Nacho Libre Party!

If you’ve ever seen the movie Nacho Libre, you know it’s a hilarious, bizarre, and addictingly quotable piece of filmmaking. My husband and I have been bandying lines from it back and forth for years (in our best Mexican Jack Black impressions, of course), such as:

“Get that corn outta my face!”
“Chancho! I need to borrow your sweats!”
“Beneath the clothes we find the man, and beneath the man, we find his…nucleus.”
“I believe in SCIENCE.”

It’s a totally uniquely stylized movie with cool scenery, endearing characters, and even a great soundtrack–AND it happens to be one of the few movies we own on BluRay. So since it had been awhile since either Anthony or I had seen it, we decided it needed to be an event shared with friends. Thus was born the idea for…. “doodle deedle doodle dee!” (Nacho Libre inside joke)…a Nacho Libre movie night! I thought I’d share some of the details of this fun event here on the blog in case you, too, have been saying to yourself, “Hey, I haven’t watched Nacho Libre in awhile. Why don’t we center an entire party around it?” Read your mind, right?

Decor:
In my book, a fun party starts with a fun invitation. I found this hard-core luchador postcard on Zazzle, an online custom retailer that sells absolutely EVERY customized product you can dream. You could type “Striped Donkey Prom Queen” into their search engine, and it’d be like, “Your search yields 2,000 results!” Order this Lucha Libre postcard here.

Of course you can’t have a Lucha Libre postcard invitation without getting a little creative with your wording to reflect the Nacho Libre theme. I tried to work in some quotes from the movie:

Surprisingly, no one actually wore stretchy pants.

Oh, well! On to the decor! I’ve always been enamored with the colorful flag banners I see at Mexican gatherings, so I figured this occasion called for finally laying down 5 bucks to get one. Amazon just called this one “Medium Plastic Mexican Banner” for us gringos, but apparently these are actually called papel picado. Either way, it was worth $5 to bring a festive touch over our buffet spread in the kitchen.

Amazon also came in handy for ordering a serape table runner that added some color to the dinner buffet:

In addition to our dinner buffet spread, we also had a dessert table:

I had seen crepe paper printed with the Mexican flag on Oriental Trading Company’s website, but couldn’t bring myself to pay shipping for it, so I decided to make my own version by lining green, white, and red crepe paper around the border of my kitchen table. Some double-stick tape held it in place on the surface and I let the edges hang down for a little flare. P.S. Yes, I know the Mexican flag also has an eagle on it. I’m just not great at drawing eagles on crepe paper.

Another area I had fun decorating was a wall plastered with luchador promo posters. Googling “vintage luchador posters” gave me some images to play with, which I printed, mounted on construction paper backing, and hung for a quick way to cover a large space.

Finally, as I said, I really can’t overemphasize the quotability of Nacho Libre. One of my husband’s favorite is when Nacho is serving some kind of disgusting slop to his fellow friars for breakfast and one of them has this to say:

So, yeah, that had to be placed in the bathroom. Keepin’ it classy.

Activities:
Since Nacho Libre is a pretty family-friendly movie, we let our kids be a part of the evening and invited our friends’ kids, too. While the grownups gathered over sangria and Mexican beer, the kids had a chance to create their most awe-inspiring luchador masks. I found these coloring page printables on a site called First Palette:

For the adults, a friend at the party looked up this awesome site that generates a luchador name based on your actual name. I have no idea what matrix it’s using, but my luchador name is El Lobo Mas Macho–the more macho wolf. Sounds about right.

Food

Last but not least, the food! The premise of our Nacho Libre party was that it would be a nacho dinner, so I set out to create an all-star nacho buffet. Ingredients:

Chips (the Lord’s chips, obviously)
Nacho cheese sauce in the Crock Pot
Veggie-ful Salsa Chicken
Spiced black beans
Regular salsa
Mango salsa
Olives
Avocados
Sour cream
Tomatoes
Sriracha

A Mexican salad rounded out the dinner.

If you were wondering about that fabulous-looking dessert in an earlier image, here it is again. This thing was a masterpiece of cookie crust, white cake, and confetti frosting. Thank God for Pro’s Ranch Market, our local Mexican grocery store.

After all that food, all I can say is “Chancho! I need to borrow your sweats!”

In the end, after the movie was over and the last guest had gone home, I would say it was a fun time dipping into the world of Nacho Libre, made even better with friends. I’ll leave you with one more quote that sums it up:

“My life is good! Reaaallly good!”