Charity Work

Oliver attended his first "Act like a homeless person for charity" event last night. Relay for Life is what it actually was called, but as far as I could tell, it was just a bunch of people sitting/walking/bitching/begging for money in the dark. Yep, sounds homeless to me! It was held at the Jewish Community Center (and me with my anti-circumcision bumpersticker, so I was nervous about a kosher egging of my car the entire time).

At least we didn't go hungry, unless of course, you wanted something other than cheese pizza. Oh my, there was cheese pizza as far as the eye could see! There was a sad demoralizing slide from fundraising to begging people to haul the "food" and "prizes" away. The pizzas were $10, then, $5, then the over-enthusiastic/emotionally delicate event coordinator would come around handing each man woman and child a pizza. One man even confused the boxes for mattresses.

The plan was to stay for as long as we could until Oliver had a meltdown and needed to go home. Then, CT would go with him and I would stay with a bunch of his friends from work (yea, don't worry about me!). Well, around 10pm, Oliver conked out in the tent and didn't wake again until we were packing up 9 hours later. Leaving CT free to pretend to walk around a track (unpaved and in the dark-awesome plan!) with the rest of us.

There were "games." A woman announced haltingly that we were to do a dunking booth for Cancer. The dunkee being Cancer, and the dunker being ACS, defeating it, or something. I am not sure that this symbological (term coined around 1am) stuff continued, but there was also: "Dance Contest for Cancer" where one can assume the song being botched was Cancer, "Cake Walk for Cancer" where one might think the cake might be chemo?, and a "Ring Toss for Cancer" where I am pretty sure they were just trying to get rid of extra snacks that no one wanted. As the night grew later, the symbols made less and less sense. Around 3am someone asked, "why are we doing all of this for Cancer? I don't even LIKE Cancer!"

All in all it was a successful night, my son learned about what it means to give back along with how to do a very evil laugh (thanks Chad!), we corrupted one very annoying and apparently parentless 13 year old boy who will be VERY confused when he becomes 21 and DOESN'T receive hookers and blow, and....oh yea, we raised over $20K for American Cancer Society!

I mean sure, the games were lame, the coordinators were pushy, certain team captains were cranky, and most of us were extremely lazy, but at least we have the memories, the stories, and a whole new respect for sleep deprevation as a means of torture.