Time flies when you’re having fun, the saying goes.

And wow does the time fly here at our office. It seems we just get one magazine to press and there’s another one waiting to be sent.

It’s like every three weeks we have a baby. And as the mother of five, that’s an analogy I don’t make lightly!

Managing editor Lynn Wasson and I try to let it be known that the best time to schedule a meeting or social call with us is on a single digit day of the month. And if you think about calling or just dropping by between the 20th and 25th of the month, forget about it.

Fun, ah yes, Fun.

We remember it, we know all about it, we constantly write about it, and we used to have a lot more of it. It’s just that for the last four years (Happy Birthday to us!) we’ve been so busy making sure everybody else knows about all the fun things going on each month, we haven’t been able to work many of them into our own schedules.

Sometimes, because we’re writing about events at least a month before they happen, we tend to miss them when they actually do roll around because we think they’ve already happened.

“Just read the calendar in the current month’s magazine, mom,” advises my daughter Laurie. And I do, at least once a week, before I talk about upcoming events on KWHN radio with Gary Elmore and Daren Bobb each Wednesday morning.

Lynn’s daughter Flannery is pretty good at reminding her mom about fun things that appear in our magazine. She especially keeps up with audition dates for musicals and plays – she has a passion for the stage. She tried out for and landed a part in the cast of the Young Actors Guild musical, You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown. So you can bet that will be one event Lynn won’t miss. And luckily for her, all the show’s performance dates are in the single digit days of the month – Aug 4-7.

But lest you start feeling sorry for us, slaving away over our keyboards and only remembering good times, let me set the record straight. As far as I’m concerned, our work is fun – most of the time. We meet interesting people and get to introduce them to our readers. We take our cameras to lovely homes, gardens and businesses we think our readers will enjoy seeing and knowing about. We get to entertain and inform about 60,000 people a month with stories and photographs of the places they live and work and play.

We try not to let on, but our office is a fun place, most of the time. Don’t tell anyone, though or we’ll never get any work done. Once in awhile one of us gets the urge, and the time, to cook – and we’ve enjoyed some delicious, freshly prepared meals here. Sometimes, we get really lucky and somebody like Johnny Miller – a great cook (and bomb squad expert) whose specialty is Italian dishes – will come by and make us something so outrageously tasty we have to write a story about it.

We love having our office in the historic district where, even with our hectic schedules we can take a minute, or a meeting, sitting in the swing on our front porch. The downtown horse and carriage, and the trolley bus for tourists, pass here frequently.

Just three blocks off Garrison Avenue, we are surrounded by trees, animals and birds, This spring and summer we’ve watched the same mourning dove parents raise three crops of babies in the tree outside our kitchen window. When we’re here at sundown we can hear them cooing in the trees around our office. The natural beauty of our neighborhood helps restore us when we’re really stressed.

The buildings and the people around us are great, too. We watched for months as the historic church west of our parking was restored. Now it is the lovely Darby Community Center, and with it on our west and the beautiful Bonneville House on our east – both serving as meeting places and wedding venues – we’re surrounded by an interesting array of people and fashions, coming and going.

Our small but choice, handpicked staff of experienced professionals is fun, funny, smart, caring, multi-faceted and multi-talented. The fact that they we’re all women is mostly coincidental. We have no prejudices against men. We love our husbands, sons, fathers and brothers. In fact, we all have wonderful, supportive husbands, otherwise they would have divorced us by now, God love them, and help them. They visit us sometimes here, mostly to bring us food or treats or children. But they tend not to tarry long, especially during the dreaded, final deadline days each month. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

Actually there are quite a few good and talented men who work with us– writers, photographers, graphics artists, technicians, student interns from the UAFS graphics department. We enjoy working with them and, as far as we know, have never caused any of them to leave our building screaming.

And that’s a good thing.

We’d just rather everyone be calm, be safe, and have fun.

 

Linda Seubold, editor of Entertainment Fort Smith Magazine, can be reached at lindaseubold@efortsmith.com. Read her archived columns and articles online.

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