Claudia Myers column: When you volunteer to run one of biggest quilt shows in US

In 1997 and 2001, I was co-chair for the large and prestigious Minnesota Quilt Show. This is a state guild show with, at that time, about 350 members and a show turnout of upward of 2,000 people.

It takes at least a year to plan and put together each annual show, which gives you and the 12 committees plenty of time for contention, temper tantrums, disasters and happenings that threaten to derail the show itself (which really never happens).

The show goes on with or without numerous hitches. The doors open; the classes are taught; the quilts compete for ribbons and prize money; the quilters spend their "show money" at the vendors; somebody wins the raffle quilt; the show closes; the quilts are returned; and everybody goes home and starts their new quilt projects. Amen. All in, all done. Until next year.

In 1997, Shirley Kirsch was my co-chair. Everybody knew Shirley, she had started the North Country Quilters in Duluth and it was said that Shirley taught most every quilter in our area to piece and hand-quilt. No one in the quilt world had ever heard of me.

I attended the Minnesota Quilter's Show in St. Cloud in 1994 and when I came home, my son-in-law, who was chief financial officer of the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center at that time, asked me why MQ never held its show at the DECC. How would I know?

So, I asked someone on the Minnesota Quilters Board of Directors and she said: "because we can't get anyone to chair it from that area."

My mouth opened, my brain disconnected and I said: "I can do that."

MQ immediately took me up on it and I immediately broke out in hives.

At that point in my life, I had been the backstage go-to person for the Minnesota Ballet, St. Scholastica theater productions and the Baltimore Opera Co. I rationalized to my self: "How different could it be? A show is a show is a show." Right?

Wrong. This show was run by volunteers, most of them women. It is one of the largest all-volunteer quilt shows in the U.S. A large group of women, two to a committee, plus a treasurer, secretary and two chairmen, all crammed into a small meeting room, all talking, laughing, arguing, taking turns bringing coffee and snacks, taking turns giving their committee reports. Twenty-eight women. As the saying goes: "Like herding cats."

One committee member stood up and said she certainly wouldn't be buying any tickets for the show raffle quilt. What! We had chosen to do a quilt with a number of compass roses on it. That is a mariner's compass with a cut-out and appliqued rose in the very center — a very old, very traditional block. But, that person didn't care for our choice, so no tickets for her! And so it went.

I had never run meetings before, never stood up in front of a large group and had actual common sense come out of my mouth. In fact, I would warn people at the beginning of the meetings that if I hyperventilated and slid under the table, I'd appreciate someone retrieving me.

About the third meeting, however, I realized that if I didn't give the committees too many choices, things went much more smoothly. They didn't have to take sides and debate the fact that a tote bag for a quilt show should be large enough to carry at least 15 pounds of newly purchased fabric. But what if a 54-year-old, 125-pound woman couldn't carry it around? It took half the meeting to settle that storm!

To facilitate matters, I would say: "Listen up, committees, here we have some things to sell at the show in our MQ merchandise booth. We have show logo T-shirts in red and navy blue (never mentioning the green, orange and black ones). Which one shall we sell? OK! The red one it is!"

As I said, Shirley Kirsch was my co-chair and she knew everybody who could be called a quilter. So she was in charge of recruiting and hiring the teachers for the quilt classes that we were offering. We both wanted a stellar lineup. We wanted teachers that quilters who didn't travel to the big quilt shows might not have an opportunity to learn from. Teachers that we, ourselves, would like to take from.

Those people are usually booked out way in advance, so we started contacting our choices two and a half years before the show. One woman responded with: "Well, Shirley, I'm 83 now. I'm not sure I'll still be here in two and a half years." To which Shirley replied: "That's OK, Blanche. If you're not, don't come."

We jokingly said the other Shirley thing was the weather during the four-day show. That came about because of Duluth's reputation for changeable conditions and the fact that the show was in June and a few years back, there had still been ice in the harbor in June. So Shirley fretted and lost sleep, worrying that no one was going to come to our show.

Well, that didn't happen. We had over 2,500 members, local people and visitors attend the show and after the numbers were all in, the DECC catering department reported that Minnesota Quilters now held the dubious record of having consumed the most gallons of ice cream in a four-day period. Ever.

And Shirley heaved a big sigh of relief.