Pirates of the Cure

(Precious kittens, you may like to refresh your memories by reading these before proceeding.)

What flamingos and pirates have in common, I don't know. Peg legs, maybe? Garish garb? Anyhoo, my friend and colleague Steph and her sister, Jenny, like to raise money for the American Cancer Society, and two ways that they've been doing it have been "pinking" people's lawns with pirate flamingos for a ransom (you'll know what that means if you clicked the link above) and participating in the annual Relay for Life in Dickinson at DSU's Whitney Stadium. In advance of the Relay, they sell luminaria for people to honor their loved ones who battled cancer, and they collect donations to turn in on behalf of their team; at the Relay, they set up a tent (among the others lining the track) with pirate-themed games for kids, enter a male in the Mr. Relay contest*, and walk the track all night.

They also invite our family to walk as part of their team. We're leaving early tomorrow for a vacation (keep your eye on Pensive? No, Just Thinking in upcoming days for all the details), so we knew we couldn't stay at the stadium long, but we did put in a couple hours and a few laps around the track. We saw many people we know--some stationed at tents around the stadium, some walking the track as part of teams, and some attending just to show their support, get some exercise, and patronize the fundraising booths.

The Mobergs posing with the team banner, which says, "Pirates of the Cure: On the Hunt for a Cure." I think Steph and Jenny thought of the pirate theme when the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were just out and popular. Notice Hillary's hook on her right hand and Suzanna's smile despite her otherwise intimidating pirate accessories. Below note how the girls and I got into character with those same pirate items, courtesy Steph and Jenny:

And here we are starting off the relay. The girls were the official banner carriers for our team. Those white T-shirts have this year's Relay for Life logo on them; white means that we are official participants in the relay.

Before participants in white T-shirts get their turn walking the track, however, the people in purple Relay for Life T-shirts start it all off with a couple laps, one all by themselves and one joined by their families. Purple means a cancer survivor. With each step, they were greeted with applause from nearby onlookers lining both sides of the track and seated in the stadium bleachers. The saddest sight was seeing parents pushing a stroller with a purple T-shirt-clad toddler inside.

Here's a luminary in honor of my friend and colleague; she battled cancer earlier this year and was devastated to learn in recent weeks that it has returned. She's currently undergoing more treatments and could use your prayers.

Neither Susan nor I made this luminary, but spotting it brought tears to our eyes because it could have represented either of us.

*The Mr. Relay contest requires each participating team to force some poor schlub into women's wear, makeup, and a wig, and then to send that temporary transvestite around the stadium seeking donations from others in attendance. The winner is the she-male who turns in the most money. There might even be accolades for being the most "beautiful" contestant, too . . . I don't know. This year Steph's new husband played the role. For his sake, I'm posting no photographic evidence!

Relay for Life: Walking for a Cure

Well, my incessent nudging of faithful (and intermittent) readers to donate money to the American Cancer Society will now, in fact, cease . . . for about a year, probably! Yes, the regional Relay for Life has begun and will likely have ended by the time you read this, and the Mobergs participated for the first three hours. (More die-hard team members will remain for the entire relay from 7:00 P.M. today to 7:00 A.M. tomorrow. Those people either do not have small children or, if they do, are insane.)

We arrived at Whitney Stadium at Dickinson State University and found the tent that served as home base for the team of which we were honorary members: the Pirates for the Cure. The all-too-familiar flamingos were flocked in front of the tent, and there were various pirate-themed items around the tent. The team captains even gave our girls bandanas with skulls and crossbones printed all over them to suit the theme. The track in the stadium was lined on both sides with luminaria inscribed with the names of cancer survivors or victims whose friends or loved ones honored them by purchasing luminaria in their names.

All the participating teams' tents and stands lined the east side of the track's interior, and along the south and southeast of the track's exterior were food stands, silent auction tables, and raffle tables to raise more money. The bleachers on the west side held people there just to watch the start of the event, and microphones and speakers were set up on the southwest side of the track's exterior for all the musical performers throughout the night (with a dance floor on the interior of the track's south side for several dance performances that we saw).

