16.2.05

El Pachangon del Jefe

I was typing something up, but in the midst of transcribing, I didn’t save it and now it’s gone to untitled Word document heaven. But it was basically talking about what I was too tired to recap yesterday.

Yesterday, we celebrated our director’s 60th birthday. This was a pretty big deal because this is also the year that the press turns 25, like me! Well, it started in 1979, but you know, it’s got 25 years under its belt.

In the past, we’ve always had a surprise party for NK, our director. The first year I was here, we had a gag gift party. He was given herbal supplements to enhance his virility, dollar store men’s hair dye, an “El Jefe” action figure, and I made him a t-shirt with this horrid character concept we received and used my photo shop skilz to place his head on the peasant farmer meets cholo body. But the best part was the catalog. We took the Fall 2002 Catalog that lists all of our titles and somehow related them to him, i.e. for our book AmeRícan, we called it AmeKanellos. I don’t know if he really liked it, but everyone got a good kick out of it. The following year, we had the run of the mill fajita and cake lunch which turned out to sort of suck because people were complaining about not being asked to be part of the planning the year before and then when asked that year, they didn’t want to participate.

This year, we said, fuck it, whoever wants to help will help and whoever does it can so, so suck their toe all the way to Mexico! We pretended to forget NK’s b-day for two weeks. In the meantime, we made preparations. I was in charge of decorations which Layout Lalis helped me with. During one of our trips to our storage facility, me and my boss found this huge portfolio bag with tons of the old school cover jobs and all these theatrical pics. I scanned some of the pics and Lalis put NK’s face on it. I wrote descriptions for the pics and we titled it “The Rasquache Photo Exhibition.” I’d post them up here, but they’re on Lalis’ Mac and I don’t know if any of them are copyrighted. It was awesome to see him walk in and see the exhibit. He laughed and at the end of the lunch, he took them all off the wall and took them to his office. But the best part of the whole thing was when the trio walked in. My sis and roomie contracted a trio to come and sing to him because of course, he loves music. The first three songs were about Puerto Rico or being Puerto Rican, because you know, he’s a Nuyorican. You should have seen the smile on his face. It was like giving me fresh tamales in the middle of the summer.

I know I’m taking forever to get to the point y estoy cantifleando, but the point of all this is that he deserved this and more. Yeah, sometimes he can be rude and brash, but he’s an extremely busy man. How many men do you know that teach, run a publishing house and influence the actions of a Spanish department? He’s planted so many seeds in his lifetime and I hope he gets to see all of them bloom.

3 comments:

Daily Texican said...

wow. you all went all out. i'm sure he appreciates it. my b-day is May 10th.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, no kidding daily texan. If you can, remember mine. It's July 28th and I'm only one major city west of yours.

Georgina Baeza said...

Only if you guys donate a substantial amount of $ to the press. I'll settle with $20,000, that's enough to cover the cost of one of our Piñata Books.