Party Girl Annette Evans

Aug. 29, 2007

About five years ago, a friend of Carrie Sharp’s was moaning and groaning about turning 50.
“She was really ridiculous. All boo hoo, waa waa, I’m getting under the covers. I said, ‘Not me! I want a parade.’ But I was just kidding,” said Sharp of Suttons Bay, who works for State Farm Insurance.
Her friend, Annette Evans, didn’t think so. Five years later, she threw her friend a surprise parade in Suttons Bay. She got a parade permit and enlisted 80 of Sharp’s closest friends to join in.
“We were supposed to meet Annette and her husband downtown to go on a sailing trip, so we did, and all of a sudden there was no traffic, and you know what Suttons Bay is like in July,” recalled Sharp.
“We looked down the street and I saw police lights, and I thought, ‘Uh, oh, the tribal police, something’s going on.’ Then I hear music, I see this big banner, there are flags, vintage cars, convertibles, a juggler, there’s trumpet music. And in front of it all, there’s Annette wearing this little red and black mini-skirt, stiletto boots, and twirling this fake rifle. She’s marching
and never breaks stride. She’s just cracking up.”
The procession of friends all honored Sharp’s 50 years of life in a different way.
“When I was about 13, I had painstakingly embroidered a blue jean shirt for Cat Stevens and sent it to him with a note, ‘Please wear this on your next album cover.’ So one of my friends made a huge poster of Cat Stevens wearing my shirt,” Sharp said. “I love berets, and one of my friends was wearing a beret. I couldn’t stop laughing and crying, laughing and crying. Old guys were running out of the cigar shop to pose with me.”
Sharp ran to give her a friend a hug, but Evans, twirling her old high school rifle, shouted: “Get back! I might hit you!”

CLASS CLOWN
If Evans were back in high school, she’d be the class clown. She likes to crack herself up. At her Suttons Bay home on Lee Point last week, she wore a skirt that looked like a newspaper, six rings, and two charm bracelets with at least 100 charms. She wore earrings from India that weirdly wrapped around her ear, and her purse was constructed of mini-license plates, one of 200 from her “strange purse” collection.
Evans is unusually happy. It’s as if she took a self-help book and burned it into her brain. Except she doesn’t need a book—her good nature came from growing up with
an adventurous and energetic dad, and a mom who loved costume jewelry, chaperoned all the school field trips, and threw crazy parties.
So when Evans moved to Suttons Bay 19 years ago, she took a page out of her parents’ book, and threw an egg toss party. The first party drew 25 people—the last one nearly10 times that many. Each party has its own charm. “One year someone drove over our septic field, and it exploded.”
The competition involves two-person teams throwing raw eggs to each other at greater and greater distances. The record toss is 150 feet.
“People take this competition very seriously,” Annette said. “You see grown men diving for eggs and skidding across the lawn.”

SERIOUS?
There are some things that Evans takes seriously, and one of them is her job as a geologist. She and her husband both studied geology at the University of Wisconsin—“I had a purple mohawk and wore my dad’s clothes when I first met him.” Within months they were engaged. After graduating, they worked together on oil rigs.
“We lived in a little field lab with bunks—no bathrooms—yes, you used the cornfields—and I wore a hard hat, a parka, and boots. We moved around a lot. In our last job, we were stuck on a mud boat and I couldn’t get off that thing for three weeks. It felt like an absolute prison. I called my boss one day and told him, ‘I’m done. I need a job where I can put a dress on.’”
Mark and Annette took their tokens from the field, including a broken nose horn from a Tyrannosaurus Rex (now resting at their fireplace), and moved to Traverse City where Evans’ brother worked for Reef Petroleum.
It took months to find a job, but finally, a woman who wanted to open a Traverse City branch of Frontier Petro offered to meet with her.
“We hit it off right away, and had a couple of gin and tonics at the Park Place. Then she said, ‘Do you want to come up to the room and look at the seismic data?’”
Evans’ new job involved the brokering of underground seismic data required for gas and oil exploration. After a few bleary-eyed minutes of looking at the maps at 1:30 a.m., Evans and her new boss ended up jumping on the beds. “It was at that point, I knew I had the job.”
Evans ultimately took over the
company, now called Evans Geophysical, and still brokers seismic data. Evans remembers her first gas and oil convention, arriving in a suit and trying to look like everyone else—the vast majority of whom were men.
“I realized, I just can’t do this. It’s just not me, and people won’t remember me. I was just another suit,” she said.
Not long after that, Evans came across a life-sized Marilyn Monroe cut-out. “I thought, ‘That’s it! I’m going to take this and a Polaroid, and start asking these oil guys to pose with Marilyn.’”
At the next trade show, Evans set out Marilyn, along with a pile of bongy, buggy eye glasses for the guys to wear as they kissed her (Marilyn, that is). Now she has 700 clients, and no one forgets her. Sometimes she wears a long, sequined evening gown or a crazy hat.
She may look goofy at times, but she’s serious about the job, which requires absolute confidentiality. She doesn’t joke about that part.

IT’S THE ADVENTURE, BABY
Evans threw the surprise parade on July 5, just a day before her family left for Alaska, where they hiked a glacier and paddled intensely for four hours in a Class 5 waterfall.
Evans’ passion is taking adventure trips with her family, and plans her life and budget around them. She has two teen-aged sons, and whenever they want to buy something, she equates it with the cost of a plane ticket. “Are you sure? That’s half a plane ticket to Reno.” Evans herself buys second-hand clothes, occasionally splurging on a new item from a downtown store. “I hate to shop, and I only buy things on sale.”
Evans said she has always loved travel. She and Mark climbed the Matterhorn for their honeymoon. They realized early on they shared a taste for adventure travel when they were assigned to a field camp in Montana, where they were mapping out 16 square miles of a mountain range.
“We were sitting on a glacier, and we decided to jump off onto an iceberg. It was really fun for about a minute. Then we realized the iceberg was starting to sink and and the water was really, really cold. We got on our knees and started paddling like crazy, and then we had to crawl back onto the glacier. We were completely soaked.”
After Evans’ two sons were born, she made it a point to research the danger factor. Yet she still agreed to bungee jump with her younger son on a recent trip to Reno. “It was his idea, even though he’s scared of heights. We were lashed together, and on the way up, he changed his mind and I feel him shaking. So I’m trying to get his mind off his terror, and I say, ‘Hey, just look at the great view.’ And he says, ‘What great view? We’re looking at a freeway.’”
The free fall was not one of Evans’ best memories, although she and Elliott were laughing by the second bounce. “Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it.”

INSPIRATION
Annette’s inspiration, hands down, was her mom. Although her mom is no longer alive, her philosophy of joy lives on: “A day without a laugh is lost. I think even fretting over something for an hour is just a waste. It doesn’t accomplish anything.
“My mom was great. She said, there’s a reason for everything, and I truly believe that. Maybe it’s a wake-up call, maybe it’s showing you your next step in life. It’s not what you do in life, it’s what you do with your life Help other people, have fun.”
Evans’ next major production is the Baystrider Road Race, a September 1 run that she and four others helped organize with the Body Balance gym in town. The proceeds will help complete the computer lab at Suttons Bay High School. (The fund-raiasing team already raised enough money to buy 31 computers for the lab.)
As for Sharp, she’s quietly planning a payback for Annette’s 50th birthday, but has four more years to think about it. Wait, there’s no surprise party, Annette … really, you gotta believe it. Don’t expect a thing.

For information on the The Baystrider Road Race on September 1, call Kevin Pryor
at 271-2210.