The Conference, Part 2

Friday evening there was a large scale gala honoring blogging Voices of the Year, ninety bloggers honored for excellence in their writing. There is so much good stuff out there it just awes me. Here is a link to the list of these outstanding writers: Voices of the Year. They are worth reading.

Saturday was another full day of sessions. I still focused on the Writing track, but there were easily dozens of other things I could have done. There were hundreds of sponsors, some of whom had suites reserved where you could sample their products and/or services. ECCO shoes had a suite where they provided free foot massages and pedicures. K-Mart sponsored a day care room. Most of the sponsors were offering samples and I came home with more Playdough than I would have thought humanly possible. Because this was a women’s blogging conference, the primary focus of the sponsors was traditional ‘female’ stuff, i.e., products for children, babies, pets and the home.

Prize for most, um, unusual? "At Home With Your Digestive System" sponsored by the makers of Metamucil and Align. We all received an invitation to visit their suite for complimentary products and “services”. I shudder to think what services they might have been offering. I gave this a miss, as I am already at home with my digestive system, thank you very much, and if I wasn’t I certainly would not be discussing it with strangers in a hotel suite.

That last sentence definitely sounds kinky.

I met some other fellow bloggers I have followed online, SO exciting. The writers of Nanny Goats in Panties and Sparkle Cat were my companions for more than one meal. Absolutely delightful, as I knew they would be from their blogs. I felt like a groupie.

I caught a glimpse of Marinka from Motherhood in NYC (consistently funny AND raising young children at the same time!), but I was disappointed not to meet her. “Wow, she looks taller in person.” I thought. Which was rich, considering I’d never seen her at all. Ever. I guess she writes short.

Hurricane Danielle had wrangled us a free dinner Saturday night. Including transportation! We were picked up right at the hotel door and whisked (almost literally) all the way downtown to TriBeca. The taxi ride was even more adventurous than usual when, while hemmed in by traffic, the van in front of us began to back up towards us at top speed. All of us in the cab involuntarily leaned back and shrieked, including the driver. Fortunately, the van halted in the nick of time.

We all met downtown at F. Illi Ponte on Desbrosses Street. As an aside, because I am a New York City history freak, Desbrosses Street is still cobblestoned. So cool. It is named for Elias Desbrosses, a wealthy merchant who lived in the eighteenth century. He was a senior warden at Trinity Church and in 1777, at the height of the Revolutionary War, was obliged to administer the oath of office to the new Rector, an Englishman and an avowed Royalist. I could not find any information about his political leanings but his brother was a British supporter. Desbrosses died in 1778, apparently of natural causes and is buried in a vault in Trinity Church.

Ok, history lesson over. Back to dinner.

We were guests that evening of Lou Bivona, who is a Managing Partner of Tavern Direct and a Founding Member of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Tavern Direct is a charity founded specifically to support the NCMEC. Besides traditional fundraising, they offer products such as flavored oils, sauces, marinades and vinegars under the Tavern on the Green label. (Another historic aside: Tavern on the Green, which operated from 1934 until 1999 at the southern end of Central Park, was the venue of choice for my family’s celebrations for years, such a wonderful place.) With every purchase, 50 cents is donated to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. While we enjoyed a marvelous dinner, with samplings of the products for sale, Lou, an senior executive by trade, spoke movingly of his passion for this cause and his commitment to protecting children. There are other ways to help as well, so check out the website here. The products we sampled were superb, available on line or at Wegman’s.

Lou is a down to earth, handsome, funny guy who demonstrated a strong dedication to doing good in this world, something that has been confirmed for me in subsequent e-mail exchanges with him. A really good guy. The food was awesome, the service was flawless, the company was great, the cause is admirable. Not a bad deal for a Saturday night in the city.

F. Illi Ponte is at 39 DesBrosses Street in Manhattan. They serve Italian American cuisine, rating rave reviews, and have been in business for decades, a rarity for a New York restaurant.

Thanks, Lou, for a great dinner and introducing us to a great cause!

Next: Sunday and Goodbye to BlogHer 2010

The Conference

So. About BlogHer.

I went into the city last Thursday, a day early, in order to get started bright and early on Friday, when the conference officially began.

This is how I spent my time getting ready for four days I would be away from home:

Monday – did nothing
Tuesday – did nothing
Wednesday – did nothing
Thursday – ran around like a lunatic

By the time I got into New York, because I had totally overdone it, I was doubled over in pain and exhaustion. The SheWrites get together in a swanky bar downtown? Scratch. All I could do was take a load of pills and fall face down on the bed.

Thanks, Multiple Sclerosis. Well, technically, thanks you procrastinating knucklehead. But if it wasn’t for MS, I just would have been tired, not incapacitated.

On the plus side, we had lined up a last minute third roommate, a delightful woman from D. C. Debbie blogs at Legal Speaks and is a fascinating person.

Then there was Hurricane Danielle. Except that I saw her sleeping with my own eyes, I never would have believed it. That child did not stop for one single, solitary second. She won more stuff than seemed humanly possible, including two laptops. And she found swag under every rock and in every cranny. Evidence:



So I started out with two wonderful, considerate, thoughtful partners in crime. We all have totally divergent backgrounds and interests, but we really hit it off.

Friday

The conference opened with two separate breakfasts, one for all attendees and one for women attending for the first time. Comic relief: Danielle kept running into the original roommate who ditched us and continually practiced giving her the evil eye.

The breakfasts were sumptuous, no kidding, and the welcome was warm. Everyone was happy to be there as we headed off to our first workshops.

There were three workshop blocks each day, each segment containing multiple tracks: Bloggers as Change Agents, Passions, Personal, Professional, Geek (tech stuff), Writing and Job issues. The subjects were very comprehensive, with sessions such as Creating Tangible Social Change, How to Build a Community Around Your Cause and Writing Inspiration: Stoke Your Creativity.

I found that the sessions I was most interested in were the writing ones, and that was the track I pretty much stuck with. It was awe inspiring to be in rooms filled with women who had published books already (one panelist actually even had one of her books made into a movie) or had projects in the works, most resulting from blogging.

I met many wonderful women, but I was especially happy to meet Kamy Wicoff, the founder of SheWrites, a marvelous online community for women writers of all sorts, not just bloggers. That was the party I missed on Thursday night. She was incredibly down to earth and friendly. Of course, on the site I announced I had been thrilled to meet her and spelled her name wrong in my gushing comment. Mortifying. But honestly Kamy! You have K’s where there should be C’s and C’s where there should be K’s. Way to addle a girl’s brain!!

Friday evening was punctuated by a frantic call from my sister regarding my parents, whose train has been coming off the tracks for two years now, a slow motion horror show. The situation was deteriorating and would get even worse over the next days.

My perspective of the conference was completely affected by having to use a wheelchair. The wheelchair determined where I sat in the dining room or at a workshop. Since all the meals were buffets, it determined what I ate and drank (although the staff was VERY helpful; one manager even made me a cup of tea and brought it to my table for me). As the elevators were in banks, there were only three serving the conference floors and the twelve floors above, where our room was. At busy times, I sometimes had to wait through five or six elevators before there was one with room for me and my chair. The second floor of exhibitors was completely inaccessible to me.

Without the chair the conference would have been impossible. But with it, it was still daunting and, at times, the chair was very marginalizing.

More to come...