Hello Sara

I've been working so hard, so I have also gone on three small trips since the last post about being the audio/visual master for a fundraising gala to make up for it. As someone said, and I'm paraphrasing, when a body is in motion, she stays in motion. Boy, have I been moving fast, and it is such a wonderful feeling.

Some weeks ago, I rented a car to drive to NYC to hang out with my friend Sara - who I met in Sakura Hostel in Tokyo - just to say hi and catch up a little bit. Alice and Lizzie came along, so they were my companions while I navigated, feeding me snacks and water.

We told a very bizarre story in the car about an ancient Chinese scholar who could time travel. The traffic was atrocious at times. We took as many rest stops as we wanted, because we could. It's the being lost and the navigation that's part of the fun, though I had also rented a GPS, which went haywire every time we were on a bridge or in a tunnel.

We compared New York City driving to Boston driving. Actually, both styles are equally as aggressive but in different ways. New Yorkers will not signal and don't care about pedestrians. Bostonians will either be too slow or weave in between lanes and cars like it's a desperate rat race, sometimes getting too close.

We found parking in a garage near Chinatown, and then went to meet Sara. After eating dim sum at Gaga, which has good reviews because the food is good and the interior is pretty in a modern art kind of way, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were around the Indian and Mesopotamian wings, along with the Chinese and Japanese rooms.

The drive back was a semi asleep half silence. We dropped Lizzie off at her house. It was really returning the car to the Enterprise lot that was challenging, because it was a one way street coming out and we had to loop back around several times. By that time, it was after midnight, so while we caught one of the last trains, Alice had to stay over at my house for the night.

Next stop: Miami.

For the Children

Hi! Three months later. While the days have become a little bit of a routine at Phoenix Charter Academy, today was different, because it was the 2013 Benefit Gala. Since PCA is a nonprofit organization, an event like this makes perfect sense. We raised a lot of money - I would guess maybe around $20,000 plus? - though I could never give you an exact amount. Someone else was keeping track; that was not my job.

My job was A/V for the show. Now, I wasn't really in the background so much as tucked into a corner of the stage and running back and forth between there and the projector room, which was past a hallway and tucked into another smaller room. All the materials were prepared for me: Powerpoint slides, music, and even a short film. My main duties were to make sure everyone can see everything in a pretty fashion in the right order, and that the sound was going at the right volume.

That sounds simple, except that the game plan keeps changing because one of the two MCs like to improvise quite a bit. I didn't mind, it kept the show lively. So did the hanging projector which didn't seem to like staying in one set space, so I had to readjust it a few times. So there were about 200 to 300ish people put into this small to moderately sized space with a stage. There were some cocktail tables in front with dainty chairs, but most of the people were standing. Food trays with deliciousness were scattered all around the space, with drinks, tshirts, raffles and other paraphernalia at the edges.

There was dancing, a silent auction and a live auction and some speeches. The speeches were the most moving parts for me. Here we were, in a recovering economy, with so much pessimism going on everywhere, but there are still people out there willing to invest in underprivileged teenagers on the off chance that most of them will turn out okay (despite horror stories like juvey time and drugs). It also reminded us that the day to day work that we do - for me, fixing computers, but for the teachers and tutors, urging young adults to go back to class - has a deep impact, and we are actually making life and circumstances much better for a lot of people.

While the planning was a collaboration between 3 women and took months, the actual implementation only took a few hours, and the modest school building was transformed into a place to entertain and to be entertained. The raffle prizes were impressive, too. Red Sox tickets, Celtics tickets and the signed basketball, cooking classes, trips to different states, and even a band playing live at your house for an hour and a half. The school staff with maybe a handful of students and interns, about less than 150 people, put all of this together - after teaching 5 hrs of classes - within 4 hrs. It amazes me how efficiently people can work and the amount of things they can accomplish when they agree on something.

For me, there was even a short personal span during the day when I accompanied my supervisor and 3 female students to a CVS to shop for pantyhose. The 3 girls were friends, and 2 of them were a lesbian couple, my supervisor did the driving, and then there's me riding shotgun. They were talking about teenaged girl things: gossip, boys, condoms, the tiny variations of colors in different products. This work place is truly like no other, and I can see why the people who can endure the long hours and emotionally demanding workload retrieve so much satisfaction from it. They defy statistics and normal logic in the most steadfast and optimistic ways possible. It's hard not to grow to at least like them a lot.