Each team provided a contestant for the night's beauty pageant that consisted of the contestants using their gorgeousness to hit up others in attendance for donations. Teams were vying for the honor of raising the most money in the limited amount of time allotted, so they worked especially hard to beautify their contestants. Our team's contestant arrived after we did, so we watched the team captains do the fitting of the dress and tiara and the application of makeup and nail polish right there in the tent. Oh, yeah, one stipulation: each contestant had to be a male dressed as a female. Yep, "beauty" pageant in quotation marks.

After some opening remarks that we couldn't hear much of (the microphones were cutting out), the event began with cancer survivors making the first lap around the track. (I should mention that this was a walking relay; nobody intended to run for the 12 hours, nor did anyone attempt to run for even a few minutes, which would have set an intimidating precedent.) Their families joined them for a second lap, and then all the teams assembled for a lap. All teams need to have at least one member on the track at all times, so we Mobergs volunteered to start out since we intended to stay only a few hours. While we walked, we enjoyed the music and dancing, we visited with others we knew who also were participating, and we slowed down enough to examine the luminaries until we found the names of Susan's mom, Sue, and my mom, Mary Ann, as well as those of my stepmom's first husband, Kenneth, and several other people we know in the community.

Abigail and Hillary were ready to be done with walking around the track long before Susan, Suzanna, and I were, but they toughed it out reluctantly until finally Susan and I granted them a reprieve, took them back to the tent to bid the team farewell, and headed on home. Thank you to everybody who heeded my calls for donations and responded with monetary contributions to cancer research. Your help enabled the team to raise more than $1,000 to add to whatever the total will be for the night's/morning's overall Relay for Life effort.

The Pirates of the Cure tent/home base

The girls got to carry the banner for the team.

I told them to "look tough like pirates." Here you have it, then.

There's that darned Hillary making Dad do all the work again!

Here's Adam, our team's contestant in the beauty pageant!

Elizabeth Taylor likes to be filmed through a layer of gauze to soften the hard lines of time. I figured it would help Adam's femininity, but maybe I needed more layers . . .

Once dusk fell and the luminaries were lit, it was especially sobering to walk around the track.

2007 Relay for Life

Susan's cousin Anna is an organizer for the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. (In fact, she's on the executive team for the St. Olaf Cancer Connection, sponsoring events throughout the year to raise money for cancer research, education, and services.)

In the past Susan and I walked in Relay for Life, an event for which participants solicit donations to the American Cancer Society and during which, in return, they light a luminary in honor of the cancer survivor or victim of the donor's choice. The luminaries (paper bags with lit candles in them) line the sidewalks or track of whatever venue is the site of the event, and the participants run or walk during the relay. As dusk settles in, the glowing luminaries provide a gentle reminder of the extent of cancer's reach in our lives; the line of luminaries piercing the darkness usually extends as far as the eye can see. It's an opportunity to celebrate those who battled or triumphed over cancer; to donate money to an excellent cause; and to gather with like-minded individuals for an evening of exercise, fundraising, and entertainment (relay sponsors often arrange for music, public addresses, etc.).

Anna is asking for donations of any amount to help their organization reach its goal of $60,000 (last year they raised $58,000). If you are willing to help, please click here to reach Anna's donation page. Every $10 donation offers the opportunity to dedicate a luminary to someone you know who had or has cancer. Feel free to copy and paste the Web site address of Anna's donations page into an e-mail to others who you think would be willing to donate to this cause.

The ultimate goal is a cure for cancer. If you or anyone you know has been touched by cancer, you know how urgent it is to achieve this goal.

Help Us Fight Cancer

On Friday, July 27, Susan and the girls and I will join a local team in the SW ND Relay for Life at Whitney Stadium in Dickinson. The American Cancer Society sponsors Relay for Life events in local communities across the nation as fun, team-oriented ways to raise money for continued research to treat and cure cancer. With as many family and friends of ours who have fought and/or survived cancer, Susan and I are happy to participate in our community's Relay.

