Four Installations and a Funeral

This weekend was one of those exhausting, yet all too typical, event packed couple of days, filled with four installations and a funeral. I had an installation on Friday night in San Jose, then the funeral on Saturday morning in Los Altos, then an installation in Napa on Saturday afternoon and then raced back down for another installation Saturday night in Santa Clara. On Sunday, I attended a breakfast and then my own Chapter's installation on Sunday afternoon. Whew! I made everything on time, although sometimes I missed the start of the picture taking. But they managed to shoot me anyway before the festivities got started. On Friday night, I attended the first of the installations. It was relatively smooth and even better, it wasn't too long. In my experience as a teacher and as a student, I have found that people can only concentrate on learning for about fifty minutes before their attention wanders off and even when they are not trying to learn anything, people can only sit still and pay attention comfortably for about two hours tops. Anything more than that without a break is almost a waste of time because everyone starts thinking only about the time and when they get to get out of the room. Over the past two years, attending dozens of these things, I have discovered that the length varies enormously. There are a bunch of pre-ceremony things that can happen and how long it takes before you start on the actual ceremony depends on those choices. Then you have the actual Ritual ceremony, and then there's a bunch of things that you can do afterwards, so it is sort of a three part tour. At the beginning of Part One, usually the first thing that happens is some people are led in from the doors in the West to the stage in the East, one or two at a time. They introduce each other to the audience. Sometimes before that, you have a little mini-ceremony where the emblems for the five points of our Star are brought in ceremoniously, along with the Bible, which is placed on the Altar in the middle of the room and sometimes this is skipped. After the initial people come in, usually the officers of the Chapter come in and take their seats. The Bible is opened and the Lord's Prayer is recited. The Flag is brought in and we say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the National Anthem. Then there is a welcome speech or two. The traditional speech at an installation is a little (or a lot) of history about the lady and gentleman about to be installed as the heads of their Chapter, the Worthy Matron-elect and the Worthy Patron-elect. Often when the speeches are given by people who know the subjects well, they can be very entertaining, with personal anecdotes, sometimes the ones that the subjects wished no one had ever heard. Then it is very entertaining indeed, at least for the audience. After the welcomes, we start in on Escort and Introductions. The short way of doing the Escort and Introductions is to have the various dignitaries sitting in the East already and have them stand up and come to the podium to be introduced. The long way of doing this is to have the dignitaries sitting in the back of the room and asking them to retire (go just outside the doors in the West) and then having them escorted from the back to the front to be introduced. After the ones who walk the floor if you are doing that, comes a long list of those who stand for introduction and then a bunch that stand for recognition. The difference between those is that if you rise for introduction, the person who is presiding introduces the individuals who stood up and if you rise for recognition, everyone is just supposed to clap with no names given and then the people sit back down. Not only does the walking/no walking make a real difference in length, but so does the decision on how far down the "Order of Precedence" to introduce versus just recognize. Finally, after all that, the presiding officer declares a recess to prepare for the ceremony of installation. The outgoing officers go out and chairs are set up in the back of the room in a semicircle for the new officers to sit in. In the four installations I attended, the length of time for Part One, from the start time published on the invitation to the point where the recess was declared, varied from twenty-five minutes to a full hour. That's how much difference the extra walking and the talking can make. The second part of the Installation is the Ritual ceremony. From experience I can say with fair assurance that the ceremony itself, with no interruptions for songs or fancy bits, and with people who know what they are doing, takes between forty and forty-five minutes to install all eighteen officers. (There are actually twelve installing bits, nine people get installed alone, two groups of two and one group of five.) But not everyone runs right through it. Often, there is a song or three. Sometimes there is one song for both the WM and the WP after they are both installed. Sometimes there is a separate song for each of them after each one is installed. Sometimes there is a song after the star point officers are installed. (They are the group of five.) Sometimes there is a little ceremony bit after the star point officers' installation where other members present the star point officers with the emblems of their offices, which they then set on pedestals behind their chairs. And once this month, I saw a prayer type song done as part of the installation of the Chaplain. So even though the theoretical length of the Ritual ceremony is fixed, the actual