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