We'll be walking the track (others will be running; both are acceptable); at least one member of the team must be on the track at all times, and the event runs from 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M.! At dusk they will light the luminaria to create a hauntingly beautiful border for the track and to remind everyone of the people we know affected by cancer--our reasons for being there and caring so much about this cause.

Would you be willing to donate money to this cause? If so, choose one of these options:

1. Go to this Web site and click on "Make a General Donation" in the sidebar to the left. OR
2. Write a check to "American Cancer Society" and mail it to us. If you need our mailing address, e-mail me, and I'll provide it to you.

If you'd like to dedicate a luminary in honor of a cancer survivor or in memory of a cancer fighter, choose the "write a check" option and let us know whose name to put on the luminary and whether it is "in honor of" or "in memory of." Each luminary is $10.

E-mail me, too, if you have any questions about the event or about donating. And thank you for your support.

We've Been Flocked!

(HELP US FIGHT CANCER! CLICK HERE.)

Faithful readers already know that our family will be joining a team for the upcoming Relay for Life to raise money for the American Cancer Society. That team named itself "Pirates of the Cure" (inspired by the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie, of course) and will have a pirate-themed booth at the Relay. It makes sense, then, that another fundraiser of theirs would have a pirate theme.

We awoke last Friday morning to find that overnight our yard had been "flocked" or "pinked"! Yes, a half-dozen pink flamingos had found their way onto our front yard in the dead of night and were there the next morning in all their neon pink glory to greet us, our neighbors, and all passersby on our street. There was a hot pink brochure in our mailbox explaining that the flamingos could be removed by the flocking crew (the Pirates of the Cure folks, as it turns out) for a $10 donation and then placed on the front lawn of our choice tonight. Should we choose to keep the flock an extra night, it would cost us another $5.

What a fun fundraising idea! We chose Susan's aunt and uncle Mary and Dale, who played along and sent the flamingos the next night to Susan's aunt and uncle Kathy and Pat, who paid to send the flamingos along again . . . and that flock is still traveling from lawn to lawn in the community. Who cares that flamingos have nothing to do with pirates? Although, in the Pirates of the Cure's defense, they did decorate the flamingos in pirate apparel. Look closely for head bandanas and eye patches:

"Standing" on the Corner Watching All the Gulls Go By . . .

Do you know what the animal-world collective noun is for a group of flamingos? "Stand." A stand of flamingos. (One amateur on-line neologist suggests "flamboyance"--a flamboyance of flamingos. Gotta admit: it has a nice ring to it.) So if a flock of those birds were to appear suddenly in your yard, would you say that you'd been "stood" up? That's what we were last night:

Hey, these guys weren't in our yard last night when we went to bed!

On my way out the door this morning to go to work, I discovered a stand of flamingos standing in our front yard--we'd been pinked! (Faithful readers will recall what that means.) We had to pay $20 to the hoodlums responsible for those shenanigans in order to have the stand removed and stood in somebody else's yard (are any Dickinson relatives reading this and just now figuring out where their own set of pink avian yard ornaments came from?!). But the $20 goes directly to the American Cancer Society, so it's for a good cause.

Also to help that cause, our family will join those same hoodlums on their team in the annual Relay for Life, held this upcoming Friday in Whitney Stadium at Dickinson State University. We will be walking not only in memory of our moms and other loved ones now gone who had cancer but also in honor of friends and family who have survived cancer . . . or who are currently battling it. Please add my friend Jarri to your prayers for that reason.

And my friend Ruth, also a cancer survivor, offers you this means to help in the battle. Pink birds on the lawn are a fun way to get our attention, but ultimately we need to find a cure for cancer to stop this loss of loved ones to the disease in its many forms.

Hillary and Abigail mimic the one-legged posturing of the pink plastic pests (Suzanna was still asleep). I pray that in their lifetime cancer is wiped out.