February 16, 1990
Dear Everyone:
I don’t want to say that this group is slow,
but we had our annual
Christmas Potluck Lunch yesterday.
A trifle late.
Actually, when we “couldn’t” have it at Christmas (the result of poor
planning on some people’s part), it was decided to change it to
Valentine’s Day. You’ll
notice that we didn’t exactly get it on the mark there, either.
Could be worse, of course.
For instance, we had our official Christmas Luncheon at a nice
restaurant on January 31st.
That was the closes we could get to meeting for lunch “around”
Christmas. We had barbecued
ribs, a traditional Yuletide favorite.
On the other hand, by having our Christmas Potluck
Lunch in the middle of February, “Ashley Holtz” was able to get us a “King
Cake” to go with it.
This is something associated with Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where
“Ashley” has lived most of his
life.
A King Cake is something you have between Epiphany
and Lent. It actually is
more like a big cinnamon roll than a cake; at least, this one was.
Traditionally, the cake commemorates the Three Kings who honored
the Christ Child. On Twelfth
Night, someone bakes a cake and it is served to family and guests.
But watch it – there’s a “prize” hidden somewhere inside the
cake. Originally, this was a
coin which would be used to pay for the next cake.
Whoever gets the piece of cake with the coin in it provides the
next cake. This goes on, on
a more or less weekly basis, until Ash Wednesday.
After a while the coin was changed to a pecan or
other nut. More recently, a
very small porcelain doll.
Lately, the bakeries use little plastic dolls.
Any way you look at it, bite down
carefully until you’re sure
someone else has gotten the prize.
I suspect a lot of those coins went to pay for broken teeth.
Still, it was nice of “Ashley” to get it for us.
He ordered it air express.
In other news…
Yesterday, we watched a couple of Video Arts films
on making meetings more productive.
Video Arts, if you don’t know it, means
John Cleese, who is
probably better known for his work at Monty Python and his performances
in movies like A Fish Called
Wanda. But he also
writes and stars in personnel and training films; he’s a partner in
Video Arts.
The Company Learning Center recently acquired a
pair of such films:
Meetings, Bloody Meetings and
More Bloody Meetings.
Each is about a half-hour long and they’re mildly amusing.
(Actually, the funny parts are where you see yourself in the
vignettes. As “Melanie”
said, “they hit the nail on the head every time.”)
We’re guessing that “Chris”, our manager, has been
on “Alma’s” case lately about “communication” and she decided
(blissfully unaware that it’s her communicating that needs work) that we
would all benefit from watching these two videos.
So she ordered the tapes and equipment and scheduled us to watch
them yesterday morning.
During the fist tape,
Meetings, Bloody Meetings,
which covers the mechanics of productive meetings (or meeting
productively), “Alma” kept hopping up from her chair to run back to her
office. (I’ve known
two-year-olds with longer attention spans.)
So she sort of missed the best jokes which were when we’d all
look at her chair and nod – yes, that’s exactly how she does meetings
(i.e., wrong!).
During the second tape, which deals with the people
side of meetings, she stayed in her chair and pointedly read through the
Learning Center booklet as if to say, “all of this is beneath me, but if
I have to sit here, at least I’m not wasting time watching the tape.”
Following this little performance, we had an
impromptu meeting about our weekly “status” meeting and on which day of
the week we should hold it.
The problem, of course, is that we all have so many
other meetings to go to that
it’s hard to all get together for the weekly meeting.
After that, we went back to our rooms and added up
how many of the films’ rules “Alma” had managed to break in under half
an hour. This give us a new
incentive to attend meetings:
We can keep score of the number of times “Alma” puts her foot in
it. This is a lot more fun
than paying attention to whatever it is we’re supposed to be meeting
about, right?
Speaking of fun, “Jeannie” and I went down to Palo
Alto last Saturday to attend a Star Trek convention.
Just us and 700 of our closest friends.
The principle guest speaker was
Patrick Stewart who
plays Captain
Jean Luc Picard, of the new Starship Enterprise.
He is also a renowned Shakespearean actor with such a beautiful
voice that “Jeannie” and I agreed we’d be willing to pay money to listen
to him read the phone directory.
He did better than that, answering questions and
recounting how he got into the Royal Shakespeare Company and how he was
picked to play Jean Luc.
According to legend, he was reading samples of various literary styles
as a favor for a friend who was giving a lecture in Southern California.
A Paramount producer was in the audience.
As soon as Stewart opened his mouth, the producer leaned over to
his wife and whispered: “We
just found our captain.”
Another speaker at Saturday’s convention was
Richard Arnold, who is a producer-type person at Paramount.
He did wonderful impressions of
Sean Connery meeting
Whoopi Goldberg for
the first time and told us the story about the Tibetan Monks.
It seems that the
Dalai Lama of
Tibet is a fan of the show.
He asked to visit the set and, of course, they said yes.
They even posted a notice on the bulletin board so people would
be prepared. Now really, if
you saw a notice on the bulletin board reading, “Dalai Lama, next
Tuesday” you’d think it was a joke, too, wouldn’t you?
Nobody took it seriously until he showed up,
complete with entourage of saffron-robed monks, all twenty of them.
Once they got over the initial shock, everybody wanted their
picture taken with the twenty Tibetan Monks.
Usually, it’s the other way around.
All in all, it’s been a week.
Monday’s a holiday and you know what that means:
Sleep until noon!
Love, as always,
Pete
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