Dirty, Nasty Swashbucklers Like You've Never Imagined

So here’s how it started – a couple of years ago, my girlfriend Sarah and I were watching the music video for R. Kelly’s “Step in the Name of Love.” Besides featuring the amazing crooning of R. at his finest, this video dazzled us with its depiction of a night time yacht cruise in the lake by Chicago. “Hey,” I told her, “we should throw our own boat party where everyone has to dress in white like that. We could play Step in the Name of Love at the party, and it would totally feel like we were living in the video!” Sarah, of course, immediately agreed, and so was born the White Boat Party.



This year, in the middle of “winter,” Sarah and I were talking about how great that party was, and how we’d really like to repeat it with something similar, but not the exact same sort of outfits. But what should we do? An All Black party? A rainbow party? Then I remembered a promotion I’d wanted to do back when the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie was coming out – a Pirate Party! We’d have everyone on the boat dressed as a pirate, and in the middle of the party another pirate ship would attack and make our captain walk the plank! But an idea this good needed to be shared with more people than we had in our immediate group of friends, and since I initially wanted to do it as part of a movie promotion, it made sense to make it an official Alamo event, too. I talked to Tim about it, and he agreed that we can totally have genre parties and events where we throw a party with the same enthusiasm and passion we have for movies, even if we don’t actually show a movie at the party at all. After all, if we’re all dressed as pirates and defending our ship and looking for treasure, isn’t it like living in a movie? We were going to find out.

And you guys, let me just say – wow. This party was a massive success. From the first moments of serenely cruising out into the open seas while I blared the theme song from The Curse of the Black Pearl down to the sweaty dance party that led to embarrassing make out sessions and a few people vomiting off the top of the boat and inadvertently hitting people on the lower deck, the first Alamo Pirate Party was a raging success and definitely one for the history books. Check it out:


Sarah and I doing our best pirate faces at the beginning of the trip. I learned very quickly that I am horrible at making pirate faces.


The Dread Pirate Roberts showed up to let everyone know that this was his ship, and he would most likely kill us tomorrow.


When we got to Treasure Island and I told people that there were gold doubloons they could collect for prizes, the Dread Pirate Roberts was unsurprisingly the first one to climb the cliffs of insanity.


These guys didn’t have a lot of luck finding gold on the island, but they made up for it by showing us how to actually make pirate faces. Show offs.


With the gold collected, we headed back out to open waters. Little did I know that a mutiny had been planned…


Tim League showed up looking especially rogue-ish, and he told the crowd that he’d had enough of my smooth sailing music and was ready to bring Car Stereo (Wars) to the sound booth. And so to punish me for not being awesome enough, he made me walk the plank:




The water was freezing, but it was worth it, because the dance party that went on for the next three hours was totally amazing, and Car Stereo (Wars) delivered, as always.














After the boat party, a bunch of us met up again on Sixth Street to invade Treasure Island. That may not have been the best idea in the world…

And so there you have it – the very first Alamo Pirates Party. If you were fortunate enough to be on our ship last weekend and have other photos or videos, please tell us about ‘em and leave some links or embeds in the comments of this blog! We’d totally love to relive the party all over again from your perspective, too.

Up next in our new series of random parties that have nothing to do with anything except the fact that we really want to throw them is the first Alamo Crawfish Boil, currently being planned for late May. I’ll let you know more about that situation as we figure it out.

Yaarrrr!