Crashing Parties = Good Times

I was poking around on the City of Oakland’s website researching and digging for information for our assignments, when I ran across the mayor’s calendar. I thought, “Wow, is this guy (the mayor) really not making any public appearances after this conference until August or am I reading this wrong?” So I felt that I better go even though the meeting was scheduled from 9:00 a.m. till 5:00 p.m. “What the hell kind of meeting is that long?” I was officially confused but, I dragged myself out of my warm bed at 6:30 a.m. and journeyed up the huge hill by 7:30a.m. to get to the Claremont Hotel by 9:00 a.m..
I felt weirdly proud of myself that I put in the effort to really do this, but it was still eight -something in the morning and it was too early to be so arrogant. When I got there I didn’t realize what I was doing, I was distracted by the beautiful hotel, honestly this place looked like a castle on the outside and was so plush on the inside I started to feel way too underdressed in my button up and black slacks.
I went to enter the room and as I walked by a lady at a table said, “Excuse me miss, you need a name tag.” “Um, what?” I thought. I was in the moment and looked at the table, like I was looking for my name tag, and after an appropriate amount of time I asked for the sign in sheet because I couldn’t find my name, then I started a bogus conversation with the woman so she wouldn’t ask me any questions and it worked! She wrote me out a name tag gave me the agenda, and a green leather planner with the city of Oakland’s logo on the front.
And When I walked in, it was so lovely. There was a continental breakfast, the tables were coved in expensive white linens and the beautiful white lily center pieces were calling for me to take one home with me, but of course I didn’t, I chose a random seat (ignored the place card) and started a conversation with a nice lady who entertained me till the conference started.
Then after prayer the woman who was in charge announced that they were going to start giving out awards. Awards at a conference? Then it dawned on me, that this was a luncheon for the clergy and I had crashed their party. I had overlooked all the signs that maybe I shouldn’t have been there but by time lunch came, I just thought well, no one told me to give up my seat.
I used to work in non-profit and when we would put on luncheons like this can run up to $10,000 a table ($1,000 per person) and I hope that the city didn’t make the clergy donate to get a table. I didn’t really dig anymore into the subject.
But the day went extremely smooth they had “break-out” sessions where after every hour or so people would leave to different rooms to attend workshops on topics like time banking and personal safety for faith based organizations, and during lunch they even had musical performances from some of the youth that were involved in violence prevention programs. It was great.
I’m very glad that I went to the conference, it was exciting, encouraging, I met a lot of awesome sources and I even got free food. I would definitely love to crash another conference like this.