Classics Week 2015 - The Grand Finale Red Hat Party

Sunday 26th, 2015

I almost forgot to tell you about THE Red Hat Party.  The Finale.  The one where everyone gets their Red Hats - except for those of us volunteering who got ours that way.  The party was last night at the Mad Mongoose.  This is a cruisers hang out.  Food, drinks, music and FREE wifi and the owner thankfully is Kewl and leaves the wifi on 24/7 so at 7AM in an given morning and you will find crusiers sitting outside the locked bar getting wifi.....well....maybe more like 9am and certainly not after a Red Hat Party, but you get the idea.  And they serve rum.  Sailors like rum.  Oh yeah and this kewl owner is.....from Missouri, Eldon, on the KC side not the STL side.

Owner Connie on the right with her BFF from Eldon MO

I went with the Royals shirt to represent KC

 Anyway, the finale Red Hat Party started at 18:30 so cruises with serious numbers of Red Hat redemption tickets started showing up at 18:00.  Some final negotions were going on as well - "Please....I just need one more regular ticket to get another hat....for my sick little niece back home."  Yeah right buddy!  The line to get the Red Hat started around 18:20.  In the past, people were only able to redeem 2 Red Hats at a time.  Those with numerous redemptions tickets aka big rum drinkers had to get in line a bunch of times to collect all their hats.  However, this year they were able to get them all at once.  There was a scare that they might run out when some heavy hitters were near the front of the line, but there were enough.  Soon the place was filled with people running about wearing their new Red Hat and new Red t-shirt and new Red bandanna with extra hats dangling from their belt or backpack securely.  It was something to see.  

The line for Red Hats

An extra special bonus for Tom and me was that KC's own Nace Brother modern blues band was there to play. We got to meet them and chat before the show and then a bit after.  Tom and I used to go see them play at Blainey's in KC when we were first dating 24 years ago.  They are super nice guys and happy to be playing in Antigua.  They were also really good.  We had not heard them play in many years.  Mount Gay rum brought them in.  Thank you Mount Gay.  We even got one of their new CD's.  Yay - new music.

The actual Nace brothers

Good stuff