THE TALE OF THE MOVEABLE FEAST

 

            On Wednesday morning, February 9, we started getting e-mails from people intending to come to our dinner meeting the next day.  They were concerned because the weather hype was predicting 12 – 18 inches of snow. Was the dinner still on?  Our speaker, Tom Parliament, from the ACS speaker’s bureau, was to drive up on Thursday to the Radisson in Enfield from his previous engagement in Poughkeepsie. Early in the afternoon on Wednesday, I contacted everyone who was planning to come to the dinner and told them I would keep them posted.

 

Well sometime during the day on Wednesday the weathermen, in their wisdom, changed the forecast from 12-18 inches to 1 – 3 inches (why weren’t we surprised?).  Tom said he didn’t anticipate any problems getting there.  Annoyed at the weathermen and somewhat frazzled, I e-mailed everyone late Wednesday night that the dinner was on and things would go according to plan.  Well, was I ever wrong; fate just did not want things to go smoothly.

 

            At about 3 o’clock on Thursday, the Radisson Hotel called to say we would have to cancel our dinner.  It seems that there was a power outage, not weather related (something about an underground cable), and they did not know when they would get power back.  After conferring with a few colleagues, I called them back to verify that in fact, we really would have to call off the meeting.  What, I asked, did they plan to do with people holding reservations?  They could expect our speaker, who had a reservation to stay there Thursday night, to arrive any minute.  “What’s his name?” the manager asked me.  As it turned out, Tom Parliment had arrived and was trying to check in that very moment.  “Look”, I told him; “I’ll get some people and we’ll come up and take you out to dinner; we can talk about chemistry at dinner!”

 

            But I didn’t know Tom.  The Radisson sent him down I-91 to the Holiday Inn Express in East Windsor where Tom charmed the manager, Chris Corso, into setting up a room for the talk.  They had no restaurant, but Chris arranged to have food catered in.  Then “all” I had to do was try to contact the 25 dinner guests and tell them to get off at exit 42 instead of exit 49!  Incredibly within a period of about a half-hour, I was able to send e-mails to everyone and had responses from 16 people!  Taking a guess, I added on 6 more and told Chris to plan for 22 people.  And that’s exactly what we had.  Thanks to Tom and Chris, the show went on!  Tom gave a great talk on the Chemistry of Coffee Roasting, and a good time was had by all!  But all the same, I’ll be happy if the next meeting stays put.

 

                                                                        Jane Knox