THE SIMPLE BUT IMPORTANT DYNAMICS OF

                          WHERE PEOPLE SIT

Barb Shortz, a WOW participant and one of the volunteer coordinators, said, “When welcoming new people we give them a name tag and at the beginning of the meeting they stand up to be introduced and tell a bit about themselves.  Several people will greet them at coffee time and some people who have had connections with them before typically invite them to sit at their tables.  The following week they usually go back to the tables where they sat the previous week -- as they were comfortable with those people.”

Marguerite Manning describes this very important dynamic in these weekly gatherings that picks up on Barb’s comment about where people sit.  Marguerite said that at first she tried to encourage people to move around to new tables each week, but she found that people really appreciated sitting in the same place.  They wanted to talk to those people that they talked to last week.  Sometimes names are forgotten, but not faces or places (where they sat last week). 

So Marguerite has learned that this tendency to sit where they sat last week is a very important part of the interest in attending.  She said, “The main event of WOW is the socialization and fellowship.  Try as hard as I can, it is hard to shake up the tables and have people move around (kind of like the pews at church!), and I have finally given up that idea, realizing that the main reason people are there is so that they CAN visit with their longtime friends.  And new friends are being made simply because newcomers are welcomed to a table -- the group is still a good size for meeting people - and we all wear name tags!!”

Marguerite also mentioned that if there are cards to be signed for a person who was in the hospital, even though people are known only through these weekly WOW events, and only because they sat at the same table with them, both the signing of the cards and receiving those cards have important meaning to both parties.

Bruce