BigEvent = Rebirth! (this is part 2, read part 1 first!)

5:30 p.m. The biggest fundraiser of the year approches in an hour and it looks like the eighty page program book will not arrive in time. For all the time and money we spent on it this is a disaster. It also means that the guests won't know what's going on, and the funders won't see their ads. This is a BFD.

I am nearly shivering with nerves. Thankfully our room captain has ordered his minions to move the twenty pound gift bags – did I mention that there were 400 of them? - from the staging area into the ball room. They are also placing them under the seats, a separate job. Didn’t have nearly enough people for this thing. There was no way we could have done it ourselves. It’s hard to get volunteers for the middle of the day on a weekday. Thankfully, Kid and her team of eye-rolling undergrads have done a bang-up job on the silent auction and it is now finished. Unfortunately that also means that they are going up to the room to change. No more help. I see the bag stuffers going up to change into their party clothes as well. I can only hope that my team has stuffed enough bags.

I too must go up the room to change. The thing will start soon. I’m wandering around. Not quite blindly. I made photocopies in the hotel business center. At $2.49 a minute it came to $18. That’ll go on the expense sheet. I need to change. The show must go on. I don’t know when it happened that I became the primary contact with the printer. I think no one else wants to know that the iceberg is coming. So. With Sweetie trailing me, she’s my booster tonight, I decide to go up to the room to change. No tribute/progam book. Failure is pushing her arm down my throat and stirring my insides in preparation of ripping my viscera out through my mouth.

But before I do, I decide to make one last call to the printer. Standing outside the valet parking, surrounded by cocktail dresses and sport coats, I call the printer.

“Can I talk to Jim?” I say.
“He wants to talk to you,” the guy who answers the phone says.
A pause.
“Hey, Rabbi, how’s it going? Did you get the poster and the postcards? I sent them over separately?”
“Yeah, Jim, I got them, thank you. What’s up with the tribute book?”
“I sent it over with two guys. I sent two guys in a white van.”
I look up and rounding the corner is a white van.
“It’s a white van?”
“Yeah, I sent two guys…
The van pulls up next to me, blocking half of the valet parking lane. The driver leans out the window.
“You from the printer?” I ask the driver.
“Yeah,” he says.
“They’re here, Jim. Thank you.”

I hang up the phone and me and one of the guys take half the books inside while the driver directs traffic around his lane blocking double – no triple! – parking job. I hold up the sample book for the event planner. Anuses unclench.

The helper and I go back out. We get the last half of the books.

The rest of the event went off well. I showered and changed. Sweetie ironed my shirt. My god I love her. I went downstairs and helped the PR folks round up photo ops.

The last-minute-script-rewriting board member arrive with an insert page for the MC. She gave it to him. Of course when the program actually started he ignored it.

Also, I ran into NK. (Read my summary of my relationship with NK here.) The first thing he said to me was, “I owe you a phone call.” I was so gratified. He had gotten Sandow but hadn’t yet read it. But he said that he would. I told him how I had been fretting about not contacting him directly when I sent Sandow. “Don’t worry. Just keep sending out your stuff,” he said. It was incredibly heartening.

The program went on. Sweetie and I split a meal. Some of the program was awkward, some of the speeches were blah, but it did tend to get better as it went on. And Gore Vidal has more stagecraft than Madonna. Wonderful.

Wonderful.