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An Aviation Meet
TRY this plan for recruiting attendance at your next church social. It would also "fill the bill" for a jolly midwinter school party. The invitations are made to look like tickets of admission; the men's of red pasteboard and the girls' of blue. They read this way:
Admit Two To an Aviation Meet In the Church parlors Friday evening February 21 8 o'clock Each member who receives a ticket must make a point of inviting somebody else, and should conduct the guest personally to the social.
The hall or assembly rooms may be decorated with American and Allied colors, and it would be appropriate and effective to suspend in each window a trio of toy balloons, [21] red, white, and blue in color, respectively.
Miniature airplanes hung overhead at intervals down the length of the room would add realism.
In different places on the walls fasten conspicuously large posters boldly lettered with the program of events, as follows:
A themed evening for a church social, and the page breaks off before the theme is paid off: the programme of events is printed on the following page. What is here is the invitation, the decoration and the recruiting scheme.
- No food at allThere is no menu, no refreshment and no recipe anywhere on this page. The subject is attendance — how to get people into the church parlors on a Friday evening in February.
- The ticket with a plus-oneThe invitations are printed to look like admission tickets reading Admit Two, red for the men and blue for the girls, and every member who receives one must invite somebody else and bring them personally. The social is being grown deliberately, one guest at a time, and the mechanism still works.
- An aviation meetThe thing being imitated was a real public spectacle of the day, a flying meeting with timed events and prizes, and the party copies its programme structure. Flight was recent enough to be glamorous and simple enough to decorate with, which is all a theme has to be.
- Allied coloursThe decoration calls for American and Allied colours alongside red, white and blue balloons, and that phrasing is the one thing on the page that fixes it in time: it belongs to a country at war or just out of one.
- Still the right decorationThree toy balloons in each window and miniature aeroplanes hung overhead at intervals down the length of the room. A century on, this is exactly how anybody would still do it, down to the balloons being one colour each.
- The programme on the wallLarge posters boldly lettered with the list of events, fixed up conspicuously round the room so that nobody has to be told what happens next. It is the best practical idea on the page and the one most often forgotten now.
The page is written for somebody whose problem is that attendance at the church social is falling off, and it treats that as an ordinary recurring difficulty rather than a crisis. The social was an institution that had to be actively kept alive through the winter, and the author offers the same plan for a midwinter school party because the two filled the same slot in the calendar. What such an evening needed was a reason to come that was not the social itself, and so it is dressed up as a public entertainment: tickets, events, posters, prizes, and a theme borrowed from the newest spectacle available. The guests are being offered, in a church parlor in February, an approximation of something most of them could not otherwise have attended.