length can vary a lot. This past week, I saw some people done in forty-five minutes and others that took sixty-five minutes. But even that is only Part Two. After the ceremony is over, we have Part Three, Remarks and Presentations. There is a special little escort done between these parts, where all the new WMs and WPs who attended the installation are sent out and escorted in and introduced in the East and then the WM usually starts on her remarks. These are often prefaced with a series of thank yous to all the people who helped and did stuff in the ceremony and then whatever message of substance the WM wishes to give. Then she invites the WP to preside and he gives his remarks. Somewhere in there, they each usually introduce their family and sometimes they ask members of other groups to which they belong to rise for recognition and to thank them for coming. Then comes a part that varies widely, which is inviting others to give remarks. In my own area, the Peninsula San Francisco Association, the tradition has been that only the WM and WP give remarks at Installation, but in other areas, various dignitaries sitting in the East are also called on to give remarks. We try to keep them short and interesting. I don't know how people in other areas come up with enough different things to say. Of the three local installations I did, and at which I did not have to speak, I would say that most of the room attended two, if not all three, installations this weekend and nearly everyone in the room was going to be at two or more local installations this month. That means that you have to give different remarks because if sitting that long can get boring, listening to the same person give the same remarks can get really boring. In fact, I keep notes on what remarks I gave where so that I don't repeat myself in the same region of the state for just that reason. I don't know how I would have come up with twelve more sets of remarks for this month's installations. Thankfully, I am spared that in my home area. I only had to do remarks at the installation in Napa and I knew that might happen, so I brought something along to share. But without question, more speakers means more time. Then there are presentations. Usually the WM is presented with a gavel, sometimes a new one and sometimes an old one with a new band on it for the new term of office. The WM often gives her new Marshal a baton, which is carried by the Marshal throughout the year. Many Chapters have traveling pins to be worn by the WM during the year and those are often presented. And sometimes families do presentations too. At one of the Installations I attended, on top of all this, the outgoing WM and WP were invited to sign the Bible. Now most Chapters have a tradition of having signature pages in the back of the Bible and each WM and WP signs the Bible on a line as a history memento for the Chapter. That part is really cool and you get a little choked up when you sign it because, as you look at all the names that came before you, you truly get a sense of being the latest link in a chain that has been forged over a century. Even though almost all Chapters do this signing, they differ widely on when this signing is done. In my own Chapter, the tradition had been (although it may change) that we sign the Bible at our Farewell night, which is the good bye meeting for the outgoing WM and WP, since installation is really about the new people. Some Chapters have a special honor meeting as their first meeting of the year and have the junior Past Matron and Patron sign it then. And some Chapters think of the signing as the bridge between the old and new and have the Bible signed at installation. As I said, it is a very beautiful and meaningful ceremony and if you've ever done it, then every time you see it done, you think about the last time you did it and that you are watching another link of history being added and that part is totally awesome. But when you've been sitting for over two hours, some of the awesome is diluted by wanting to stand up and stretch. I think sometimes that people don't often add up the time each part will take and balance long choices with short ones to get the ceremony down to two hours or shorter. Some Chapters do think of the whole arc of the evening and they usually do the best on balance. One of the installations this weekend did a great job on that. They had the beginning emblem ceremony and called on people for remarks, but they cut out some of the other speeches and some of the other escort and such, so the whole thing came in at a pretty perfect two hours or so. On the other hand, a couple of Chapters I attended went almost three hours and when you start late in the evening, that can be very hard to do. My spine has a curve, so sitting that long can get really painful and I know I start to fidget a bit, to keep from getting pains in my hips and legs, but I try my best to be as attentive as possible. It is just very hard to do that when it is late at night and you've been in the chair for hours. The Part Three bits varied from about thirty minutes to sixty minutes long. Then we all went into the dining room for refreshments. Getting a chance to talk with everyone and say hello to people you may not have seen in a while and congratulate the new officers and meet new people from the Chapter that you may not have met before is the best part of the whole thing for me. I've got two or three more local installations to do this week and then I will be back on the road hither and yon. Maybe next Monday I will also describe the funeral.