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Other Duties as
s as Assigned
Shoes? No Service.
Kawania Howerton Wooten, CMP Principal Consultant, Howerton+Wooten Events
We were working on the annual convention for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association in New Orleans in 2004 — what they used to call the Cable Show — and the media mogul Paul Allen had a VIP re- ception for us, for the board and members of Congress, who were at the conference during this time. And everything was great. Of course everybody was
excited to get on his yacht, because it’s the largest private- ly owned vessel in the world. It’s called the Octopus. But he had just installed all of these beautiful floors onto this boat. He also had glass over the pool, so you literally felt like you were walking on water. And because of that, he was very concerned about the floors. So we found out on site, probably the day before the
event, that no one was allowed to wear hard-bottomed shoes to the event. So we had to send out emails to the members of Congress, so they could let their spouses know, their staff know, our board members know that
you’re not allowed to wear hard-bottomed shoes. But that’s all a matter of perspective, I guess, of what
a hard-bottomed shoe is. So we were concerned about that, because goodness knows we didn’t want to turn our board members away from their own event. So my job was to stand there with Paul Allen’s yacht staff and check the bottom of everybody’s shoes. And if they didn’t follow their standard, I had to issue them a pair of bedroom slippers with his boat’s logo on them. And these weren’t those nice ones that guys wear with a smoking jacket; these were those slippers that women wear with bathrobes and hair rollers. Of course it didn’t go well. Nobody wanted to put on
a pair of white, fuzzy slippers — it didn’t matter whose logo was on it. But the interesting thing was that as much as people complained about it, nobody turned us down, because everybody really wanted to see this boat. — As told to Hunter R. Slaton
pcma convene December 2011 141
ILLUSTRATION BY HAL MAYFORTH