When Duck Duck Goose founder Daniel Sher first started communicating with One Park’s Matt Hichens about hosting an event at Cape Town’s favourite listening bar, he started scrambling for a reasonable justification for people to come together in celebration. Having recently reached the completely unremarkable 36-and-a-half-year milestone in his life, Daniel started fishing around for a recently birthday-ed collaborator to make the celebration’s validity a little more convincing. Shaun Hill, creator of Bat Butt and a frequent collaborator who had just turned 34, was the first to put his hand up.
The jol was on with a dream collaboration on the bill – One Park could provide access to the best music venue in Cape Town, Duck Duck Goose could provide T-shirts to commemorate the event as well as additional expertise in curating events, and Bat Butt could provide the visuals to tie the whole idea together. Daniel’s notorious Chicken Teriyaki recipe and Baby Blood vodka Stoneys were being conjured up throughout the night in the One Park kitchen, overlayed by DJ sets from the men of the hour in Baby Blood (Shaun) and Full Inbox (Daniel). The dancefloor was packed out and in full swing, led by Most Supportive of Her Husband’s Dreams Award winner Paige Sher, who showed her unwavering loyalty to the Full Inbox cause in the front row for “almost” (Daniel’s edit) the entirety of Daniel’s four-hour set. At the request of many, recordings of Shaun’s and Daniel’s sets will be released in due time, so look out for those.
The skop was monumental irrespective of who was turning however years old. The success of the event was a symbolic milestone for Cape Town’s creative scene, as Daniel, Matt and Shaun all belong to the same crop of similarly aged creatives who were once inexperienced whippersnappers, full of ideas and dreams of executing projects like this one. Now, with their stripes earned as OGs in the city’s creative landscape and founders of celebrated communal spaces, the three of them have the ability and the resources to throw a party for all their friends that came up alongside them. So, as much as the party celebrated Dan and Shaun’s combined 70,5th birthday, it also celebrated the greater creative community’s coming of age.
After the swarm of hype around the party, we owe it to the public to look back at what was objectively the liveliest 70,5th birthday party of all time.
