Alegria got off to a promising start, but seemed to stall.
As a last ditch effort, I explained the situation to the Regional Coordinator who had first contacted me. She managed to get the e-mail address of the President of the local alumnae chapter.
Armed with that info, I e-mailed the President. She replied with a warm response inviting me to an upcoming event. She asked me to phone her so that we could chat. When I called, she explained to me that the event in question was a "card party" and wanted to know if I knew how to play bridge. I had no idea how to play bridge. She then asked me which card games I did know how to play. This woman seemed to me to be an older lady and I felt embarassed telling her that I only know how to play blackjack and poker. I thought that she must think that I was some kind of beer-swilling hooligan who didn't know how to play ladylike card games.
Of course, I'm not a beer-swilling hooligan, but I digress.
On top of that, she said that there was a problem in that bridge is played in teams....and all of the teams had been filled.
We sort of struggled for a bit, I felt like she was trying to hard to accomodate me but couldn't. I didn't want her to feel obligated or anything.
She said that she would check with one of the other members and either she or the other lady would get back to me on the card party event. In the meantime, she tried to come up with some other ideas. She said that there was a meeting coming up, but I couldn't attend because it was an election meeting and non-members couldn't attend. She said that the next thing after that was
Alegria's Founder's Day. Unfortunately, that was the one day I had something else scheduled that I simply could not cancel on. She then said that nothing else would be going on until next October or so. That would have been an 8-9 month wait.
Finally, she got my hopes up by saying "Would you be interested in possibly helping out with the collegiate girls?" I answered very enthusiastically and then she said, "Oh...wait...you can't....you're not a sister."
I felt so bad, she clearly tried hard to come up with something, but it didn't work out. I thought I would give the card party a go, but neither she nor the other sister gave me a call. I didn't attend.
A couple weeks later, I happened to meet another aquaintance who is a member of
Alegria. She heard about the difficulty we had been having, and felt awful about it. She was very sweet and wanted to do something to help. Though, I knew that there was nothing coming up for another 8 months. I explained that I just couldn't bear waiting around that long to see if I might
possibly be invited around to meet the ladies.
I started to get the feeling that, after 8 months of waiting, and the prospect of waiting 8 months more, there simply wasn't a place for me with
Alegria.
All of the
Alegria sisters I knew are especially classy ladies. It was sad that it didn't work out after all.
Then along came
Varekai.