PLA Blog

There are three notable times in my life that I’ve been a volunteer on stage: as Ophelia in Reduced Shakespeare Company’s production called “The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged)”; for various library training programs; and today when one of the nine volunteered men called out “Any Woman” as his contribution to “Call out the name of a woman you know in the audience.”

I was on stage with Ella Jenkins, who was the main draw for High Tea sponsored by Music Online for Public Libraries. Ms. Jenkins started with nine men on stage in a circle doing “Miss Mary Mack, all dressed in black” and ended up with two women from India, one woman from near New Orleans, two children, and various other public librarians.

And wouldn’t you know it; my cell phone went off, which is a minuet of some sort, I think. Fortunately, there were no speakers or mikes on us, the 20 or so gathered volunteers, so the only people (I hope) that heard my cell phone go off were the people around me. I knew who it was and what the message would pertain to: my boss, with our “meeting place” for dinner.

The meeting was supposed to be at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, but when I got there, there was a sign saying it had moved. The bell captain repeated the directions to me at least five times. I got them wrong four times and said, “I’m so tired,” and he just smiled and repeated the directions in his beautiful accent. Finally, I got the directions and about halfway down the block I met up with two other librarians that were headed to the same event.

Hint that I hope to follow up on: there’s a beauty school across the street from the convention center where they’ll do your hair for $6. The librarian who tipped me off looked great and said it relieved her shoulder and neck tension.

Tags: conferences, PLA, PLA2006

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.