‘The best party of the season’ — put it on your calendar

I’m not the party-going type, so when I tell you I’m hitting the circuit, it means something. I’ve had a blast attending past Sarasota Magazine parties at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, and I expect this year’s, scheduled for Tuesday, April 23, to be no exception.

Dubbed Glamour in the Garden, the soirée is being promoted as the “best party of the season,” and I believe it. Past events have brought out a who’s-who of local bigwigs and celebrities, and you can’t top the setting: Selby at sunset.

Click on the image below for more details about the event, and to snag your tickets. Tell ‘em M.C. sent you:

Anne-Marie Slaughter headlines this year’s Renaissance Luncheon

If you’re unaware of the myriad offerings of the Women’s Resource Center, a great opportunity to learn more is coming up quickly: On Tues., March 12, the Center hosts its biggest fundraising event of the year — the Renaissance Luncheon — at the Ritz-Carlton.

“For our donors, [the luncheon] lets them know the good programs and services their money is supporting,” Executive Director Janice Zarro explained to me last year. It’s “an opportunity to showcase our values and the impact we are having on our community.”

And that impact is significant.

Each year, nearly 13,000 women take advantage of the Center’s varied programs, which include everything from peer referral counseling, finance education and Excel spreadsheet training to lessons on starting and managing a business. On the personal side, they offer classes in navigating life as a widow, learning yoga, handling divorce, bouncing back from adversity and creating the life you desire – just to name a few.

The Renaissance Luncheon is a cornerstone in helping the Center continue to do what it does for the women of our community and has developed into a can’t-miss event — attracting close to 600 men and women who want to support the Center and draw insights from the outstanding keynote speakers.  The theme for this year’s luncheon is “Redefining Balance,” and the keynote speaker is Anne-Marie Slaughter, the author of the much-discussed and controversial 2012 Atlantic essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.”

The event begins with boutique shopping at 10:30 a.m., followed at noon by lunch and Slaughter’s talk. It also includes drawings for prizes and a silent auction — some of the goodies include a five-course meal for eight, courtesy of Zest! of Sarasota catering.

A ticket for the luncheon will run you $95; you can purchase one online by clicking here.

More Joy in January

Sitting at my desk, immersed in updating content for a client website, all doors and windows open, and outside a bird singing one of the sweetest songs. So sweet, so soft, so near; it draws me away to the doorway and I search the surrounding bushes for the source of that singing. I finally spot a female cardinal, deep in the bush very near. She falls silent when I reach the door. I go back to my desk and realize I can see her easily from here.

She’s hasn’t resumed her singing, but I know she will. And as corny as this sounds, I realize this is joy. “Our truest life is when we are dreams awake.” Henry David Thoreau

Path Financial Facebook blog dedicated to good economic news

We’re so inundated with economic news each day — good news, bad news, who’s up, who’s down — my tendency is to sometimes just ignore the whole shebang, but one of my clients is trying to help folks zero in on the important positive news out there.

Path Financial (whom I’m very proud to call a client) just launched a new Facebook page called the Better News Blog, where the company is plucking out and highlighting important positive stories from around the web. Here’s how Better News defines its mission:

The purpose of the Better News Blog is to share smart, well-sourced, and solidly-researched news articles and stories that stress the positive side of things. While we mostly focus on economic and market issues, we also provide links to general interest stories that we find inspiring or noteworthy.

News outfits, talking heads and high-drama pundits are dedicated to selling “bad” news. The Better News Blog wants to share with you good news you can use instead.

If you’re as in to sharing good news and focusing our energies in positive ways as much as I am (or at least as much as possible!), help me spread the word for my client’s new page by “liking” it on Facebook: Click here and “Like” — and read the positive news coming your way!

Joy joy joy

Yesterday and this morning, feeling pretty awful on a personal basis and then, sullenly checking in with facebook, saw this and my world changed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbJcQYVtZMo

Sarasota Film Fest Hopeful: Racing the Rez

Even if I weren’t best friends with the director, Racing the Rez would be on my must-watch list. The documentary follows the stories of two high school cross country racing teams in Northern Arizona, where tribal bragging rights and a state championship are on the line. But it’s also a peek into a culture we rarely get to see — that of the Navajo and Hopi who live on America’s largest reservation. By following these boys, we’re really following a whole community.

I met the director, Brian Truglio, when I was at Bucknell University on a poetry scholarship and when he was running a monthly poetry discussion forum called the Full Moon Poets Society. We’ve been best friends ever since. Brian first visited the Navajo Nation in 1991, and taught there for a number of years.

Racing the Rez picked up a Best Documentary award at the Arlington International Film Festival, and has been broadcast several times in many states, including here in Florida. I heartily recommend checking it out. The best way to find out if the film’s showing on your screen soon is to follow the film’s Facebook page. Brian regularly posts there about when and where the film can be seen.

He’s applied to next year’s Sarasota Film Festival as well, so (fingers crossed) you might even be able to see the film on the big screen.

TEDxSarasota: An excellent adventure

Here’s something to put on your calendar: TEDxSarasota, an independently organized version of the famous TED talks that generate online buzz every time a new one’s posted. The speakers for the December event are your usual lineup of usual talking heads until you get to one name some of you might know: Theresa Rose, a former “Sex in the Suburbs” columnist at Creative Loafing, who wrote intrepidly of her peeks into online porn and and the role bleach can play in bring a couple closer, who is now a full-time inspirational performer with a deep passion for hula-hooping. The Hoop Woman, as she is now sometimes billed, is still sharing her intrepid and infectious enthusiasm for life but she’s doing it with a hoola hoop. She’s bound to liven up the event.

