Last year at about this time, I wrote about a conference I went to in Pasadena, California put on by the organization that gave Homescapes a couple of awards in 2006 and 2007. The group is called ARTS (which stands for Accessories Resource Team) and it’s made up of representatives from all the different segments of the Home Accents industry.
What I like about the conference work-wise is that it’s filled with people who want open, honest communication between wholesellers, retailers, manufacturers and sales reps…so at any given moment you can find yourselves talking about the good, the bad and the ugly in an effort to make things better.
What I like about the conference party-wise is that there’s always something goofy scheduled at the end of the conference where we can let our hair down and have fun. (In my case, the good, the bad and the sweaty of being all dressed up in a room without enough air conditioning.)
Last year they had a Hollywood-themed party with a contest for best costumes. I went as Jon Voight from Midnight Cowboy, and though I looked more like Glen Campbell than Jon Voight, during the judging I did a few stripper moves and garnered enough applause to win a free ARTS conference for 2008.
Did I mention that the alcohol flows freely?
This year they had a Charleston dance-off…which was appropriate considering we were in Charleston. The room was filled with flappers and gangtah’s doing their best to make their mamas proud.
This one was a funny contest for me to participate in. First off, I really liked the tails that they’d supplied for me so I went into the evening promising myself that I wouldn’t dance or even move much so I could keep my dignity and avoid the flop-sweat that usually occurs when I’m trussed up (or in weather above 68 degrees).
But here’s the thing. When I was a kid, my grandparents made me and my brothers swap out the Sears Toughskins for Blue Blazers and take what were called “Winter Dance” classes. (My grandparents had enough Southern in them to think that you needed to Waltz, Rumba and Cha-Cha to have a hope of a chance of growing up to be a gentleman.)
So even though I hadn’t done the Charleston since I was 11, I was a jump ahead of some of my fellow conference attendees in having ever done it at all. The couple hired to show the group how to do the dance did a quick routine and then got to work instructing the folks on how to hop, kick and cross their knees. I watched from the sidelines and tried to keep my promise to myself about sitting out any action that would cause perspiration, but my competitive nature got the better of me and during a break in the lessons I asked one of the instructors to break down their routine for me. Basically she said it was 4 steps repeated 4 times with a bit of freestyling between sets. A cute girl who I hadn’t met yet at the conference named Amber from Progress Lighting must have overheard me grilling the dancer about their routine because just as I was about to go back to my table she asked if I would dance with her.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Amber shimmied and twirled her boa and I sweated to the beat as we out-and-out STOLE the pro’s routine and strutted like it was ours. And instead of being chastised for dance-plagiarism, we were heaped with praise and won our conference fees for next year. Woo Hoo! Yay Us!
Who knew that “Winter Dance” would pay off all these years later. But too bad I ain’t a kid anymore…I was freakin’ sore for THREE DAYS after doing that little routine.
