BYU Management Society Dinner

 I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I had volunteered to help out with this annual dinner.  It's held each Spring at the Crystal Gateway Marriott and is held to acknowledge scholarship recipients as well as honoring others.

 So Thursday afternoon I met Judy (who is organizing this little extravaganza) at Wilson Florist to pick up all the flowers.  Jean, who owns the floral shop is in Judy's stake and had designed the floral arrangements for us and the other volunteers to put together the following day at Judy's house.  The Marriott had let us borrow the tall vases.  The table cloths were a shiny silver so Jean had designed the arrangements in a red and white motif.....which turned out to be pretty funny when we opened the door and all these BYU graduates came in.....a sea of RED awaited them!  Anyway, Judy and I got quite a bit done on Thursday between cutting flowers, misting, cutting and gluing the shiny beading for the vases so we were in really good shape when all the volunteers arrived Friday morning. In fact what was scheduled to be most of the day & evening turned into just a couple of hours allowing me to run a few errands out in her neck of the woods.

 

We got there early on Saturday to put everything together and the tables turned out beautifully. Our guest speaker was Sheri Dew who had sent enough books that every attendee got two as favors in their gift bags.

Really bad photo or they're all being translated......

Entertainment was by the Mormon Choir of DC who did a couple of songs then Sheri Dew spoke. She was terrific and really spoke off the cuff about men and women in the workplace.  She spoke of being unmarried and her struggles with that, and how she often has to speak about the power that the LDS church gives women in a world that perceives them as being persecuted.  I didn't get the impression that she planned on talking about that, but I could be wrong.  Anyway, I thought she was awesome.

Sheri Dew

It took us some time to break everything down at the end but it was fun giving away the flowers to all the volunteers who had helped and everyone was thrilled with their gift bags.  The Metro leaves right from the lobby of the hotel and man, oh man, were my feet killing me.  I took the long ride home to just relax and to gather up enough foot strength to finish the walk home from the metro to our apartment.  Rolled in about 11:30 pm and enjoyed a nice hot bath after a great evening.