jwg

Ah the life of a retiree who volunteers for lots of stuff....

On Friday I met with Chris, the Queen Mum of Lavender Country and Folk Dancers (LCFD) to start thinking about what we could do with the money to be raised at this summer's fund raising dance community weekend camp at Eastfield Village, an 18th century reconstruction. We expect to raise as much as 2-3 thousand dollars. The money would best be used for outreach and publicity about our dances and there are lots of possible projects. One thing we want to do is to preserve all our archival VHS tapes from past dance camps. A serious video might be a good asset to develop - I've seen a couple of really good ones done by people in the straight dance community.

Later we and several others including rsc met for a post-mortem for our food booth at NEFFA (the New England Folk Festival) so that next year we can raise more money and make life easier. This year we made $765 which beat last year's $400 but was way below three years ago's ~$2000. In addition to the six of us, we had good input from several other people. We had the only American Food booth there - even though was called Italian - we served Pasta with meat or vegan meat balls, salad, hot dogs, iced tea and lemonade but there were infinite number of combos's and specials and sizes. We decided a few things - from the top of my head:
-make the menu simpler to make it easier for the server, the cashier, and the customer.
-purchase from Costco instead of the institutional food vendor we used
-add Pesto sauce as an option to Marinara (someone contributed - as a Gay man I hate selling bland food)
-have some simple sweet thing to sell such as M&M packets
-change our sign to make it clear that purchasing from us supports our dances (many of the vendors are small merchants)
-set prices more wisely (we actually raised prices late on Saturday and estimated that had we used the higher prices we would have made a $1050.

On Saturday, the Cambridge Lavender Alliance (CLA) had its 15th annual Cambridge Pride brunch (I am an organizer of it). This is the Queers take over City Hall event. It was lots of fun. My role was to do a postcard mailing. I use the US PostOffice systems mailing on line where you merely have to upload a mailing list and a document and they do all the work for a reasonable price.

Then it was down to the Pride festival where we Contra and English Country danced on the desert Common as reported by rsc & pinkfish. My organizational role was to prepare a flier for saturday nights dance and to provide input on our two dance groups to the EM who prepared a nice brochure.

Then on Sunday it was an LCFD board meeting. I am the treasurer so I had a fair amount of preparation to do for it. The meeting was productive (however, I have more work to do!)

And today I updated the CLA mailing list with new names we gathered at Pride, I reconciled the per-dance spread sheet and Quicken file for Boston Gender Free English (I am also the treasurer) which was a slight mess but now everything is OK.

Oh, I also rewrote a letter from the Cambridge GLBT Commision (I am a co-chair) to the School Department about reinstating the staff for Project 10 East, the high school GayStraight alliance. Lots more to be done there I am sure.

And I expect if someone at tonight's English Country Dance asks "what's new?", I'll say "nothing".

And on a different front, the daylillies are starting to bloom, the strawberries are almost ripe, and lots of grass needs cutting but it is too wet. And if we weren't going in to Boston to dance, I suspect we'd have a fire tonight which would be a change yesterday's 90 degree high.