I saw yesterday’s Today Show, where the crew surprised Savanna by blindfolding her and taking her to the middle of Madison Square Garden to be unveiled to see André Bocelli and his daughter sing Hallelujah. This totally reminded me of a similar stunt we pulled off for our mother’s 70th birthday.
At the time I was singing with large choral groups including the Michigan Choral Union. The association put me on a first name basis with the manager of Hill Auditorium; the 1911 amazing venue on the campus of the University of Michigan. Thus, I was able to “book” the auditorium for a surprise concert to take place December 3rd. (Note that her birthday is December 1st, but this just made the plan harder for her to detect). As I recall, the cost for the “booking” was roughly $40 of Godiva chocolates.
The event was planned to be a surprise so we had to work on the invitations and instructions very carefully. Special “tickets” were produced complete with the minute-to-minute military timing printed on them and then die-cut to allow for the image of balloons to float above the main rectangle of the stub. No one posed more of a secrecy challenge than my older brother Kenneth.
Ken, though a peaceful and lovely person, suffered from schizophrenia and keeping him quiet about the plan required a bit of kindly brow-beating to keep the secret. We told him we would arrange his transportation from Lansing where he lived to Ann Arbor and would have someone meet him at the bus station. He was willing to play along.
For the concert part I hired a professional harp player. The day of the event the harp sat alone on the brightly lit stage with a row of poinsettias. Very lovely, but sort of empty and quiet.
I had another friend who happened to be an official Hill Auditorium volunteer with an Usher’s badge. She was assigned to meet Alice at the big front doors and escort her to her seat.
The day of my dad drove Mom over to Ann Arbor on the pretext of meeting me at Hill after a non-existent “rehearsal”. Dad, though having obtained his driving license at age 28 whereupon he promptly ran over someone’s fence, nonetheless had always been a steady and safe driver. He reported that on route to Ann Arbor he had to speed up to avoid other cars that had multiple friends of Mom that from time to time pulled along side. He took the risk so that Alice would not see nor suspect that something was “up”.
Hill seats 3,500, so our band of Mom’s friends, numbering about 50 (pretty good huh?) were seated in the orchestra section when the usher brought her down the darkened room. The seated group broke into applause to which Mom commented, “Why are they clapping? There is no one on stage.”
We had left one row open to the middle of the group to facilitate seating her in the middle of the group. When she sat down next to Kenneth she asked what he was doing there. He replied innocently, “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”
The harpist came on and gave an hour performance to the delight of all. At the end we all exited the fire doors that led to the mall next to Hill and went across to the Michigan League cafeteria (fortunately mostly empty of other diners) for cake and presents.
The whole project came off perfectly to the minute and was suitably classy for Alice who herself was a very classy person.
