Wednesday, March 5, 2014

My Very Famous Brother

My very famous brother turned a very significant age recently, so I want to to commemorate it with a special gift.

It is now part of family lore that my parents were so quick to pick up on his innumerable talents as a youngster that they put up a storage shed in the backyard of our childhood home for him to use as his personal playhouse. I'm talking playhouse...as in he put on plays in our backyard. Everything from Charlie Brown to magic shows to Shakespeare.

You should have seen him at age 8 give Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy, complete with burning candle, where he finished the speech and blew out the candle all in one terrifying "signifying naaah-thing" breath.

From there it was on to Disneyworld and Broadway (Ever seen Cats in NYC? Or Tommy? Then you've probably seen my very famous brother.) and now he's producing star-studded events like this one..


and this one and who could forget this one?



So like I said, I wanted to make him something special.

The first thing I did was to find a special book.


How about the 1964 Book of the Year for the 1964 man of the year?

Next I had to decide on a word, and no word seemed to sum up my very famous brother more than


I wanted to leave room for a little sumpin'-sumpin' on the end papers, so I twisted the word like I did for Twas which gave me extra space in the corners.

One thing that is different about this book than most of the books I fold is the colored pages. Usually I tear out any colored pages so all the pages look uniform, but this book was full of colored pages. See? 

 
If I tore out all those, there wouldn't be enough pages to fold any word. So, instead of trying to hide the colors, I decided to accent them instead. 


That's why I picked a very sparkly black paper to cover the end papers.

Then I added a sentiment in a coordinating aqua. (Hmmm...says the guy on page 49. This is pretty cool!)


...And voila, the finished product.


Here's to many happy returns of the day, very famous brother. Love you!

3 comments:

  1. I remember seeing a special on channel 4 about your brother and how he was involved in many of the productions in the OKC area. I think he was instrumental in the Centennial celebration as well as many Bricktown events. I read where he is in Dallas now. I don't know if you intentionally left out his name, but I think he deserves to be named as well as a face to go along with the name. :-)
    The Dahlem family has been blessed with an abundance of talent.

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  2. Very cool book design and happy birthday to your talented brother!

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  3. Great book! Don't forget, though, you are famous, too...

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