We had ourselves a Roaring 20’s evening of mobsters and murder at my house last night. When two rival crime bosses meet at a speakeasy to talk about bootlegging practices, and bring their heavily armed henchmen, and mingle with an assortment of molls, film stars, singers and reporters…what could go wrong?

After clearing almost all the furniture out of our living room, we set about creating our speakeasy. We turned a couple walls into brick, added some bullet holes, and hung autographed pictures of famous gangsters. We even rented round tables and lit them with table lamps for ambience. I was worried that the lighting would make it hard to take photos, but it all seemed to work out pretty well.

Since I’m a history nerd, I printed out a bunch of newspapers from the 1920s and made a collage over the buffet table. I just did it for fun, but some of them actually came into play when part of the mystery involved figuring out what year certain events occurred.

We had a bit of everything: waitresses who wanted to be singers, singers who wanted to be molls, a pilot who couldn’t find north and a murder victim who drunk-texted his wife from the bathroom (long story). We even ended up with three murders instead of one, which was a pretty cool twist.

A great way to celebrate turning 40!