Two Hundred Yards of Embroidered Organza

This past weekend was full of lots and lots of meetings and I missed some fun events because there were meetings to have with people with pretty full schedules.  But everything went very well and it was a good weekend's work.

One meeting was with our Finance Committee, to go over items that need to be included in the budget that will be presented at the next Grand Chapter session because that is the budget for my year and all of our 2013 items needed to get worked into it.  My AGP and I met with two members of the Committee to go through our ideas that require funds and talk about how to make them work.  The Committee members were awesome!  We went through everything and they worked with us to figure out which line item should contain the amount, which ones were in/out items so required revenue entries too and it was almost easy.  Not that anything involving money is ever actually EASY, but it was relatively painless.  Now I just hope everything can sail through the full committee just as easily and I will be thrilled.

As it happens, however, a far more difficult task has arisen and that is dress fabric and style for the 2013 Lady Grand Officers and Lady Escorts.  We've been looking at dress material and dress style off and on for a while now, but we have reached the point where we have to get SERIOUS about it and that has caused a few intakes of breath, no carpet in the mouth yet, but definitely some bracing to do.

It is also totally unfair.  The men only need a little vest each with a matching tie and there are lots of choices from regular manufacturers.  But to get actually original dresses for the ladies, you have to first find someone to make them (done for now - BOY AM I GRATEFUL for that), then you have to choose a style and then you have to find the fabric and get enough quantity for matching dresses.

In terms of a design, the inevitable debate arises about how big a skirt to give the dresses.  Almost everyone loves the very big poofy classic Eastern Star look and for a session dress, which will be worn at the Grand Chapter session and only on special occasions thereafter, great, fine, wonderful.  You only have to pack it the one time to get to Grand Chapter and you aren't sitting next to each other or other people with your skirts flopping into their laps.  But for a dress that will be for all or part of a year of travel, I am not convinced that an eighty yard petticoat is all that fun to pack, travel in or sit in, especially when the weather turns hot, as it inevitably does in most places in the state in the summer.  But you don't want to go with anything too straight either, because you don't want an inconvenient slit that shows your slips or requires you to wear pantyhose instead of knee highs all summer either.  And then you have a wide range of body types in any Grand Family and what looks good on some is just not going to look great on all.  And you have to decide if the same style will be used for the Officers and the Escorts or a different style or the same thing in a different color or totally different dresses.  Sigh!

Okay, so you get through that part - you resign yourself to the fact that it just ain't gonna look good on everyone and you hope it looks good on you and then you do some math.  You multiply however many dresses by however many yards and the next thing you know, you are trying to find someone who will supply you with two hundred yards of embroidered organza because your seamstress will hurt you badly (or quit, which is worse) if you make her sew lace or some other layer that will rip in her machine.  The problem is that no one will weave for you for less than a thousand yards and most people don't stock that many yards in anything decorated.  Solid colors, sure, order all you want and no worries, but decorated stuff, not so much.  And of course, someone has to buy the fabric, and usually that would be the AGM, needs to lay out anywhere between $4,000 and $7,000, hopefully to be reimbursed when she has her officers and they can give her a deposit for the dresses, whenever that might be.

Then, when you've got that done, you have the travel suit problem, which is finding some sort of jacket or color scheme that is going to look good on both men and women.  But that is next week's problem.  Whew!

Next weekend, I will be in Riverside and Coachella.

Greetings and Felicitations

This past weekend was the Official Visit to my District and in keeping with tradition, I provided welcome gifts for my fellow Grand Officers in attendance and also gave a Greeting speech.  Yes, I went with the funny.

The Greeter thing has gotten some areas into confusion and trouble of a very ironic sort.  Originally, as it was told to me, a local Past Grand Matron or Patron was asked to give a welcome from the District as a whole, primarily because that person would be expected to know the proper protocol form to welcome the visiting Worthy Grand Matron and as a gesture of love and support.  Then I am told that someone said that it would be nice to include any local Grand Officer in this opening speech/welcome because the appointive Grand Officers serve only one year and being a Past Grand is a life sentence. (Five years is going up the line but the obligations are forever - with no chance of parole either.  At least there are no metal cuffs involved. :-)  So a local Grand Officer would have their one chance and then they would be done.  Somewhere along the way, it was decided that we should not take the honor of welcoming the Worthy Grand Matron away from the Past Grands, but neither was it permissible to have one speech delivered by both the local Past Grand and the local current Grand Officer and then there were two (speeches, that is.)  To differentiate them, one became the Welcome, still offered by the Past Grand, and the other became Greetings (offered by the Grand Officer).

When there is no Past Grand or Grand Officer in the area, there is a whole protocol list of who you ask to give the Welcome.  It goes to Grand Representatives then former this, then former that, then wannabe this, then etc., etc., etc.  But somehow it all went wonky.  Someone got this idea in their head that there need to be two speeches and that you have to scramble down the list to find two people instead of just one to give a Welcome.  But you don't have to have two speeches at all and I can't find anything that says that even if you have two categories, that they cannot speak together instead of separately.  I mean, they don't have cooties, really!!

Anyway, after the short welcome, I gave a speech a la Bob Newhart phone monologue style, pretending that my cell phone rang just a minute into my speech and answered it and proceeded to have a one sided conversation.  It had some decent jokes and some good puns and it was about all things nautical, that being the theme for the Official Visit.  The best part about it is that it is over and I am done with my speechifying for the rest of this year - well, okay, I will be making a thirty second presentation to some Grand Officer at some point, although I can't remember getting a name for who, and okay, I have to give a whopper of a speech at Grand Chapter, an Inaugural if you will, but nothing else and that is months from now (although somehow it seems that the days are going faster lately than they used to.  Why is that I wonder?).

