As expected, late last year I received an invitation in the mail for the “45th Annual Awards Banquet” for Locations LLC. What I hadn’t expected was the theme – Chinese Elegance. As you can probably guess, this theme was, quite literally, foreign to me.

What in the world is Chinese Elegance attire? Last year’s theme was Casablanca so donning a pretty black dress and some chunky faux pearls worked perfectly for blending in. I’m allll about flying under the radar at large events.

The thing is I’m not even into Halloween, much less themed-parties, so the idea of searching for and buying an outfit for one evening (guaranteed not to wear it again) doesn’t excite me. Not to mention my concern of wearing something completely inappropriate – in this case, something offense to the Chinese culture.

My solution was to wear something completely neutral, perhaps even last year’s little black dress. Surely there would be others not in character.

That plan went hay-wire when a lovely friend in my office offered for me to wear one of her elegant Chinese dresses. My gut reaction was, “That’s so kind, but no thank you. I’m just going to wear something I have.” Wrong. Her offer was followed by encouragement from several other women I work with to “at least try it on!” Okay, I agreed. I didn’t realize they meant try it on, like, now. Into the bathroom I went. While it was a very beautiful dress, it was way outside my comfort zone; in a way I was hoping it wouldn’t fit. No such luck. Even with jeans on underneath, the dress preceived oohs and ahhs from the office crowd along with an offer to hem the few places that weren’t exactly perfect.

On the one hand, I immediately felt super self-conscious because I had visions of being the only one at the banquet in costume. On the other hand, it was nice to have the outfit ready to go knowing that they wouldn’t have chosen something offensive for me to wear. I could totally get into having a personal stylist.

So last night was the main event! It turns out my outfit was perfect, thanks to my friend who let me borrow it and the office cheerleaders for helping me get over myself.

After a few introductions and several awards, dinner was upon us. Clearly we had a good year because there was more food than we knew what to do with. It just kept coming, and coming, and coming. Here is a pic of the menu, after a curried shrimp took a dive.

And here are some really poor quality pics of some high quality Chinese specialties, after demolition. Full and busting out of our dresses, we left the rest for the hotel staff.

Congratulations Locations LLC for the achieving the title of #1 Real Estate firm on Oahu both in of number of transactions and closed volume! Honored to be small part of such a great company. Here’s to good fortune and fashion in 2015!!