Andrea Cabral told PEOPLE that she never had a birthday party growing up, but as her 29th birthday approached, she resolved to change that.
Rather than celebrating with a few pals, the Texas woman, who works as a social media manager at PepsiCo, took a unique approach: she posted a TikTok asking anybody in the North Dallas region to join in the festivities.
“I wanted my first party to be special, and I wanted more than five people to show up,” Cabral tells me. “I was just hoping for people in my immediate area who are around my age to come show up and really feel the community that I’m a part of.”
Cabral had no idea how popular the footage would become. Since publishing it on May 14, the video has received approximately 600,000 views and over 8,500 comments, significantly exceeding Cabral’s initial expectations.
“I posted the video, I forgot about it, and I took a nap,” she tells me. “I woke up to find that the video had gone viral. I didn’t even get a chance to observe the early responses because it blew up immediately. When I awoke, there were more than 150 responses.
And the reactions were overwhelmingly positive. “The general sentiment was that they wanted to show up and have a good time,” she said.
The next day, Cabral thanked everyone for their good sentiments and said that she had messaged her address to 200 party attendees.
“I obviously wasn’t going to dox myself and put my address out there, so I reached out to a specific number of people,” she adds, revealing that she chose those people based on the overall vibe they gave off.
“That could mean their TikTok bio,” she explains. “It could refer to their profile photo. It could refer to their username or the comment that they left.
“If I had a good feeling about them, I was going to invite them,” she tells me.
As an added degree of security, she claims that the party was held in a shared public space of her apartment building.
Cabral says she “made a pretty big shopping trip at Walmart” before the big day, buying everything she needed to build some epic charcuterie boards, as well as plenty of chips and soda.
On the day of the celebration, Friday, May 23, about 30 of the 200 people Cabral invited showed up — and she had her pals present to make sure there were no glitches.
“They were kind of vetting people at the door,” she confesses. “I had a secret codeword that everyone had to use. The code word was ‘drizzle,’ and they simply made sure that everyone was okay. Nobody was being outrageous or acting out. Everyone was on their best behavior.
Even though she didn’t know the bulk of the attendees, Cabral was convinced that nothing strange would happen.
“I just had a really good feeling based on the people I had spoken to online.” she explained. “They just appeared like wonderful folks, and it turns out that my instinct was correct. This could have gone horribly wrong, or extremely well. And I was fortunate that it was the latter.
Some attendees surprised her with flowers, while others brought gluten-free cupcakes.
“I wasn’t expecting anything,” Cabral explains. “I particularly instructed folks not to bring gifts. That was not the purpose of the celebration. It was simply to have people around me.
Cabral intends to do something similar for her next birthday, citing the example of grandmother Wanda Dench, who unintentionally texted a then-stranger to her Thanksgiving dinner nearly a decade ago — and they’ve been getting together ever since.
“We’re hoping for that kind of vibe, that similar story,” she elaborates.
Cabral adds that while putting yourself out there is scary, it can also be rewarding. She continues: “if you’re authentic, people are going to be receptive.”
