My Inner Smarm

God. Three days of intense rushing about. The Indianapolis Children's Choir is going to New York in March, and the trip will cost $1700. DANG! But Ethan will be able to sing at Carnegie Hall if we can make this happen. He'll also get to do all the other New York-y stuff like seeing a Broadway show (lucky!), and touring Ellis Island, and Chinatown, and all kinds of other fun stuff. With his friends. Not his parents.

But $1700! Egad!

We could sell 5 million tons of candy, wrapping paper, plants, and baked goods, but I. REFUSE. I hate that shit.

OR... I could try to sell ad space in the program brochure, at $250, $550, or $1000 a pop, depending on the size, and Ethan gets 50% of each sale. So that's definitely the route we want to take.

I, however, being a fairly recent choir mom, was unfamiliar with this process, AS WELL AS misinformed, because I was told we couldn't start selling space until the spring. For some reason. But I found out on Monday that we could sell up until THIS FRIDAY! September 30th!

I have spent the last few days wracking my brain and my husband's brain, and hitting up every local business person I have worked for, or supported with my consumer dollars, as well as a few friends. I have run copies of contracts, and last year's program, and run around town getting lost delivering copies, and being late to pick up carpool, and spent countless minutes leaving messages and taking messages, and writing heartfelt (read: manipulative) two page letters to former employers, and now I'm just waiting... waiting...

Seriously, by yesterday afternoon, you'd have thought from my spiel that I'd been working in marketing for 20 years. I'm that good. Heh.

I've got pretty good prospects at: my son's school; a dinner theatre where I used to work; a local kids' haircut place; a darling, local, kids'-themed-birthday-throwing business; a generous and loving photographer friend of mine; and a mortgage broker gal who married my husband's friend even though she clearly still has the hots for my husband (as evidenced by the fact that at their wedding 2 summers ago, she delivered all of her vows to Andy, over her fiance's shoulder - and this hilarity was captured on film)(and don't think I wasn't ok with him using his masculine wiles to try to wrangle us some dough, nosiree).

I've got until Friday. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you are poor, and want to make something amazing happen for your kid. I can enter the capitalist marketplace with gusto, and an eerie acumen for confident salesmanship. Salespersonship?

Heh. Of course the lingo will trip me up every time. Silly me.

On a less boring note, Charlotte likes hats! She's getting her 8th tooth, and she's cranky, and as I was carting her around this evening, I pulled open her hat drawer (they have remained in the drawer up to this point because she has always had enough hair not to require a hat, even on the sunniest days, and also because she would immediately pull off anything I put on her head), and stuck a little pink jobbie on her head and showed her her reflection in the mirror, and she was enchanted! She points now, too, which is totally cute. So she was giggling and pointing, and I put another hat on my own head, which she thought was HI-LARIOUS, and pretty soon we were holding a fashion show for the boys, who humored us politely. Because we are fashion girls!

Hats! I wonder if I can pass along my obsession with vintage coats, too. Heh heh heh.