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.