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What That Grail Story Can Still Do
Dec. 18th, 2006 11:34 amOne evening at festival, George and Cat were watching the children from our camp playing. Cat turned to George and said, "If we as a community were really thinking about the future, we'd be up setting a college scholarship fund to help these kids out."
And George, being The Man Who Gets Things Done, got to work right away. Now the Free Spirit Alliance offers a college scholarship, which will soon be renamed in his honor.
Once the legal and bureaucratic details were in order, he borrowed a fundraising strategy that Dan had come up with--George promised to get a tattoo, and invited the community to decide, at a dollar per vote, what tattoo he would get. After a year of collecting votes and dollars, he invited everyone at the next midsummer festival to see him get inked at Sacred Mark Sanctuary's tattoo pavilion.
His Ink-the-Elf campaign was a wildly successful fundraising drive. I suspect his passing will, as a side effect, be wildly successful in that way, too, since his family has asked that, in lieu of flowers, people send donations to the fund. Three hundred people came to his memorial, as predicted. We filled that hall. George's obituary is the lead story at Witchvox today, and it ends with the same request. The Free Spirit Alliance is going to have a very full post office box.
Many of the people at the memorial service had read his Grail story here, and they urged me to consider publishing it. The only way I could bear to do that would be as a tribute to George, with all proceeds going to the scholarship fund. The thought of revising that particular story while asking myself how I could make it more marketable to magazines...impossible. But getting it printed and selling it at festival--that I could do.
It's a project that will have to wait until January. I haven't bought any Christmas gifts for my family or Dan's, and hardly any Yule gifts for anybody else, so I need to run around and take care of holiday things for a while. But when there's some progress to report, I'll mention it here.
And George, being The Man Who Gets Things Done, got to work right away. Now the Free Spirit Alliance offers a college scholarship, which will soon be renamed in his honor.
Once the legal and bureaucratic details were in order, he borrowed a fundraising strategy that Dan had come up with--George promised to get a tattoo, and invited the community to decide, at a dollar per vote, what tattoo he would get. After a year of collecting votes and dollars, he invited everyone at the next midsummer festival to see him get inked at Sacred Mark Sanctuary's tattoo pavilion.
His Ink-the-Elf campaign was a wildly successful fundraising drive. I suspect his passing will, as a side effect, be wildly successful in that way, too, since his family has asked that, in lieu of flowers, people send donations to the fund. Three hundred people came to his memorial, as predicted. We filled that hall. George's obituary is the lead story at Witchvox today, and it ends with the same request. The Free Spirit Alliance is going to have a very full post office box.
Many of the people at the memorial service had read his Grail story here, and they urged me to consider publishing it. The only way I could bear to do that would be as a tribute to George, with all proceeds going to the scholarship fund. The thought of revising that particular story while asking myself how I could make it more marketable to magazines...impossible. But getting it printed and selling it at festival--that I could do.
It's a project that will have to wait until January. I haven't bought any Christmas gifts for my family or Dan's, and hardly any Yule gifts for anybody else, so I need to run around and take care of holiday things for a while. But when there's some progress to report, I'll mention it here.
