The Rotary Club Story

OK, I'm going to catchup on a couple of topics that really need narrative. The first thing that comes to mind is the Rotary meeting story. So, Nancy Hargrove and I decided that before she left us to go back to Mississippi (the professors stay one semester, not the whole year) that we were going to go to a Rotary meeting or two. She is a Rotarian, and had brought 2 banners with her to exchange with clubs here, and I, well, I am not a Rotarian. I like Rotarians, some of my best friends are Rotarians, but the truth is that I am merely an anhanger to this circle. I had thrice tried to get a Rotary scholarship and was twice named runner up. My father and uncle are in Rotary and I have maintained a close relationship with the club who had sponsored me in Dallas, so I brought a banner (and my dad promised to send me one from his club, too). So Nancy and I went online and found out where and when the Rotary clubs meet. There are like 20 of them in Vienna! So, on January 11th we went to this hotel where we thought the meetings was supposed to be. Despite Nancy's best efforts, she could not actually reach anyone by phone to confirm the meeting location. So, we get to the Hotel Intercontinental and we asked about the Rotary meeting. It's not there. We saw that another club met at the same time at the Hotel de France next door, so we went there and were in luck - the meeting was there. Fine. So, we walk in, we order dinner at the door, we sign in, and the first thing that Nancy asks our host is, "are there women in this club?" Which is actually a valid question since Rotary did not start permitting women in the clubs until about 15 years ago. The answer was no! There were no women in this club or in most of the other Vienna clubs! They explained that about 2 clubs in Vienna have women in them (and they didn't seem thrilled about that either). When she asked them when they thought women would be allowed in their club as members, they said, "never." Despite that, they were quite welcoming to us and we sat with some lovely gentlemen at dinner and had very nice conversations. They all spoke English, though I did get to impress them with my stunning German just a little. So it came for the time when they would have the program - each meeting has a program where you get to learn something about something. Tonight we were in luck... oh we were in something.... The topic was............ Male Menopause! OMG, I could definitely understand what the man was talking about and Nancy could actually understand some of it, too. It was all we could do not to burst out laughing. Not because male menopause is anything to laugh at, because believe me, it isn't. But it was just so apro po that the one night they have women at their club they have a lecture on this topic. Nancy even mentioned it to the men at our table afterwards and they definitely saw the humor in it. It really topped off the evening. We got to take a picture with the nice gentlemen at our table and said goodbye to our new friends at the Rotary Club Wien-Donau (Vienna-Danube).