October Relief Society Activity: Dinner with the Stars!

By request, I'm taking a moment to tell you about our October Relief Society Activity, which went pretty well.

A few months back, our Relief Society President wanted to plan a Visiting Teaching Conference, and asked our committee if we wanted to make it into our monthly activity. I'm not one to pass up a chance for someone else to plan a program, so I said, "Sure!" Our committee only needed to come up with a meal and decorations. The presidency planned the program. Her idea was to call it, "Dinner with the Stars."

In my experience, Visiting Teaching Anythings don't exactly draw in big numbers. Most people hear, "Visiting Teach................zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" And that's as far as it gets. So, I decided not to call it a Visiting Teaching Conference at all, and focused on the star theme. I was hoping to get people to come first, and then spring the whole visiting teaching thing on them after they were there. (It worked like a charm!)

We had a food committee, and we wanted to keep it pretty simple, so we did soups and homemade bread. The bread was baked into mini loaves, so it made great at-the-table slices and was served with honey butter. We'd planned some simple bar cookies for dessert; that message didn't make it through to the committee, which was just as well. Most ladies sampled more than one soup, and everyone was pretty full at evening's end.

It took me a while to catch the vision of the theme for decorations, though. I just couldn't get past the STAR look. Once I connected it into a Hollywood version of stars (let's have a big fat DUH!!!)..... then the ball really got rolling. Our colors were purple and black and white. I re-used our black cloths and mirrors from the August Black and White dinner. I found these star centerpieces at http://www.shindigz.com/, on sale from $14.99 to $4.99, and grabbed them up. Then I picked up some purple star garland, silver star confetti, and iridescent snow from Michaels, and voila! Tables decorated!! Then I had two Brilliant Ideas that came after snooping around some party websites. You'd never know, though ... because I didn't use one idea, and adapted the other.

The one idea was to make a big clapboard, like what's used in filming movies. It was going to be out of black posterboard, and using my Cricut to cut white letters that would say, "Production", "Directed By", "Act", "Scene", and "Take". Then I was going to fill in the sections with actual chalk. This idea got shot down, though, so I scratched it.

My second idea was to do a Walk of Fame on the floor, like the one in Hollywood. I created squares with 12x12 black paper, made a 10" circle from purple paper, and a 6 1/2" star from silver hologram paper. I cut 1 1/2" letters with the Cricut, but I didn't do real names. I just knew if I did, I'd forget someone, and their feelings would get hurt. So I did roles of women: Mother, Sister, Friend, Wife, Visiting Teacher, etc.

I'd planned to cover each square with clear Contact paper, with enough to overlap the edges and thus protect it and hold the whole thing down at once. But then I was worried that with people walking on them, they'd stick a little TOO well to the wood floor, and I'd have a mess of cleanup afterwards. So it was a small thing to change "WalK of Fame" to "WalL of Fame", and instead of going on the floor, it went behind the lectern, on the wall. I think it worked:

Here's the laugh-about-it-now kicker: I was busily gluing these squares together, and I was three-quarters of the way done, when I read the writing on the back of the hologram paper I was gluing. It said, "Self-sticking Paper". Oh yeah. I'd glued them ALL, and just now realized they were peel-and-stick!! Another lesson in reading the instructions, I guess!


The purple velvet was some we'd bought for a Home Show display for Welenco. It was therefore FREE for the borrowing, and worked perfect for our lectern table with a few more stars, black cloth and some silver star garland:

I'd also thought to pull out the big spotlight that we have in the church building. It never happened, though, and nobody missed it, either!!

The program was NOT long -- a key element, I think. There were three ladies that spoke for a few minutes each about their own experiences with either being a new convert, or an inactive person, and how their Visiting Teachers were a key influence that helped them and did not give up on them. The final speaker was the Relief Society president, who talked about how we all can be the stars in someone else's life.

At the end of this, there was a slideshow presentation, which was photos of as many Relief Society sisters as we could get, trying mostly to get them in a shot that was an example of their life, talents, job, family, etc. One sister's photo was with her motorcycle, another was sewing, and another with her dogs, etc. It had a music background and turned out quite well. (A lot of the photos were also ones that we had taken at some of our past RS activities, too!)

We closed with handing out the newest edition of our RS directory, and also some Visiting Teaching magnet cards for the VTers to hand out to their sisters.

You could really take off with this Hollywood theme, though, and do a red carpet and paparazzi, and have everyone dress up, hand out sunglasses, etc. It would make a great dance theme, too! Oh, the possibilities!