PEOPLE ON THE GO
Alison Amick, Beth McKillop, Julie Heffernan and Jack Madden attend an Oklahoma City Art Museum previewPhoebe Brown, Shirley Harris, Peggy Marquart and Val Walser attend a Dentists for theDon Baker and Cindy and John Gladden also attended the benefit.
CLUBWOMEN RULE THE WORLD – WELL SORT OF
I admire women who work tirelessly behind the scenes on fundraising projects and are the first to volunteer to chair everything from garden club meetings to ski trips.
I have written about them for 37 years and truly my hats off to them. Hopefully they will forgive me for this little bit of humor “on the lite side.”
Clubwomen manage to get out of the house more often than business executives who float from one meeting to the other. One of my best friends belongs to this group of Type A’s. Her family hasn’t eaten a meal with her in three years, but they haven’t forgotten her and always keep a light burning in the window.
It’s like an addiction. Once these women become hooked on three-hour committee meetings and chicken-a-la something luncheons and award dinners, there’s no turning back.
Most of the ones I know are officers. I’m sure there are some committee members around but none come to mind right off hand.
If I were pressed to name the most underrated office in a club, I’d have to mention the PROGRAM CHAIRMAN. Here’s a woman who is expected to provide a year’s worth of entertainment on a $50 stipend from the club’s budget. She has to find speakers who will orate for a box of scented soap and a department store that will stage a free style show for a group of women who think a petite 4 is the name of a rich dessert.
Compared to the PROGRAM CHAIRMAN’S job, the CHAIRMAN’S duties are…well…a piece of cake. If things get too hectic, she can always slip a leg into a cast for three months and delegate her duties to her CO-CHAIRMAN (whose name may or may not appear in the program.)
The RECORDING SECRETARY does the best she can, but her job’s tough. She doesn’t take shorthand and everyone in the meeting talks at the same time. Never once has she been able to get the name of anyone seconding a motion – but her handwriting is super neat.
Everyone in the club knows about the TREASURER’S problem except the nominating committee. Just because she always has the correct change for the drink machine does not mean she is good at figures.
This leaves the WAYS AND MEANS CHAIRMAN. Some hapless soul always gets blindsided on this one. She’s the one on the second row happily copying down a new meatloaf recipe some “friend” has slipped her, while the nominations are being made from the floor. It’s a set-up of course, and before she can figure out how to spell sauteed, she’s been nominated and elected WAYS AND MEANS CHAIRMAN. This poor woman is never the same after a year of money raising projects. She’s been known to stage her own estate sale just to make the numbers break even.
It’s no wonder some of these volunteers suffer burn out, and choose to stay home for a year just to sit and stare at the wall….until, they get a phone call and the same old snake oil spiel gets their adrenaline flowing again, and off they go.( I don’t know what we would do without them.)
