Renegade

HI ho, HI ho, HI ho, HI ho, HI ho, HI ho, HI ho, HUM!....hi HO! HI ho! It's off to work...OH NO! The first e-mail from Lois Maroney came on a Tuesday night in February. "Hi Bill, I have Kathy copied in. She is going to update the exhibit and sponsorship forms that will appear on the web site with your name and email address...." Oh no no no NO: This meant work was on the way. Wall Street was tanking at about the same time so it was easy to connect the dots... Tuesday night...ALDA work...Black Tuesday. Bad, bad karma.

Kathy was Kathy Schlueter, the ALDAcon 2008 Sponsor and Exhibitor Business Manager. I hadn't been paying close attention to ALDA for years, but every time I did look Kathy seemed to be on the ALDA Board, at least once as President. And now she's President-elect. Some people just don't know the word uncle.

Kathy and I go way back, all the way to ALDAcon I. I guess that's how we inscribed it then: like a Super Bowl, with Roman numerals. Kathy lives in far northwestern Illinois. To come to Chicago for that first Con it took her about as much time to drive as it took Marylyn to fly in from Boston. Kathy was new to deafness then, and living way out there in the, um, sticks she didn't have much of a support network to lean on. I think she'd be the first one to tell you that she came to ALDAcon scared as hell, depressed at being deaf, and low on self-esteem. We needed a crowbar to pry words out of her. And nobody had one.

But Kathy got through that meeting and she kept coming back and she kept coming back. Now she's one of the most vocal and persistent leaders in ALDA. Some people call her the Energizer Bunny, but I've always called her Ren, short for Renegade. I don't remember exactly how that nickname came to be; I suppose it had to do with her being a free spirit who did things her way. She flirted with me, for example. She told me if she wasn't married she'd run away with me. If I had carried my brother's business card I would have presented it to her. He's an eye doctor.

Be that as it may, the once-reticent and uncertain Ren is now one of my mentors on the ALDAcon Sponsorship Committee. The other is Lois Maroney. Stay tuned.