An "Up" Baby Shower

A note on privacy: We do not disclose details about our guests or their events without permission. Private celebrations are described only in general terms, and names and photos appear only when a guest has said yes.

Saturday's baby shower came with a theme we couldn't resist: "Up."

Thirty-five guests, white tablecloths, and a room full of balloons and adventure-book touches for a baby whose arrival is now officially an expedition. If you know the movie, you know the whole thing runs on one idea — that the great adventure isn't the far-off place, it's the life you build with your people. A room full of grandmothers, aunties, and friends who drove in to celebrate exactly that felt like the right adaptation.

That's the deal with this room, and it's why themes work here: we hand you the canvas — white cloths, good light, chairs for a hundred — and your idea does the rest.

We don't name our private parties here — the day belongs to the family, not to our blog. But we will say this: of all the events this room holds, baby showers might be the most hopeful. Somebody new is coming. Everybody in the room already loves them.

To the family: adventure is out there. It was also in here, on Saturday, between the balloons.

Both Sides of the Aisle

A note on privacy: We do not disclose details about our guests or their events without permission. Private celebrations are described only in general terms, and names and photos appear only when a guest has said yes.

In the span of twelve days this fall, this room hosted a meet and greet for Jamie Ager, a town hall for Jennifer Balkcom, and a local candidates' forum put on by the Democrats.

Same room. Same tables. Both sides of the aisle.

People ask us sometimes how we play it, hosting events for candidates who'd disagree with each other about near everything. The answer is simple: we're the room. Our job is chairs in rows, a microphone that works, coffee that's hot, and a door that's open to the whole town. Murphy is a small place. The same people who sit at these tables on a Tuesday are at the ball counter across the street on Wednesday.

It helps that this building has always been a civic room. It opened in 1950 as the post office — back when that made it the most public building in town. Seventy-six years later, in a way, it still is.

If your group needs a neutral room in the middle of town — a forum, a meeting, a meet and greet — this is what the room is for. Whoever's name is on the flyer, the room is Murphy's. That's the whole policy.

Fifty Years Later: The Class of '76 Comes Home

A note on privacy: We do not disclose details about our guests or their events without permission. Private celebrations are described only in general terms, and names and photos appear only when a guest has said yes.

Fifty years is a long time. On Saturday, the Murphy High School Class of 1976 fit it all into one room.

Sixty-eight classmates and guests came back to The Ballroom for their 50th class reunion — some from across town, some from across the country. Half a century since graduation. There were yearbooks, there were photos from the seventies that should probably stay in the seventies, and there was a lot of the particular kind of laughter that only happens when people who knew you at seventeen get you in a room again.

Reunions are some of our favorite nights in this building. The room holds a hundred, so sixty-eight old friends had space to spread out — tables for dinner, room for the photo displays, and corners for the conversations that needed catching up. A ballroom that started life as a post office in 1950 has seen most of these folks' whole lives happen in this town — and for one evening, it gets to hold the reunion version: everybody a little grayer, nobody in a hurry to leave.

Class of '76, thanks for spending your fifty years with us. See you at fifty-five.

The Night Murphy Thanked Its Volunteers

A note on privacy: We do not disclose details about our guests or their events without permission. Private celebrations are described only in general terms, and names and photos appear only when a guest has said yes.

On Saturday night, this room fed the people who feed everything else.

The Town of Murphy held its Volunteer Appreciation Dinner here — 85 guests, prime rib on the plates, and a room full of the folks who show up for this town the other 364 days a year. The firefighters, the board members, the ones who run the events and staff the booths and coach the teams. Most nights, they're the ones doing the serving.

It was a good night, and it must have read that way from the outside, too — the Cherokee Scout put it on the front page.

Our family's business, Downtown Pizza Co., sits right across Hiwassee Street and handled the catering, the way it does for everything in this room. That never gets old: our people cooking for the town's people, in a building that's been serving Murphy in one form or another since 1950.

Eighty-five people at round tables, and the room never felt crowded — that's the thing about a space built for a hundred. It gives an evening like this room to breathe.

To every volunteer who sat at those tables: thanks for what you do when nobody's handing you a dinner for it.

A Room With a Past

A note on privacy: We do not disclose details about our guests or their events without permission. Private celebrations are described only in general terms, and names and photos appear only when a guest has said yes.

Before it was a ballroom, this room was Murphy's post office.

The building went up in late 1949, built by E.H. Brumby, and opened its doors in March of 1950 as the United States Post Office for Murphy, North Carolina. In the decades after, it was a grocery store, and eventually it became what it is today — The Ballroom, an event space on Hiwassee Street in the middle of downtown.

The Brumby family lived right next door. Mrs. Brumby was a builder herself and put up another building in town, and the brick addition E.H. built onto his textile mill still stands — it's the Murphy School of Dance now.

There's a piece of our own family in the building, too. The stained glass over the front doors, with the two fleur-de-lis, was installed by our parents. We're from Louisiana originally, and the fleur-de-lis is our stamp — our family's mark on this building's long history.

Today the room holds about a hundred people, and it changes costumes the way it always has: a wedding on Saturday, a town hall on Tuesday, a reunion the next weekend, with dinner catered from our family's restaurant right across the street. The walls have been a lot of things. We like what they are now.