80th Birthday Celebration of Skip Parsons

 

by Cliff Lamere   March 15, 2017

 

 

Skip Parsons turned 80 years young on March 11, 2016.  He was performing at the Fountain Restaurant in Albany, NY that evening with his Skip Parsons' Riverboat Jazz Band.  It was his 46th year of appearing there every second weekend of the month.  Could that be some sort of record?

 

Knowing that he would be performing on the evening of his birthday, a surprise birthday celebration was planned by his family for the previous weekend, on Saturday March 5, 2016, when two of Skip and Linda Parsons' daughters, and their families, were visiting for that weekend.

 

On the day of his surprise party, his daughters (Stacey Plante and Jill Wilson) and their families took Skip to a restaurant for dinner.  When they wanted to leave, Skip wanted another cup of coffee, so they had to wait.  They then suggested that they should stop at the Fountain Restaurant for a nightcap, but Skip said that he would rather go home.  Once they were all in the car, however, Skip was told that they were going there anyways. 

 

Many people, including myself, were invited to be there at 7 p.m., but Skip and his family arrived late.  When they walked in the back door, Skip saw someone that he knew, then another person, and me, and so on.  He was confused, no doubt, but he stopped to talked to each one.  At some point, he must have seen me taking photos of him, but he was not close enough to say anything.  After 10-15 minutes, he made his way to the front of the restaurant where a large table of his friends were seated.  By then, he knew something special was happening.

 

Notice the clarinet and soprano sax both of which Skip plays.

 

Below you will find a list of the best 46 photos that were taken that evening.  Since they were taken without frequent annoying flashes, the photos are a bit dark in some cases.  Making them lighter introduces speckles in the darkest areas, so I avoided that.  Every person in each photo is named in the links below, and the people are named from left to right (except the second photo which states that they are named clockwise).  'cr' near the end of the name of the .jpg means that the photo was cropped; 'ed' means the photo was edited in some other way. 

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