On Dec. 12 (12/12/12, get it?), Theresa will be addressing the TEDx throngs and the title of her talk? “The Hoop Revolution: How Joyful Movement Will Transform the World.” She recently posted about the stress of preparing for the event over on her blog; here’s a snippet:

In two weeks, I am going on one of the most important dates of my life, and his name is TED.

On 12/12/12 (World Hoop Day!), I will be delivering a TEDTalk at TEDxSarasota called “The Hoop Revolution: How Joyful Movement Will Transform the World”. As I write this, I am deep in the throes of a five-alarm freak-out, doing my very level best to keep my @!%* together. Within 18 innocent inches of these clicking fingers lays (or is it lies?) my tattered TED script, complete with hoop choreography notes that aren’t even close to being incorporated. I’m terrified that while on my Date of All Dates, I will do one of more of the following: forget everything I am supposed to say, sound like a colossal moron, or experience the greatest fear of all hoopers — drop my hoop. It feels like the three nerve-wracking hours immediately before the biggest night of one’s life, still looking unbelievably scary in the bathroom mirror. We know that eventually we’ll create a miracle and be fabulous, but at that particular moment it seems like we’d all be lucky if we got out of the whole darned thing without wetting ourselves.

Click here to read the rest, and be sure to hit up TEDxSarasota.

Regifting good

Kindness is the one gift that should always be regifted. It’s a gift no one would ever be offended to receive knowing it had first belonged to someone else. And it’s a gift that once made, the giver would undoubtedly only be pleased if you passed it along to someone else.

I gave a talk on Friday — 90 or so people in the audience — and spoke at one point about the extraordinary generosity of my Reality Chick, Reality Online, and Sense and the City readers who, over the years, have contributed thousands and thousands of dollars during my annual fundraising drives for All Faiths Food Bank. I told the audience that my fee for the day’s talk was going straight to All Faiths, since every year I donate whatever I earn during the month of November from speaking and newspaper writing fees to All Faiths. (If you’d like to participate in this year’s drive or just learn more, click here.) I spoke about kindness and caring for everyone in our community — about the incredible need many are facing and I related times in my life, too, when I’d been in need and strangers had stepped up to help me.

After my talk, as I was preparing to leave, a woman approached me and pressed a check into my hands. “Your talk today moved me,” she said; and she asked me to make sure to send along her check, which she had just written, with mine when I send it in to All Faiths.

Such an unexpected kindness. Such an appreciated gesture. And her contribution will make a tangible difference to several someones in the upcoming weeks in our community. That’s the perfect regifting scenario: the group was kind enough to hire and pay me to speak; I was kind enough to earmark the fee for All Faiths; a stranger in the audience was kind enough to amplify those kindnesses with her own donation. Who know where this one small strand of kindness — begun when this group was kind enough to invite a column-less columnist to speak — will end?

All Faiths Food Bank 2012

As I do every year, I’m donating all income I receive for talks I give and any columns of mine that are published during the month of November straight to All Faiths Food Bank.

If you’d like to participate in the MC “Reality” All Faiths Food Bank fundraising drive this year — there are two easy ways to do so:

Online: Visit www.allfaithsfoodbank.org (just write “MC’s Reality drive” in the special instructions box).

Mail: Send a check, with the same notation — MC’s reality drive”, to All Faiths Food Bank, 8171 Blaikie Court, Sarasota, Florida 34240-8321.

If you’d like to learn more about past years’ drives and read stories about giving and receiving … just click here.

Adios, Sarasota small businesses

Despite all the hoopla about the improving economy, Sarasota is in the midst of yet another round of small business closures, and we’re losing several spots that have defined this city for years, if not decades:

• Sarasota Hardware: This local hardware shop has been a fixture on Main Street since 1934, but it’s closing its doors because of the sharp decline in contractor business over the last few years. Kind of amazing it held out for so long against the Home Depots of the world.
• Super Value Nutrition: Right down Main from Sarasota Hardware, this lil vitamin shop isn’t closing for good, just packing up and heading down to the Landings. Still, it’s a huge blow for all those who wish Sarasota’s downtown could be more walkable and liveable. Where else in the downtown core can you grab commissary items on the go?
• Media on Main: The combination computer store/bookstore/café that replaced the much-loved and much-missed Sarasota News & Books has been dark for ages, leaving one of downtown’s prettiest spots (right on the corner of Main and Palm) vacant. A shame.
• The Golden Apple Dinner Theatre: This for-profit dinner theater had been entertaining Sarasota audiences in the heart of downtown (right off of Main — notice a trend?) for four decades, but the theater was evicted last month. The venue had been struggling to get by for years, but to see an eviction notice posted outside is crushing.
• Circle Books: You know how much I love bookstores, particularly independent ones that carry unique titles, the kinds of places where you can always hear a friendly recommendation from behind the counter. So I was beyond bummed to find out that St. Armands’ Circle Books has shut its doors. It was a beacon of intelligent life in an otherwise drab outdoor shopping mall, and it will be missed. Besides just slinging books, Circle worked with organizations like Forum Truth to bring in sharp authors for lectures and book-signings. Sarasota’s intellectual life just got a little duller.

So it goes, I guess. Let’s just hope that some smart entrepreneurs take up the challenge and fill these voids. Sarasota is losing a huge chunk of its history and its character, and we should do everything we can to keep our city from turning into one giant, bland strip mall.