The Birds Is Coming

My topic may not seem grammatically correct, but those of you who are old enough will recall that sentence when it advertised Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. In my case, the birds came to my party and were a delight!

My husband Fred and I were about to reach a milestone anniversary, and his brother Jim and Jim’s wife Sandy were nearing an even bigger milestone anniversary than ours. Last weekend, we held a joint party at The Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City, California. Jim and Sandy live in Hawaii but decided on a party here because it was easier for many family members and guests to attend. We had been thinking of throwing a party, too, so we joined in.

We had a Hawaiian theme. This allowed people to attend in Aloha shirts and colorful Hawaiian prints. The women wore leis, and the men wore kukui nut necklaces. Sandy did the planning, and the party turned out fantastic!

One of the really fun things was the attendance by Christiana, a delightful lady from the West Valley Bird Society, an organization I visited while researching my third Kendra book, Fine-Feathered Death. She brought along a variety of beautiful and personable birds, including a blue and gold macaw, the type featured in FFD. There was also a hyacinth macaw, a white cockatoo, an adorably charming toucan, and a unique-looking black bird whose type I never did learn. Party guests could pose with the birds and have their photos taken. I had great fun with the toucan, who observed me cheekily even as he pulled petals off the pretty lei I had around my neck. The cockatoo perched on Fred’s arm for our picture. I learned later that the hyacinth macaw took great pleasure in pecking at the kukui nuts, and the men who wore the necklaces were soon told to take them off while posing for pictures.

No one seemed to mind waiting in line to get their pictures taken with the birds, especially because the cockatoo entertained by dancing on his perch and spreading the feathers on the comb on his head. The photos were the crowning touch to an evening that I most certainly will remember forever, and the comments I’ve been receiving suggest that our guests will remember it, too.


--Linda