It was 7pm on a Friday, and my sparkly stilettos were on the floor of an art school bathroom as I tried to scrub bandage residue off my ankles. How does someone get to this point, you might ask? Let's rewind.
Yesterday was community service day at work so I got in very early to take care of some deskwork before I had to be out for the day. In came in to an email from a BOC friend that she had a family emergency and wouldn't be at Alcina that evening. I took a few minutes to chat with her, send a few emails making sure everything was taken care of for Alcina, and calm my stupid emotions because I get all turbulent whenever I hear sad news from any of my friends.
We set off for our service opportunity around 9 and arrived at the senior center not long after that. The idea of the service day was to give the students a chance to engage in "ministry of presence" as we call it, just being with the clients of these agencies and keeping them company. Groups went to different elder care agencies all over the city. Most agencies have a volunteer coordinator or activities director, and when we arrived ours was nowhere to be found. The woman at the front desk seemed somewhat annoyed to see us, and I explained who we were and why we were there as I watched the bus pull away.
Without going into too much more detail, I will give you the extent of our interaction with the activities director: She got there late, asked me to introduce our group to the agencies clients, and then disappeared for 3 hours. NOT HELPFUL.
We survived the morning with a few awkward moments, and of course my guys were great. We got back to the school around 12:50 completely famished (I'm used to eating lunch at 11 am!) and there had been a communication error and there was no food.
Anyone who works in ministry knows as food goes, so goes the day, and luckily we managed to pull together a popcorn chicken situation which didn't help me very much but was good for everyone else. I had a half a plate of rice and a bag of chips in hopes that would fill me up a bit.
The rest of the day was a daze because I was a. tired from the morning and b. still famished. You know that feeling when you come down with something really quickly and you go from fine to sick in about 10 minutes? Those 10 minutes were from 1:35-1:45. I left work as soon as I could and stopped at Au Bon Pain on the way home to buy a ton of food. I went home, put on sweats, ate 3 meals worth of ABP, and started getting caught up on 30 Rock.
But there was a problem: I had been asked to speak at Alcina in the place of the woman who couldn't be there that night. So I was exhausted and felt like junk, my hair looked terrible and I had nothing to wear. The hair went up in rollers and I started rifling through the closet for a dress that I hadn't already work 100 times for BOC stuff. I chopped my ankles up with the razor (hence the bandage residue) and hoped that tons of eyeliner would distract people from the fact that I was not quite in the shape I should be to wear the dress I did.
I'll tell you the truth, when my term as president ended a few weeks ago, I was excited to not feel on display at productions anymore. I could wear what I wanted, come and go as I pleased, and no one would recognize me from curtain speeches. Last night I had to take one for the team, trying to make myself presentable at the last minute and pulling a dress from the archives to engage in what I always considered the president's most important task: Telling audience members where the bathrooms are.
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