Home GROWN

The Book on Parties

OK, pop quiz: Where can you take 200 people for Mexican food? Where can you order a sculpted birthday cake? Where can you rent a sweet gum tree by the hour?

Veteran event organizer Carol Fraser Hall knows the answers to these and many other off-the-wall questions. Having chaired nearly every fund-raiser in town from the reopening of the Hall of State to the Beaux Arts Ball, Hall, along with Charron Ramsey Denker, spent almost 2,000 hours researching their new book. Entertaining in Dallas-a Guide to Sources and Facilities.

“Dallasites entertain better than people do in most places,” says Hall, “but there are some areas that we don’t compete in. We have an extraordinary number of talented people in presentation- we’re stronger in visuals than in food. But it’s getting better all the time.”

Entertaining in Dallas lists 650 sources for table-top items, invitations, decorations, restaurants with party facilities, balloons, bands, flowers, valet parking, lighting, the works. The book retails for $15.95 and is available at Stanley Korshak, Translations in The TieCoon and most area bookstores.

-Mary Brown Malouf

Beatlemania

A large green “peace flag” hangs from the ceiling while Beatles music blares in the background. Off in a corner are drum heads signed by Ringo Starr, posters, T-shirts and autographs of rock groups of the ’60s. This is not a flashback, it’s Douglas Green’s Pepperland store in Irving Mall.

Toward the back of the store are Rotting Stone magazines dating back to the early ’70s and a black-light room decorated with Led Zeppelin posters. In another nook is Green’s entire collection of Stevie Ray Vaughan memorabilia. Autographs of everyone from Jackie Gleason to Madonna are displayed under a yellow submarine.

Interestingly enough, most of Green’s customers weren’t even alive in the ’60s. “Our biggest customers are the kids,” Green says. “The teen-agers really sustain me.”

Much of Green’s merchandise comes from his relationship with the Hard Rock Cafe. Four years ago, he sold a large Beatles collection to the Hard Rock in Orlando. “Now, when their office gets a call from someone who has just one or two Beatles items, they refer them to me.” Green started out in the fall of 1990 with a cart in the West End, but when mall man agement offered him a retail site, he moved to Irving last spring. Green has toyed with branching out to other locations, “but, I don’t want to lose control of it. I don’t want investors.” -Mike Coppock