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Inspiring Women Magazine May 2023

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1990: Attorneys by day, theatre producers by night<br />

(left, page 90)<br />

1995: Officer's wife (top right)<br />

2021: North Sea sailing (bottom right)<br />

Fringe Festival that summer. After finishing<br />

my philosophy degree at Rice the next year,<br />

I returned to Tulsa for law school, where I<br />

continued to do theatre on the side. After<br />

sitting for the bar exam, I toured Europe for two<br />

months until the results were in and I had to<br />

start my adult life as a lawyer. Still bitten by the<br />

theatre bug, I also helped found and run a new<br />

theatre company, producing and directing four<br />

to five contemporary American plays per year<br />

for the next five years.<br />

One of my law school friends invited me to join<br />

her in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for Frontier Days,<br />

the Daddy of ‘em All Rodeo Festival. She<br />

promised a great girls' week, and it was. Of<br />

particular note, though, was a Dutch naval<br />

officer I met briefly in the Cheyenne Club one<br />

night. We only shared a couple of dances and<br />

some conversation that evening, but we exchanged<br />

addresses. He sent me a postcard a<br />

couple of days later, and I wrote back. To make<br />

a long three-and-a-half-year story short, we<br />

married. As we were discussing who would<br />

quit their job and move where, he was offered<br />

command of a ship on Curaçao, and we decided<br />

starting our married life on a Caribbean island<br />

was the way to go. In the FAWCO world, this kind<br />

of leap of faith is not uncommon, but it remains<br />

the defining moment of my life, uprooting<br />

myself, leaving my legal career and my theatre<br />

company, my family and friends.<br />

Getting involved with FAWCO<br />

As a newlywed on the Dutch island of Curaçao, I<br />

was relieved to discover the American <strong>Women</strong>’s<br />

Club and their Out to Lunch bunch, allowing me<br />

to make some English-speaking friends and get<br />

to know the island. We then moved to Somerset<br />

in the UK, where there was no such group. When<br />

we moved on to Haarlem in the Netherlands,<br />

with a baby in tow, one of my first calls was to<br />

the AWC Amsterdam. They had a Haarlem-area<br />

group and I was quickly involved in a Moms and<br />

Tots Group and book club as I adjusted to life<br />

in the Netherlands. One of the members also<br />

offered a class on HTML and I was happy to sign<br />

up. She had just been to her first FAWCO<br />

conference in London and had offered to<br />

redesign the infant FAWCO website and signed<br />

me up to help. Soon after, she divorced and<br />

repatriated and I took over, getting FAWCO’s<br />

new Virtual Clubhouse up and running, as well<br />

as starting the FAWCO web hosting program.<br />

I attended my first FAWCO conference in<br />

Washington, DC in 2000. The next year I joined<br />

the Board as 1st Vice President. Within a few<br />

months I discovered I was pregnant with my<br />

third child. Thinking I would resign, my husband<br />

asked incredulously, “What kind of women’s<br />

organization would make you resign just<br />

because you were pregnant?” Indeed. I kept my<br />

position and ended up bringing my six-week-old<br />

baby (and my mother) to the Florence<br />

conference. I was elected FAWCO President for<br />

the 2005–2007 term, and ended up having to<br />

negotiate an international move (to Norfolk,<br />

England). More international moves followed,<br />

to Ontario, Canada, and eventually back to the<br />

Netherlands. During that time I served in<br />

several other FAWCO capacities. I was shocked<br />

in 2019, though, when I was contacted three<br />

weeks before the Edinburgh conference. The<br />

presidential nominee had to withdraw and<br />

would I be willing to take on the presidency once<br />

more? My family was surprisingly supportive<br />

and I agreed.<br />

As we approached the 2020 conference, not<br />

only did we have to deal with the onslaught of<br />

the pandemic, but one of my daughters was<br />

diagnosed with an extremely rare disease that<br />

required immediate surgery. I am so grateful to<br />

the FAWCO Board and members who helped get<br />

the organization through those dark days, while<br />

I was also dealing with her care. Because of<br />

COVID-19, FAWCO ended up having to embrace<br />

newer technologies that included virtual<br />

meetings and conferences. This abrupt change<br />

in work-ways made it difficult to recruit a new<br />

president for 2021–<strong>2023</strong> so I ended up signing<br />

on for another term.<br />

The role of FAWCO President is as a conductor<br />

for an orchestra. FAWCO is active: providing<br />

organizational support for our member clubs;<br />

engaging our members on global issues;<br />

advocating for the interests of Americans<br />

abroad; and actively pursuing philanthropic<br />

goals. We have over 150 volunteers who are<br />

passionate about their respective areas. There<br />

is a need thus to keep the organization in<br />

balance, remaining non-partisan, adopting new<br />

90 INSPIRING WOMEN INSPIRING WOMEN 91

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