Reading Rampage: A Bookish Ball (Part II)

For the Flippers who attended this year’s Christmas party, aptly entitled ‘Reading Rampage: A Bookish Ball,’ this fabulous caricature by my ‘seezter’ Flipper Ajie Taduran says it all, but I want to show all of you just how crazy the night was, and how much fun we all had — so here’s the start of the recap of the night’s events.

The organizing committee agreed to meet in the afternoon at Powerbooks Greenbelt, so we could get the party area ready.

our head organizer Sana Sta. Ana and FFP founder Gege Sugue

With help from the Powerbooks store staff (yay!), we were able to get the place set up in a jiffy, leaving us plenty of time to get into our costumes.

I was dreading getting dressed in the public restroom and walking out in full costume to get back to the store, but lucky I ran into Flippers Joko and Shani also changing in the restroom, and because they were so much more conspicuous than I was, I was practically unnoticed :D.

So I’m finally going to show you my costume. If you haven’t seen my Facebook photos by now, or you saw my peg but don’t recognize the character, I went as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones.

I found a pair of moss-green linen pants and a beige linen shirt, so I topped it off with a gray vest and a looped belt, and at the last minute (around lunchtime, that day) I raided a fabric shop for some gray cloth, then dyed a spare bit of white fur I had left over from Halloween (from my Princess Mononoke costume) for the ruff, and stitched it together in a jiffy. I also made a sword (floppy, I know, I couldn’t find a proper Needle at the toy stores) and a sheath. I tied my hair in a braided bun and added extension braids. And, as luck would have it, junior Flipper Patrick did not have a costume yet so I was able to enlist him as my direwolf (hehe I did not have the heart to tell him Nymeria’s a girl!).

Before the party actually started, look who dropped by!

It’s Ambeth Ocampo himself, straight from his lecture downstairs at the Ayala Museum.
We’re having a discussion of his books in January (we’ve had to postpone it because of all the crazy party prep),
when he can hopefully join us also.

And another surprise — we didn’t know until after the party that our judge for the costume competition, the very talented and multi-awarded illustrator and designer Robert Alejandro, was painting pictures of us early birds!

Awesome, aren’t they?

You can probably tell I’m the one on the bottom right, but I will keep you guessing on the rest of the characters… at least until my next post!

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“Reading Rampage: A Bookish Ball,” the Flips Flipping Pages 2011 Christmas party, was co-presented with Powerbooks, and sponsored by Tie Me Up Buttercup: Ribbons and More, Tahanan Books, Scholastic, Anvil Publishing, and Hachette Book Group.

Photos courtesy of resident Flipper shutterbug Rhett de Jesus and Reading Rampage head organizer Sana Sta. Ana