My new celebrity best friend.

First things first: my friend Art is spending his summer in Korea while completing an internship for law school there. His blog is pretty darn cool. Go check it out and get some culture. He seems to post regularly, so even when I don't, he can provide you with entertainment.

OK. I went to a child life conference this weekend in Nashville.

First thought to share: conferences suck. I mean, I definitely went to a few sessions where I came out fired up to go back to work and make stuff happen, and I learned a bit and networked a bit; but in the end, conferences are just work in a different setting. So I worked all weekend, and didn't get paid for it...in fact I paid to go. If this makes sense to anyone, let me know.

Next: well, it wouldn't be a story about me if the Krashworth persona didn't kick in, eh? Let me explain a bit about what I do, and then what I did.

I am a child life specialist. My whole job is to hang out with kids and families in hospitals or medical settings and reduce their stress. Sometimes this is accomplished through play, other times it's explaining things in kid-friendly terms (stitches is just a fancy doctor word for string), sometimes it's just listening or getting a cup of coffee. In any case, it's a great profession that's been around for more than 40 years now, but is only lately becoming more and more recognized. When the profession was originally started, we were known as the "playladies" (and often are still referred to as such, which I think is just fine with me...I don't mind people knowing that I get paid to play all day). Somewhere in the late 70's/early 80's there were a core group of people who got together, formed the Association for the Care of Children in Hospitals (ACCH) and named us as a group to be child life specialists. These people also did credible, published research, and wrote all the books I just spent two years in grad school studying. Because that was only 20 years ago, many of these child life "celebrities," if you will, are still around. One of them was my advisor until last year. Another child life celebrity has been my professor this past year. So you see how it is. I roll with the big guns. =)

Now, you may think I'm joking. I mean, every profession has its celebrities, right? But how big can these people be? Well...I'd liken them to Bill Gates - Gates took the computer world and made it accessible to everyone (no more needing to know specific commands and such, or spend money on a Mac), thus revolutionizing computers forever. Brought computers from one age to the next. (My computer geek friends will read this and be angry with me, as they are all anti-MS folk who love the life of Linux, but you have to face facts: Gates is a HUGE guy in the history of computers). These celebrities about which I speak - they revolutionized child life, and although it's not widely known now, it's getting bigger every day. I'd be willing to wager there's child life in every major children's hospital around the US, I know that it's an international profession, and we're now making strides in alternative settings like community hospitals and emergency rooms and outpatient clinics. Give it one more generation, and I see this as something everyone knows about.

In any case, I've been studying all of these books and articles by these child life celebrities again for the past month in preparation for my certification exam (which I took at the beginning of the conference). After the exam, there were a few conference sessions, a reception, and then Wheelock (where I went to grad school) had a private networking reception for alumni. Keep in mind one of the reasons I chose Wheelock is because it has been a crucial element of the development of child life as a clinically respected position, and it has educated most of the celebrities of which I spoke earlier.

So, for all the money I paid to Wheelock (or, more rightly, all the money Uncle Sam paid to Wheelock that I will now have to enter indentured servitude to repay Uncle Sam) you'd think the reception would be pretty swank, eh? HA! A few cookies, a few brownies, some soda. Not even cocktails - c'mon folks: it's FRIDAY NIGHT! In any case, I hung out with my classmates and chatted for a while, and then realized that I ought to make some new friends while at this conference, just because...well, I don't know, I guess because I should. I paid money to go, I should get more than the update on my classmates, with whom I try to keep in touch on a regular basis. So my friend Jen and I head over to a table with two women, one elderly, and one middle-aged, and a man at it (yes, there are men in child life. My advisor and my professor - aforementioned "celebs" are both men). As we sit down, the middle-aged woman looks at me and says, "Have we met? I feel like I've met you." I immediately go into my spiel about how I have one of those faces, that I get that all the time....I have the girl-next-door face so I look like someone everyone has either met or knows; but that I'm sure we hadn't met. So she smiles and reaches across the table, reads my nametag, and says, "Well, it's nice to meet you Kristy." I shake her hand and say, "Thanks, and what is your name?" (She had no nametag, in my defense.)

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Laura...[long pause]...Gaynard."

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I wish I had a picture of my face. This woman wrote the one book I had focused on for the past three weeks in my studies, she is one of the child life celebrities of which I spoke. She was at the conference to recieve the lifetime achievement award the next day. OY.

What's even better than this is I couldn't let go of her hand. I just kept holding on to it across the table as I apologized for not realizing...at which point she gracefully pointed out that I had indeed never met her and how would I know? (Of course, I had seen her picture earlier that day, but clearly I'm a dolt and didn't pay attention at the time.) In any case, we laughed over the whole affair, and I got to know her, her mother Betty (the elderly woman), and her brother Skip (the man). I then proceeded to introduce her to all of my classmates as "my best friend - we go WAY back - Laura" and we all had a good laugh. Turns out, just like my advisor and my professor, she's really nice, and she even tried to recruit me to come work in her program at Salt Lake City Hospital. I turned down her kind offer, but I did get a chance to see her throughout the rest of the conference, and we chatted here and there.

So in the end, I made a fairly significant connection at the conference after all. I just had to fumble my way through to get to it. =)