Next weekend, I will be in Yorba Linda and Long Beach on Sunday, but I will not be in Long Beach on Saturday or in San Diego because of meetings.

To Be or Not to Be Funny

This past weekend I attended more Traditional Official Visits, including the visit to my own Associate Grand Patron's district.

Now there is a tradition that when there is a Grand Officer in a District, the Grand Officer is invited to give a welcome or greetings at the start of the Official Visit.  If there are Past Grands Matrons or Patrons in your District, they do a welcome and then the Grand Officer does a greeting.

I was very proud of the awesome job that my man did with his remarks, which, in my admittedly biased opinion, contained meaningful content and was delivered very well.  I admit that I sat in my seat smiling quite broadly as spoke since I again had the opportunity to reflect on how fortunate I was in my choice of man and maybe a little bit on how well I did in the choosing.  I am still very happy with my choice, which is a very good thing I think.

There is also a tradition followed most years, but not all, that when the Grand Family comes to your District, the Grand Officer, Past Grands and sometimes recent former Grand Officers provide welcome gifts or goodie bags to the visiting Grand Officers.

So my turn is coming up this Friday, as the Official Visit comes to my District.  Besides the challenge of finding the time to put gifts together (I may call it a day and buy a bunch of Starbucks cards - everyone seems to like them), I have to put my own remarks together and that is proving to pose an unexpected dilemma.

The first year I had to do remarks was in 2008 when I was Grand Warder.  I gave what was probably the shortest greeting speech ever seen at an Official Visit, perfectly in keeping with the theme I might add, and which received thundering applause.  But if I had known then that I would have more speeches to do, I might not have used up the best one first.

In each of the three successive years, I had a partner in crime because there was another Grand Officer from my District all three years.  So since I had done a speech already and had more to come, I asked them what sort of tone or speech they wanted to give.  For some reason, all three of them asked me to write the speech, which I did, but I did squeeze them for input.  So in 2009, my cohort wanted any speech that ended with a particular line and it was a serious theme, so we did that. In 2010 and 2011, my cohort wanted a more entertaining speech and we did that.  This year I have to do a solo speech, so I had decided for myself that I would turn my hand to a little comedy writing and present something funny, although doing it without a straight man is a bit tougher.

I had just figured out how to do my presentation when tragedy struck.  One of the three Past Grands who live in my District passed away last Friday.  There is no doubt in my mind that the welcome that will now have to be given by just one person will have to be serious and will no doubt address our terrible loss.  But where does that leave my remarks?  I don't want to seem inappropriate, but at the same time another serious speech would probably sound either like a eulogy or like I should just say "Ditto" and be done with it.  Okay, based on my 2008 remarks (you'll have to ask in person for that story if you weren't there), I did seriously consider the Ditto speech, but only for a moment and it is not a real choice.

So do I go with funny or do I try to go with something dry and factual that everyone in the area has heard already, like the number of Chapters and their members and the type of fruit that used to be grown in the valley or the origin of Silicon Valley or . . . .?

When struggling with this question, what finally decided me was considering what our Past Grand Patron who passed away would have wanted.  He always wanted the members to enjoy themselves, loved a good humorous speech or anecdote and would have been the first person clapping, laughing and cheering if I delivered a good, funny speech.  So I think that I will have to dry my eyes after whatever remarks are included in the welcome speech and do my best to deliver the biggest laugh ever.  That is what he would have wanted and I am going to give it my best shot.

Next weekend, I will be in San Jose, Burlingame and Vallejo.

Head Firmly Attached

While I would love to blame technology for the lateness of this week's blog, I cannot do that because it is just that I have been completely swamped.  Work has been crazy last week and this week and will be crazy again next week too and some evenings have been eaten by OES conference calls for different things.  I think I've eaten lunch and dinner at my desk four of five days last week and this week again and it is truly sad when you think to yourself that going home at 8:00 pm seems early.  Luckily, my head is still firmly attached to my neck and shoulders, so I have not lost it yet, but maybe later. :-)

This past weekend we continued the Official Visits, completing the standard "Three in the North" set, which is the same as the "Three in the South" set for the other part of the state.  I do have some sympathy for one of our Districts in the North.  They've been in the top three almost every other year for a while and are going to be in the top three next year and two years after that too, so they are probably getting used to having an early OV.

This week has also been filled with comments and thoughts on timing.  It is a terribly awkward, but totally necessary, truth that all the planning for future years has to be done in the present, but because the future people are not the current people, you don't want the planning to interefere with, or hurt the feelings of, those whose time is now.  In other organizations that have either multiple year terms or in which less is dependent on "whose year" it is and more is dependent on an overall plan, the changing from year to year is less jolting and less intrusive.  Unfortunately, our system until now has not been great on multi-year planning or in easing the transition from year to year.  We are starting to try to standardize some things now and hope to standardize more in the months and years ahead.  But there are some inherent difficulties in doing so which we hope we can overcome.

One of the tough ones is the level of "traditional" secrecy between years on issues that perhaps need to become things discussed with all the Grand Line.  An example of this is the selection of Deputy Grand Matrons.  These are one year appointments and no one wants to change that because it is important to see how people do.  But not only is there a tradition of changing every year, which works against having people serve for more than a year and learn their job better, but there is also a tradition that the Associate Grand Matron and Patron don't talk with anyone else about their choices.  So how can you pick people that other people might find acceptable to serve again if the people in line behind you have no input or say into who is chosen?  To look seriously at a multi-year system requires sharing ideas between the Grand Line officers on who should be chosen.  That is a big change and some might say a scary one.

This weekend, I will be in Simi Valley, Ventura and Atascadero.