The Benefit is Over!

Two days ago was Aperture's 2008 Benefit and Auction. This is the big event I have been helping plan since I arrived at my internship. It also was the major task of my entire internship and now everything we do is on a much smaller scale. Well it was a long day starting early in the morning with packing up supplies and getting them over to the benefit location, Pier 60. I was positioned at Aperture all day answering phone calls and emails. There was a slight communication issue and we realized that we had no wall labels for the art work for the silent auction. I took this task and proceeded to follow a template to create 60 wall labels. This sounds easy, but it really took me quite a long time make sure everything was spelled correctly and all the sizes and prices were correct. In the end, we only used 9 of the labels for the live auction pieces. Come 3:45pm, I was the only one left in the development department and everyone had headed over the event sight. I was very excited that everyone had enough confidence in me to have me take the phone calls and emails. However, I had no idea how many there would be. I was watching over all three development phones and emails and there were a lot of last minute changes that needed to be made. In the end, I think I did all right.

Once I arrived at Pier 60, I met with the event coordinator and we worked with the seating list to accommodate the changes. This became a frequent thing as many people showed who weren't on the list and people brought guest they shouldn't have and other wanted to make changes to their tables and on and on and on. I had no idea working the registration table would be so much work. It was two hours of standing, running around, finding people, making changes with my director, talking to dinner staff and having them make more seating placements, making more changes with the event staff, and more. I learned quite a lot. After everyone was ushered into the dinning area, then the take down work began. We needed to get all the artwork down, and all the bid sheets over to the winners tables, and getting all the supplies out of the way to pack all the art. There was also the tasks make sure the staff wasn't getting drunk in front of the guests, and reminding spotters when and where they needed to be for the live auction portion of the evening. Quite a busy evening. Everything from here was pretty much smooth sailing. I had to kick out a few reporters who were hanging around longer than they should have, talk to a few people about the auction items they bid on, gently remind the staff they should be working and not standing around chatting, and grab a little something to eat in the process.

Overall, it was a really fun evening. I feel as if I learned a lot, especially about seating arrangements, and did a really good job doing my job. I received a lot of personal praise for the work I was doing and being on top of things. Of course, I also got to told to slow down and remember to breath a lot too. I remembered to say hi to many of the board members and co-chairs of the evening and to people I will be working with shortly for upcoming events next month. And on a personal note, for those who remember the fabulous two inch heels I bought for the event, I kept them on all evening (except for a few mins here and there) and I don't even have blisters the morning after. Quite an accomplishment if I do say so myself.
We finally got out of there at about midnight and three of us when to go meet two of my friends as a nearby pub. When we walked in we were very surprised to find that about ten of our other staff members had also decide to head to the pub. It was a little odd so we sat on our own. We had a nice relaxing hour just to sit and chat about the night. So to sum it up, it was a long day/night of hard work, fun, and fantastic fashion. Thanks for all the prayers and warm wishes for the night.

Obviously I had no time to take photos, but I will post some when I get some from work.