Speakers spark

What can you say in five minutes, and how would you say it?

Five minutes, 20 slides. That’s the premise of Ignite DC, a high-energy gathering of people with ideas and the courage to put them out in front of 300+ strangers

Ignite DC #6, held last week, had the flavor of a Tweetup and the velocity of a speed-dating event. Sixteen speakers each had 20 slides, which advanced automatically every 15 seconds.

Who were the speakers? Ignite’s Web site promised “artists, technologists, thinkers and personalities.” I heard from a marketing student and a life coach, a DJ and a policy analyst, an artist and a hacker, among others.

The evening’s organizers -- DC entrepreneur Jared Goralnick and public relations strategist and local blogging guru Geoff Livingston – kept the program moving. None of the 16 speakers went over their time, I noticed with admiration. Each presentation was focused, well paced and delivered with verve.

If your time is brief, an introduction with a catchy title creates a flurry of interest right at the start. Here are some of my favorites from the event:

- Why Jack Bauer Needs a Nap: He’d make better decisions if he could get out from under that 24-hour stress, which must be wreaking havoc on his mind and body. Life coach Alison Elissa made her point with humor and offered a gentle reminder to all.

- Heather Coleman titled her presentation simply “Help!” then grabbed our attention with her first sentence: “If you saw a naked woman running down the road, would you stop your car?” Any snickering stopped as she revealed that she had been that woman, in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis. Tragedy was averted only by a traffic jam and some helpful strangers.

- I Suffer from… FOMO: Right away, the listener wonders, what is FOMO? Should I be worried? FOMO is Fear Of Missing Out, Shana Glickfield opined in a cheerfully self-deprecating sketch. Glickfield, an online communications consultant, described overbooking herself, spending too much money, and stressing out friends and relatives in an attempt to avoid what she described as “the worst thing a person with FOMO can hear: `You should have been there!’”

Glickfield ended the program with laughter and a light-hearted reminder to look away from the screen once in a while, pay attention to the live world around you.

52,000 cupcakes? Sweet!

Multiply this more than 3,000 times...



























...and you can imagine the scale of this sugar masterpiece, made of 52,000 frosted cupcakes.

The display was created to mark the 10th anniversary of Maryland Day at the University of Maryland, College Park. It's a campus-wide open house, with all sorts of free entertainment and activities.

University representatives believe they may have set the world record for cupcakes served on a single day.

Dining Services staff baked and froze cupcakes for months prior to the big day. The cupcakes, iced in red, gold, brown and white, formed an image of the university seal, 24 feet in diameter, over 182 tables.

Volunteers arranged the cupcakes the night before the event, placing each cupcake in just the right color-coded spot. Set-up began around 9:30 pm and was completed by dawn.

At 10 am, university president C.D. (Dan) Mote, Jr. and his wife, Patsy Mote, handed out the first cupcakes.

Then the army of volunteer servers (myself included) sprang into action, removing cupcakes from the edges of the display, loading them on platters, and placing them on serving tables.

As each table was cleared of cupcakes, workers would remove the table, allowing us to reach further into the display.

When something is offered for free, people often start acting strangely. I'm not surprised when a child says, "No, I don't want the yellow one -- I want a RED one!" But an adult?

And I lost track of how many times I had to tell someone that I couldn't get them a chocolate-frosted cupcake, that the brown part of the design was still about four feet out of my reach.

Within a few hours, people were walking away with platters full of cupcakes. One enterprising woman loaded up a Tupperware "cake-taker" with more than a dozen cupcakes.

The day flew by. When the last cupcake disappeared into the crowd, around 4:15, a cheer went up under the now-empty tent. Weary servers discarded their cupcake aprons and finished off the last of the pizza provided for lunch.

Here's the University's press release about the cupcake extravaganza. In the overhead photo, I'm one of the people waving to the camera, farthest to the left.

That night, as I tried to fall asleep, I kept seeing swirls of yellow and red behind my closed eyelids.

Fancy pants

Hanging out with friends, sampling delicious foods, and dancing -- all to support a good cause. Can't have much more fun than that!

We had a great time at the Blue Jeans Ball, a fundraiser for the Capital Area Food Bank. Dozens of area chefs donated their time and their imagination, offering a wide range of dishes. And we didn't have to rent tuxedos or buy formal wear. (Not that I would have minded this much.)

Thanks to CC for helping me stalk and shoot this glittery, black-lace-and-blue-denim creation. Words alone couldn't do it justice.

My favorite dish was a "lobster scallop boudin" from the chefs at PS7. There was something pickled in this tasty little bite that made it irresistible.









I enjoyed the varied interpretations of the denim theme. I encountered this fringed grande dame several times in the dessert section, methodically moving from table to table.

The only place we didn't meet was at the Good Humor cart. You'd be surprised how many people, when offered mini banana cream pies, handmade truffles and hazelnut profiteroles, would rather have a Giant ice cream sandwich or a Strawberry Shortcake ice cream bar.

On the street

It's a weekday afternoon in downtown San Francisco, on and around Market Street. It's been a while since I moved to the suburbs, and I have forgotten what it's like to be part of a racially and culturally diverse city.

