September 12, 2006
Hello, My Name Is …. Little Miss Sunshine?
Posted by Kevin | Print This Article
Okay, if you haven’t already seen Little Miss Sunshine, then
1) You need to see it, and
2) There are going to be some spoilers in this post, so consider this a warning that I am going to be talking about the plot.
Okay, so Little Miss Sunshine is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. And I’m bringing it up here because it brought to mind a couple of completely unrelated points about meetings which are not particularly enlightening but which I found amusing. In fact, it may be the first comedy about event planning.
Basically, the movie is about a ridiculously dysfunctional family that heads out in a broken-down VW bus to take their daughter to compete in a beauty pageant called “Little Miss Sunshine.” That’s really it. Most of the major plot points are completely ripped off of National Lampoon’s Vacation, but they’re just done so much better. Now, what struck me while watching:
The father is a wanna-be motivational speaker. Greg Kinnear plays the father who is a wanna-be motivational speaker and has created some really lame program called the “9 Steps” program for success (”Refuse to Lose”). He is, of course, a loser, and the best portrayal of a motivational speaker since Chris Farley lived in a “van down by the river.” He is always on the verge of a next big deal and in a particularly funny scene chases down his agent, who is attending a conference in Scottsdale, to find out what’s going on with his book deal. Even though I’ve already given the spoiler warning, I don’t want to dwell too much on the details, but suffice to say that what the agent tells him pretty much sums up what those of us who work with a lot of these types of speakers already know about them.
There are bureaucrats working registration! “Five minutes late? Sorry … registration’s closed. If I made an exception for you, that wouldn’t be fair to the people who followed the rules, now would it?” Yeah, it’s an extreme and silly example, but …. aaaargh….what is it about these sorts of things that rules become more important to the worker bees than the reality? Registration at any event is always the most painful part of the event. Why? Because you have to do it, you have to stand in line, you have to get the bag, you have to check your name off, you have to put up with the temps who are following their checklist procedures because that’s what they’ve been told to do.
I’ll give serious kudos to ASAE, who each year seem to make registration more and more painless and more and more efficient. It doesn’t even seem like a chore — this year there were people wandering around with handheld scanners zapping your pre-mailed name badge and bam, that was it. Those first impressions matter, they create the initial impression with which people are going to judge the rest of the organization’s capabilities throughout the rest of the meeting. Yet meetings still large and small that I’ve been to make their poor attendees go through a painful period of dealing with an unsmiling bureaucrat searching for their name on the attendee list. Make registration easy — hell, you don’t have to work much harder than that to make it fun (have music play, give out candy or little gifts, engage the registrants in conversation, arrange for board members to “work the line” in shifts and just introduce themselves to registrants or chat, etc.) — and it will make a big difference in the psychology of your event.
Well, anyway, this whole post was just a thinly veiled reason to talk about a movie I thought was great. So see it, seriously. Steve Carell’s a genius and that little girl, whatshername, is phenomenal (hard to believe she’s the same little kid that annoyed me so much in that awful movie Signs).
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