Isabella’s Thousand Oaks Bat Mitzvah
Deena & Shawn Campbell hired us for Isabella’s Thousand Oaks Bat Mitzvah at the North Ranch Community Center. They wanted the creativity to flow throughout the night. I want to make sure I thank Mark Marabate and his staff at Marabate Studios for some of the footage in our video. You can tell his footage from our phone stuff… hey we try, but we have a lot on our mind.
One of the biggest things we do at our events is start things off big. We always invite the crowd to the dance floor before the grand entrance. Then we make it as fun as possible. It doesn’t happen very often in your life that everyone is celebrating just YOU! We always help and prepare our young teens for that pressure. We are great at helping give an idea of what will happen. That is usually the biggest fear, not knowing what is going on, and we want everyone to be on the same page. Thankfully Isabella was on board for all of it. Putting her in the Hora and setting off the confetti canon all went perfectly.
One of the cool things was that Isabella had some of her theater friends perform a couple of short numbers from “Matilda“. They included the crowd favorite “Revolting Children”, which makes me laugh at the choice at a Mitzvah. We had many of the normal moments usually at a Bat Mitzvah. The Father/Daughter dance with her dad Shawn went great, as well as a really inventive (musically) candle lighting.
The one big moment we created was a Theater Trivia Game. We do have a TV Tune game, but since kids don’t watch as much TV as before it’s hit and miss. Most TV shows don’t have very memorable theme songs anymore, not like the “Happy Days”, “Seinfeld” and “X-Files” Days :). So what I did was I took music clips from about 50 Broadway shows. Then I put a cue point at a spot in the song that was more difficult to guess. We had songs from Hamilton, Wicked & Annie. But we also made it tougher in the later rounds with songs from Dear Evan Hansen, Newsies & 13. The kids loved it and I will definitely keep it for other Mitzvah’s or that Corporate Event.
One of the things we love to do is grab a testimonial, and we got one from Mom/Deena (who planned every aspect of the day) and of course the Star of the night Isabella, and to get a real down to earth reaction to this Thousand Oaks Bat Mitzvah.