I spy a laundromat clothes basket, a wire basket on wheels, like a grocery-store cart, with a rod overhead for hanging clothes. It's parked on the sidewalk, no laundromat nearby, and it's filled with bright red fire extinguishers. No one else seems to notice it; no one appears to claim it.

A middle-aged Asian woman passes me on the sidewalk, neatly dressed in a bright printed T-shirt and baseball cap. She is carrying an empty plastic bag and holding up a large pair of kitchen tongs. This mystery, at least, is partially explained when she pauses and uses the tongs to root through a trash can.

Someone is calling out, at intervals, "BAAH-dy oil!" Body oil? I think it's one of the street vendors set up at tables and tents in the plaza, but then I trace the voice to a man in black T-shirt and jeans, striding down the sidewalk ahead of me. He has no table or suitcase, nothing in his hands.

A group of young people, all in black and denim and metal and leather, cross the street. In the lead is a tall guy with long dreadlocks gathered at the back of his neck, topped by a black three-cornered hat, like a pirate.

My destination is the Market Street Gallery, currently showing "Reinventing Barbie - The 5th Annual Altered Barbie" show. Seventy-five artists are exhibiting photography, quilts, video and 3-D art described as "their reworking of the American toy staple." My original target was the Matisse exhibit at SFMOMA, but who could resist Altered Barbie? Not this girl.

The gallery is closed, with a note on the door, "Back in 30 minutes." Does that mean 5 minutes from now, or 30? I'm approached by a distressingly young woman who just wants 30 cents for a soda. I don't want to linger.

I pass a store selling sporting goods and Army surplus. A sign in the window reads, "Burning Man supplies - goggles - camo/desert netting - parachutes."

A few blocks away, the glitzy shopping malls begin, luring tourists. I pass a man who appears at first to be a maintenance worker, wearing a faded cap, a blue work shirt and jeans. He holds a long copper pipe, taller than himself, loosely under one arm, resting one end on the ground. In one hand, he clutches a used paper plate flat against his stomach. The other hand is outstretched, to no one in particular, to everyone.

Later in the afternoon, I see the lady with the tongs again, on the same block. Now she's lugging two stuffed plastic bags, still brandishing the tongs.

She seemed like a reasonable woman

The customer in front of me in line at the Trader Joe’s grocery store this afternoon was an interesting personality study.

I didn’t take much note of her at first. All that registered was her light grey hair, worn in a no-nonsense, chin-length style, and the unusual pattern of her sleeveless blouse in shades of orange.

This customer began taking her groceries out of the cart and piling them at the checkout. At Trader Joe’s, the usual procedure is that the checker pulls your shopping cart behind the counter and takes everything out, ringing up items as s/he goes, and then quickly and efficiently bags everything while you’re paying.

The checker politely asked the woman to stop unloading the cart and allow her to handle the bagging. (There is very little room at the customer’s end of the counter.) Customer explained, nicely, that she was late for an appointment. Checker responded that things would go faster as soon as she was done with the previous customer and could empty the cart herself.

Customer kept unloading groceries, repeating that she was in a hurry and was trying to help. Checker kept pointing out that this was not helpful. They finally achieved a sort of stalemate, probably because there was no more room to stack anything. Customer said, in a mildly offended tone, “OK, I’ll just stand here and do nothing.”

Checker suggested that Customer could bag the groceries, that this might speed things along a little. “Oh, I’m not a professional bagger,” Customer said. “None of us are,” Checker answered, even more politely, with only the tiniest roll of her eyes.

Customer then proceeded to 1) caution Checker not to make any bag too heavy, as she had an injured back, 2) repeatedly and emphatically tell another employee who stepped up -- either to bag or to run interference, I couldn’t tell -- that they should stop moving items around in the store because she couldn’t find anything, 3) state that she never shopped in this store, and 4) offer a faux apology for “just trying to help.”

The entire conversation was conducted in calm, measured tones. If you didn’t listen to the content, you’d think they were chatting about the weather, or the price of Trader Giotto’s Marinara Sauce.

The peculiar part was the insistence of Customer that she WAS, actually, helping. It was as if she wanted to force Checker to retract her previous statement and express thanks for the interference.

I wondered about Customer. Is this a woman who always has to be right? Is she a little confused? (If she “never” shopped at this store, how did she know they were rearranging it?) Is she always so passively aggressive, or does she only pick on people who are in no position to tell her off?

To be fair, Checker also seemed intent on making Customer admit that she was being a pain in the derriere. At one point, when Customer was gone and Checker was waiting on me, she said quietly, to no one in particular, “I just don’t feel like arguing with anyone today.” I said nothing but thought: So don’t argue. Why do you have to be right? She might have sent Customer on her way a little faster if she’d smilingly agreed to everything Customer said while doing it her own way as best she could.

When I waited tables in college and graduate school, it was drilled into me that the first order of business was to pleasantly do all that was in my power to make the customer happy. If that didn’t work, I was to summon a manager and hand the problem over to him or her. The manager has more power and, ultimately, more responsibility. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to argue with even the most flaming idiot. I wasn’t getting paid enough to do that.

All I can say is: Be gentle with each other, folks.