April 3, 2019

 

 

Written by Patrick Hart

 

 

 

President Elect Greg Hill led the meeting today.

 

BRAGS:

 

Ron Lapin bragged that his wife was reelected to her office of village trustee.

 

Seb Karasu bragged that her son has returned from his military service.  Also a park for the disabled, which was built partly with donations from our club, has just opened in Turkey.

 

Teri Dreher informed us that the house adjoined to hers burned down, but that her residence survived just fine, and she wanted to mention how impressed she was with the performance of the Libertyville Fire Department. Teri also says that the District is looking for someone with an understanding of finance to serve on the Global Grants Committee.

 

Tom Zengeler bragged that he broke his record by collecting 6,500 prom dresses for the underprivileged this year and that this program is now distributing dresses in Lake County.

 

Jeff Harger told the club that his car had been stolen, but it was recovered in Chicago.  Also Tuesday was his wedding anniversary.

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

 

Doug Fendon has 72 gold balls left over from the winter fund-raiser which you can purchase to help support our favorite charities.

 

Rich Babjak is holding his candy drive to raise funds for Misericordia on April 26 and 27 this year, and he is again hoping to receive volunteers from the club to help with the effort.

 

Our spring highway cleanup will occur on Saturday April 13.  We will meet at southeast corner of Butterfield and 137 at 7:00 a.m. and we should be finished making the world a cleaner place to live for future generations by 8:00

 

Doctor Potts is holding his annual Smiles from the Heart event to provide free dental services to those in need on May 31.  He could use volunteers on that day and cash donations to cover the costs.

 

The next board meeting will be on April 16 at Chile U.

 

The club's charitable giving dinner will be held on the evening of May 1. There will be no morning meeting that day.  Special presenations of gifts will be made to Pads and Lake County Haven at our morning meeting on May 15.

 

Our installation dinner will be at White Deer Run on the evening of June 26, and rumor has it that some of our members will be attempting to play golf prior to the banquet.

 

The Libertyville Sunrise Rotary Summer Festival will be on August 24.  The VIP portion will be held in the Civic Center, which leaves some outside space for additional fund raising activities.

 

 

 

Tom Zengeler was supposed to chair fun and frolics this week, but apparently he had become so distracted thinking about prom dresses that he forgot to prepare.  He tried to punt by reminiscing about a Rotary sponsored strawberry tossing contest in the 1980s: however, some of us became worried that this was a disguised act of shameless self-promotion, leading up to a recommendation on where people should go to have strawberry stains removed from their clothes.  President Elect Hill, who is seldom an easy man to fool, quickly caught on to this ruse and he sent Tom to the wheel.  Let us just hope that the $5.00 he had to pay for his misdeeds will teach all of us that in the future we need to take fun and frolics seriously.

 

 

 

Our speaker this week was Elise Larsen from Special Gifts Theater, which uses disabled individuals as theater players and helps them to develop skills through their participation in the plays.  The program has been around since 2,000 and has recently established a presence in Libertyville, when it put on the play Beauty and the Beast at Copeland Manor School.  This fall they will begin working on a production of Madagascar which will be presented next April.

 

Special Gifts Theater has a budget of approximately $400,000.00.  They charge tuition from the students; however, they give out scholarships to students who cannot afford to pay, and the tuition only covers about forty percent of their costs.  The balance comes from donations and fund-raisers.

 

The program is therapeutically based and they spend a lot of time discussing the educational aspects of a play and the values it is conveying with the participants.  Parts sometimes have to be modified to allow the disabled actors to perform, and they often add characters to a play to make sure that everyone who wants one gets a part.   

 

We collected $372.00 from our members this week to support the Libertyville Township Food Pantry.

 

 

 

John Blair won the $24.00 weekly raffle.  Rich Babjak attempted to win the $125.00 progressive pot, but he left early and apparently appointed an incompetent proxy to act on his behalf who drew the two of Hearts out of the 49 remaining cards.

 

 

Greeter and Prayer:  Elliott Pinsel

 

Fun and Frolics and Bingo:  Scott Adams

 

Program: Endurance Swimming

 

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”   George Eliot