February 20, 2008

Quite often, I hear comments and feedback regarding my column and I wanted to thank everyone for reading it and those of you who take the time to tell me how much you enjoy it and look forward to it every week.  I've begun to notice that every compliment I hear is usually followed by the sentence "I never thought Rotary was so fun!"  This was especially true after hearing about the Rotary Trivia tournament several weeks ago!  In fact, many people have confessed that they thought Rotary would be a stodgy and boring affair that consisted exclusively of older people and on top of that, how much fun could community service be?  After all, if community service, along with fines and jail time, are among the punishments that judges can impose on law-breakers, how glamorous could it be?  

 

I'm very happy to be able to contradict these assumptions since, as you can see from my descriptions, Rotary meetings are anything but dull and boring and Rotary makes serving the community not only painless, but an incredibly great time.  And our local Rotary club is lively enough to have attracted fun, friendly, and fascinating members of all ages, though I have to admit to being the youngest!  Here are just a couple examples of the ways in which the Deposit Rotary Club and Rotary International have a great time raising funds to help others in our local and global communities.

 

First of all, at a recent lunch meeting, club secretary Rick Zacharias read the minutes of the Rotary Board of Directors meeting held the previous evening.  One of the matters of new business that had been discussed was the pink flamingo situation.  Apparently, some of Rotary's pink flamingo assets were in disrepair and new flamingos had to be procured so as to preclude the possibility of a dreaded flamingo shortage and thus avoid the risk of our fine club suffering the embarrassment of being represented by less-than-healthy looking large pink plastic birds.  Thankfully, the club was adequately reassured of the state of its flamingo holdings.  I hope to have accurately portrayed that part of the meeting considering that this columnist may have missed some of the important pink flamingo details while he was taking his notes, distracted by fits of laughter.  A dull meeting it certainly wasn't!

 

I also wanted to mention that Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland livened up their flood relief fundraising efforts by holding a glamorous fashion show during London's fashion week back in September.  Attended by all sorts of celebrities and featuring the modeling talents of Naomi Campbell, Lily Cole, Claudia Shiffer, Elle Macpherson, Fergie (the Duchess of York), Faye Dunaway, and Sting, top designers such as Chanel, Emilio Pucci, and Versace contributed garments and helped Rotary raise one million British pounds (about US$2,000,000).  Rotarians are experts at achieving the best results from their community service initiatives by getting people involved and having a fabulous time!