BigEvent = Holy Crap! (part 1)

I am writing this at 3:30 a.m. the night after the annual Big Literary Event. I tried to go to sleep at 12:30 and then woke at 3 a.m. with the adrenaline still working on me like Bolivian marching powder. I just had a shot of some Canadian whiskey that my father gave me last Christmas – the only alcohol in the house – to take the edge off. I hate that crap. Still I needed to do something.

My anxiety nearly overwhelmed me. I was very close to curling into a corner screaming and crying. I was eating my own head and digesting my own heart.

How can I explain in this short forum how much pressure I felt and how much nearly went wrong?

To begin, I got to the office yesterday morning, the morning of the BigEvent, knowing that there were changes to the program script to the Big Literary Event. What I didn’t know is that the night before I had sent the wrong version of the script to the president of our board, who had commented on it and sent it back. In addition she had sent it around to two other board members. So on a day when I shouldn’t have even been in the office I was spending two hours making changes to the script and hoping that I didn’t bruise any egos when they found out that we wouldn’t be using the draft they commented on. I did what damage control I could beforehand, but this feeling of waiting to be pounced on by board members loomed all day. Eventually it happened, but I’ll tell that tale when I get to it.

After driving in the rain to the Historic hotel in downtown Los Angeles, me and my small team got going putting together the gift bag. Now this bag weighs about twenty pounds. It is canvas and included a book by Gore Vidal as well as books by four of our literary winners, three magazines (Including a magazine weighing three pounds! We weighed it!), a very new biography of a blacklist collaborator/film director, and five postcards. This was the manual labor that consumed my day. Luckily we were able to get the wonderful, magnificent folks at the hotel to actually move the bags from the staging area to the room and they also put the bags under the seats. Those guys rock and they are great. Always do your events there. (I will comment now on my co-worker who wanted more help putting the bags together, help that would have come from the silent auction team. Understandably she wanted help. But I had to keep telling her that the silent auction is fundraising. The gift bags are not, and silent auction comes first. Ultimately, of course it all got done.)

Now we come to the soul churner, the seemingly never-ending bamboo under fingernail treatment. There’s this thing called the tribute book. It’s eighty pages long. It’s the program for the event, listing everything that happens. It’s also has essays on all the important awards, excerpts of the literary winners, and, most important, advertisements bought by our donors. Our printer told us that the book would be there on Tuesday, the day before the event. The book didn’t come on Tuesday. And by the time I got to the hotel at noon on Wednesday, the book still wasn’t there. Our event was in six and a half hours. I called the printer. He was still putting it together. He told me two-thirty. I was worried. It wasn’t my project like it was my responsibility, but I did much of the work writing the book and I had some control about how it was handled. It got to the printer late. I could have gotten it there sooner, and really I should have worked much harder to get it there sooner. Anyway. It needed to be there. If there’s no book, then the sponsors who bought ads would get very, very mad. So mad we might not get money from them. Two-thirty and three o’clock roll around. Still no books. I call the printer. It’s three o’clock, three and half hours before the start of the event. The printer tells me something like, “We’re still gluing them. They will be there at four-thirty.” Oh, god. This is the point when I started feeling the doomed gut feeling that I’ve only had in the past during life-changing personal failure. I was flipping out inside.

About this time I spent a half-hour on the phone with a board member who insisted on making script changes. It was too late, I told her, the script is done. We have no computer here. She pitched me on it. I told her I didn’t have the equipment. She insisted. Ultimately she and my boss agreed that she could bring in a replacement page. Half an hour. Like I’ve got nothing better to do. I returned to the assembly of the gift bags. I was close to tears although I don’t think it showed.

Four rolls around. No tribute books. I call the printer. He’s sending some other smaller things. But not the tribute book.

Five comes. Sweetie calls me. She’s leaving work. She’s going to help with the audio-visual components of the show. We’re an hour and a half out. Still no tribute books. Sweetie helped my heart quite a bit. I got a little of my mojo back.

Stay tuned for part 2...