torley manor

Last night was the fifth annual Torley Mixtape Exchange Party (note: the first one was actual not at Torley, but at Emma and Andy’s old apartment on Taylor Street and I had nothing to do with the planning of that one. Regardless, it was the seed to what would become the tradition the following year at Torley). Much delicious food and drink was consumed, much great conversation was had, 19 mix tape/cd’s were exchanged, and only one thing was broken. A fine night indeed.

We tried a new system for the exchange this year. I made a easel-like display unit for all the mixes to be displayed on and each mixer was asked to write their name, the title of their mix and any pertinent info on a small coin envelope. These envelopes then let everyone (mixers and non-mixers alike) vote on their favorite and to leave comments for people on their mixes. I perhaps made it needlessly complicated by making orange scraps of paper for ballots and green for just regular comments, so in the end, we just counted all slips of paper in a person’s envelope towards their ballot count. Most people didn’t seem to have a problem with it, but Eric The Red had to complain that it was too complicated. He just had to. Ha!

A sample of one of the envelopes


Of course both Emma and I meant to take photos of all of the mixes, but both of us forgot. Mike Siciliano’s “20 minutes of workout/20 minutes of chillout” mixtape won the people’s choice award (actually both emma and i got more votes, but we disqualified ourselves as people are always just nicer to the hosts). The prize was a beautiful mounted drawing by Joe Deferrari.

Here’s a great panoramic shot by Jo Ma of the folks who hunt out in the torley living room ’til around midnight or so.

As I said there was only one casuality last night – either the Steckman or the Hedgeman broke one of our recycled winebottle glasses that we got for our anniversary (i suspect there was some grabass going on between the two of them that led to the incident, but there was no point in trying to get a straight answer out of either of them). Ed was extremely apologetic. There was an additional casuality this morning when I was cleaning up. I tried to stack too many mugs in the drying rack and my Intel “profits sure taste good” mug toppled off. I found that thing at a thrift store shortly after moving to pittsburgh and just thought it too funny to pass up. Another of my old school mugs moves on to the next level of existence.

Thanks to all who participated. Torley may find ourselves involved in more mixtape related happenings here in the new year, but more info on that will have to wait.