Spring Fun Night

The PTA Spring Fun Night was held last Saturday evening. I had volunteered to be on the planning committee back in January, but because of bad weather, the committee didn't meet till mid February. As usual, the group was short on volunteers, and long on ideas. I offered to handle ticket sales, thinking I would sit there and collect tickets the night of the event. Much to my dismay, the job entailed all the logistics of pre-selling tickets to a two campus community distributed all over the city of Istanbul. It also meant dealing with large sums of money and keeping track of numbers--jobs to which I am not at all well suited. But! I had wanted to get involved in something that would get me out of the house and working with people, and this fit the bill nicely.

When I take on a project, I love the planning part. I enjoy getting down on paper, how to get from point A to point B, creating forms, making lists, and even writing letters. I hate the worry that every new project brings. Have I done it the right way, will it be successful, have I forgotten something....all those niggling worries and doubts that plague us all in the wee hours of the night. Added to that, was the fact that the event was hitting it's stride about the time I had visitors, and was grinding to completion the week I went home to Houston.

I arrived back in Istanbul 3 days before the event, and hit the ground running. Like every volunteer event I've ever been concerned with, the last 48 hours are filled with last minute details and disasters that need to be addressed, and I could hardly keep up with the phone calls and emails that were flying back and forth between committee members all day Friday. On Saturday, Jim and I arrived early to set up. Wait, I should say, we traveled together, but when Jim took one look at the mass of confusion in the room, he decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and quickly disappeared downstairs. I couldn't blame him. One Turkish woman was directing several workmen in hanging swathes of tulle all over the room. A German family was dutifully blowing up helium balloons and tying them to resemble flowers. Others were hauling up crates of silent auction items to be displayed, and amidst it all, the service help were setting up tables, glassware and cutlery for the evening. With only three hours before the guests were to arrive, I couldn't imagine how everything was going to get done in time.

But of course, it did. The evening was billed as a fundraiser, and the 85 TL each price tag started the profits. However, it included a full course buffet, with unlimited cocktails---the only PTA I have ever been connected with that allowed alcohol. Along with the silent auction, there were ongoing raffle tickets being sold for on the spot prizes, bingo, a "Name that Picture" game, and a quiz night sheet--which every man playing used their high tech phones with which to google the answers! Later, an oldies band provided great music for dancing.

The night was an unqualified success! Despite the cat fight I had to break up at the silent auction table, everyone seemed to have a great time, as it was well into the wee hours of the night before the party broke up. I don't think Jim nor I have had so much fun since we came to Istanbul. The taxi we took home dropped us off at the gate and the guards took one look at us and decided we were in no shape to walk up the hill, so they put us on the back of their golf cart and drove us. The size of my headache on Sunday was in direct proportion to the amount of fun I had the night before.

On Wednesday we had a committee meeting, where I learned that we made somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 profit! But even more meaningful to me, was the warmth with which I was greeted by everyone, and the feeling of camraderie that a group has for one another when a project has come to a successful conclusion.

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