mine Museum

"The Five Senses of Copper Mining"

The Womb Room was one of the least labor-intensive rooms to build, but by far the most relaxing. It was a small room made of red and pink sheets, with a giant red beanbag chair (not shown) in it, to represent the placenta.

Near the room of the room, there were two Fallopian tubes moving off to the sides. If you looked into these tubes, you would see a repository of eggs (ball-pit balls) suspended in the distance. The soundtrack of this room consisted of a loud heartbeat and constant splashing sounds. I thought about uploading that here, too, but it's a 20 minute recording, and nothing actually happens. 

The Devil Went Up to Michigan was based on the Charlie Daniels song, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."

But in this case, the fiddler who bets his soul was not Johnny, the hero of the song...  

But Ann Arbor's own Violin Monster. I actually reached out the real Violin Monster to see if I could hire him to play that night, but he had already left Ann Arbor for the winter to busk in warmer climes. (The next year, I saw him in New Orleans in February. True story!) Anyway, we built this lookalike.

I am including this second picture with the flash on to showcase the infamous prize of the contest, the Fiddle of Gold, which hovered and spun about a miniature spotlight. Beneath it was a bottle of Arbor Brewing Company's Violin Monster beer, which we bought for the occasion as an Easter egg for careful Fortress explorers.

The other difference from the song is that the Devil is not actually a fiddler, but a drummer. He and the Violin Monster took turns playing all night. For the Devil, we used recordings of heavy metal drum solos. For the fiddle, we used actual recordings of the Violin Monster that I found on YouTube. 

Fortress Party 2013 Retrsopective, Part 5: Finnegan's Wake

Welcome to Finnegan's Wake, the most Guinness-soaked open-casket funeral this side of County Tipperary.

We borrowed this aluminum coffin from a friend of a friend. It had never been used (we think), but the owners kept it outside for years, so we had to clean it pretty aggressively to bring it into the house. Even though that was several weeks before Fortress Party, the overwhelming smell of Lysol was still pervasive on the night of the party. 

The dearly departed Tim Finnegan was buried with his Tulamore Dew and two bars of Irish Spring, just as he would have wanted.

The band was called Dublin Audio Force, an homage to Greg's real band at the time, Detroit Audio Force. 

The setlist was all Irish drinking songs, and the lyrics were projected on this monitor so guests could sing along. The songs all came from a cassette that someone had given me as a birthday present in high school. The singer's Irish brogue was so thick that we couldn't understand half the lyrics. Rather than look them up, we transliterated them then best we could, which led to lines like, "The parish church did clone me" and, "I wish I was in some gnome, some garden." 

Fortress Party 2013 Retrospective, Part 4: Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones was Fortress Party 2013's "After Nine" room. Because kids shouldn't be exposed to potty humor. 

The Iron Throne itself. This may or may not have been Lauren's grandmother's silverware.

Every house is Westeros had a throne and a sigil with their noble house words. 

PLOP-IT was an interactive game like Hasbro's BOP-IT, but played with a toilet. 

When you started the game, it would play the Game of Thrones music, and bark commands at you like "Flush It," "Plop It," "Plunge It," and "Lift It," at progressively faster speeds.  

Appendix: House Words

Baratheon - The King's Load

Stark - Take the Brown

Tully - Family Dookie Honor

Lannister - A Lannister Always Pees His Debts

Greyjoy - We Do Not Soil

Targaryen - It Burns

Fortress Party 2013 Retrospective, part 3: 1-Up, Cirque du Soleil, and Fratlantis

This room was called 1-Up. I had wanted to do s Super Mario room for years, but never thought we could pull it off. Then Skippy showed up and did all the heavy lifting. He built and painted the giant wooden bricks and the green pipes.

...and the foam piranha plants. 

Cirque du Soleil was full of fluorescent lights, sparkly costumes that don't quite make sense, and exotic aerialists. This particular Cirque show was called, "Imbecilique." This blue head made its fourth fortress appearance, this time as the smartly-dressed ticket booth agent. 

We had majestic experimental music playing. There was a topless guy with a diablo, a woman on a trapeze.

And this guy. I'm not really sure what purpose he served. 

A frat house in Atlantis? That's Fratlantis, of course. The pun was the best part of the room. 

The second best part was the giant floating remote-control clownfish. 

And frat houses have jocks, and jocks need jock straps. (These were also making their fourth Fortress Party appearance, I believe...)   

There was a foosball table in Fratlantis.

But it was full of sand and seashells.

Fortress Party 2013 Retrospective, Part 2: The Legend of Sleepy Challah

 

The Legend of Sleepy Challah featured the the Bar Mitzvah of the Headless Horseman (or rather... Hirschman.)  

As he read from the Torah from atop his trusty steed, sword in hand. the Headless Horseboy became a Headless Horseman. 

The father of the Bar Mitzvah boy is presumably beaming with pride, though it is hard to tell. Because he is also headless. 

We bought a case of custom-printed pumpkin-orange yarmulkes, which the first fifty guests got to wear throughout the night. Knowing this will make future Fortress Party 2013 pictures make more sense. 

Of course, there was a collage of the Bar Mitzvah boy, looking dapper with his fresh gourd head. 

And what is Bar Mitzvah without a party, and what's a Bar Mitzvah party without a light-up dance floor? This amazing piece of tech was hand-made by Sean Murphy, and has reappeared in one form or another (although usually this form) in every subsequent Fortress Party. 

DJ Louis Dang pumped up the Bar Mitzvah partygoers all night long. Every now and then, the DJ would call a "Champagne Snowball."

Fortress Party 2013 Retrospective, Part 1: Ellis Island

By 2013, the Fortress Party StEering Committee (FOPSEC) was in full swing. We had at team of builders, programers, designers, creatives and grunts trying to inject at least a little wow-factor into every room. 

This little guy had a fan blowing underneath him, so the arms waved around to welcome everyone to Fortress Party 2013. 

The first stop was Ellis Island. Having completed a treacherous transoceanic voyage, guests walked up a gangplank to their new home in the U.S.A. 

As they disembarked, the first thing they saw was grand visage of Lady Liberty Mutual herself. (Again, we respectfully added a black rectangle to protect the identity of the model.) 

The statue's slogan had been updated somewhat to reflect our capitalist values. Read it out loud for full effect.

 

This immigration officer awaited them as they first set for onto American soil. 

Guests would enter their name into the registry. The name their parents gave them, their Old-World name that no one in America could pronounce. The computer would print out a name badge with a new Americanized surname, that was uniformly that immigrant's corporate sponsor. In the old world, you. may have been Daniel Klein, but in America, you would be known as Daniel T-Mobile or Daniel I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.