News and photos

Issue No 26:
15 August 2004

Welcome to our twenty-sixth PartyChitChat. Just to let you know our news first:

• There was a wonderful response to our questions in the last newsletter regarding our name change and the idea of selling our kits on CDs. Thank you so much for your valuable input!
• Because the majority of the people who responded preferred the new name, we went ahead and changed the name of our business on 1 July from "Tailor Made Mysteries" to "Merri Mysteries".
• Most clients also thought we should put our kits on CDs so we are busy researching how to do this effectively. It may take us a few months to organize this and find a distributor.

• We have created some new small standard 3 act versions of Celebrity Celebrations for 8 to 16 guests
• We have rewritten Trouble On Board and Fame, Money and Murder to be "good clean fun" kits, rather than "spicy" kits.

• Our photo competition winners
• Special decorator's prize

Our photo competition winners

We received some very creative photos for this competition. Thank you to everyone who entered. The three winners are:

• Jared Eller (USA) for a photo from his Mystery In The Library party
• Mike and Jo Long (USA) for a photo from their Poetic Justice party
• Willy Wijns (Belgium) for a group photo from his Poetic Justice party.

We are commencing a new competition with a closing date of 1 October 2004 (see photos.htm for details).

Mike and Jo sent in this feedback about their party:

We do a yearly mystery party and this year we used your "Poetic Justice." It was a hit.

Mike and Jo Long"

Here is Jared's photo from his "Mystery In The Library" party:

Special decorator's prize

We have decided to give Becky a special prize for filling her classroom with bats for her Celebrity Celebrations party.

We received this feedback from Becky about her party:

We had over 90 guests with teachers performing the roles of the suspects and gifted students taking the other roles. It is a shot of all of our teacher "suspects" against the bat line decorations that were hung in the entryway to our commons area. We found the bat pattern on the Internet and students created the decorations for the commons area.

Our local newspaper covered the event with some very nice pictures on the front page.

We had a great time and are looking forward to doing Storm Survivors next November at school.

It was THE most requested activity in a survey of incoming 8th grade gifted students for the next school year!

Becky Haun
Teacher of the Gifted

Here is Mike and Jo's photo from their "Poetic Justice" party:

Here is Willy's group photo from his "Poetic Justice" party: