Greetings and Felicitations

This past weekend was the Official Visit to my very own home district. Besides the luxury of two nights in my very own bed, amazing fun right there, having the OV in your own district when you are a Grand Officer means giving a greeting speech of some kind. It is an interesting tradition which seems to have evolved from its original intent, at least so far as I have been told. The story goes that, in the before time, one of the local Distinguished members (those who have served as Worthy Grand Matron or Worthy Grand Patron in the past) would be asked to give a welcome speech to open the Official Visit, welcoming the current WGM and WGP and their Grand Family. I understand that this tradition started because the Distinguished members were expected to know the protocol of such things and usually knew the current WGM and WGP so they were in a position to give a welcome that would please the visitors. But then some areas started having more than one Distinguished member and they didn't want to ask some but not others, so they started asking all of them and in some areas each one gives their own speech and in other areas, they do one speech together as a group. I wonder if the Distinguished members like it that way or if they would rather draw straws and take turns? Then people wanted to include current Honored members, which means those serving as Grand Officers and/or Grand Representatives, because those people are having a short, very special time in their Eastern Star life, so some clever person, who remains nameless to this day so far as I can find out, came up with this idea of adding a "Greeting" speech on top of the "Welcome" speech, so that those who were having just their one special year could also participate in the Official Visit. Somehow, though, the need for both a welcome and a greeting got "traditionalized" so now, even when a local area doesn't have current Honored members, they still scrape up a greeter for a "Greeting" speech, usually a past Honored member. I find this a little funny, sort of a tail wagging the dog sort of thing. The extra speech was created to give an opportunity to the one year people and now you are expected to cough up an extra speech even if you don't have one year people. Go figure! Anyway, that is the way it is currently working, so since our area includes both me and another Grand Officer, the two of us were expected to give a Greeting speech. Since I have done this two years in a row now, and will be doing it for the rest of my Eastern Star life if these traditions continue, I suggested to my compadre Grand Officer that she should get to give the speech all by herself and have the spotlight. Her response was something like this: No, no, no, no some more, not even, no and um, no! Getting the impression that perhaps she was not in love with the idea of doing the speech herself, I suggested that she could write something that would please her and I would just help present it. Her response to this suggestion sounded sort of like: No, no, no, nuh-uh, no, no, and I don't think so! While it is possible that I misinterpreted, I took this to mean that she would like me to help write it or perhaps even write the thing for both of us. So I found out what the theme of the event was and wrote a short, light hearted greeting with a couple of good jokes and a great pun, certain to produce volumes of groans. The secret to including a great pun is that it has to be punny enough that you get the groans, but not so awful that they throw fruit. We must have walked that fine line successful because someone did call for the hook to pull us off the stage, but no tomatoes were in evidence. If I am very, very lucky, perhaps they won't ask me to speak again next year. However, I am not holding my breath. :-) In some areas, the greeter is expected to give some facts and history about the local Chapters that are included in the District. If there are only a couple of Chapters, you can really get into some interesting trivia and tidbits about the Chapters. But when you have seven or eight, as we did at each of the OVs this past weekend, it can be really hard to give that sort of speech and make it both interesting and short enough. When they do the local Chapters, I find it most interesting when they tell us unique things about the Chapters and not just name, number, year of founding, location, number of members, etc. It is great to hear about each Chapter's special community service project, for example and I really enjoy it when they tell us about some of the local flavor that makes each region that we visit special. Sometimes they've included facts about how the lodge was involved in the founding of the town and other local history bits and that is always very interesting to me. Next weekend, I will be in Vallejo, Richmond and Burlingame.