There's to be a line dancing jamboree in Silver City next June, the first to be held here, as I understand it. It's going to be expensive to put on so between now and then there'll be a variety of fund-raising efforts. The first is on Tuesday October 28th, when for six dollars you can buy an enchilada dinner with bread and salad, with egg and onions optional. Along with the other beginner line dancers, I was given an order sheet with space for 20 dinner purchasers to list their names, delivery address if they weren't picking up, whether or not they wanted onions and/or eggs and if they did, whether they wanted them OE or SSU. A grand total of 466 dinners were sold, none of them by me - an impressive total considering there are only 10,000 people in the town.
I missed the planning meeting for the dinner as I was in New York, so was a bit vague on the details. All I knew was anyone willing to help was to show up at the senior center on Sunday "to help wrap silverware in napkins." It sounded a lot less labor-intensive than gathering wood and as with my Jupiter in Virgo I live to serve, I
was there on time at 1:30 ready to wrap.
There were a dozen or so women bustling around in the kitchen and another dozen already in place on an assembly line, opening loaf after loaf of sliced bread and putting two pieces into little Ziploc bags. On a table in the middle of the room were stacks of styrofoam boxes and a woman with a clipboard explaining to a dozen very serious looking women what to do - work from the order sheets, write the recipient's name and delivery address on the outside top of the box and write O, OE or SSU on the inside, check off each box on the order sheet, be sure to keep all deliveries to the same place together etc. etc. - way too complicated for a Sunday afternoon.
On a table all by themselves were 12 boxes each of plastic knives and forks, no napkins. Evidently Lucinda had told Edith Ann she had bought them but had told Caroline she hadn't because they were cheaper at Walmart, and nobody knew where Lucinda was to confirm. A discussion about whether the egg marking should go inside or outside the box was heating up at the clipboard table, complete with top flipping demonstration, and I backed off into the kitchen, asking the first person I saw if there was anything I could do to help.
Cheese, she said, and handed me a pair of latex gloves, a hairnet and a 18-inch long 8-inches in diameter orange roll, to be cut into pieces small enough to go into the spout of a food processor for grating. For the next hour and a half I stood in between two whirring Cuisinarts and sliced up that wheel and another four. When one of the machines burned out it was decided we could all take small amounts of cheese home for grating there, so long as all grated cheese was at the Knights of Columbus Hall by 6 am on Tuesday morning. By studiously beginning to clean bits of trodden-in cheese off the tile floor, I was able to ensure all bags of cut cheese had been apportioned out before I was finished.
As if in retribution for my deviousness, when I snuck cheese-less out the door and took off my latex gloves, a large chunk of skin came off my index finger with them, revealing a half-inch blister. Suitably Neosporined and Band-Aided, I can rest up on Monday for delivery day on Tuesday.
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