Vollmerpalooza ROCKS!

by Helen Vollmer

Okay, I admit it. I actually like the people I work with. Intellectually, I know this. But each year when we hold our annual company gathering, affectionately tagged VOLLMERPALOOZA, I am reminded in a very elemental and emotional way that life is too short not to be surrounded by bright, curious and challenging people who can teach us new tricks and help us see things in new ways.

When we first invited our staff and their families to convene in Galveston four years ago for a weekend of fun, no strings attached, I really had very few expectations. Our goal was to bring staff from all four offices together to strengthen our “we’re all in this together” core philosophy. Little did I know that we would actually have fun on that rainy afternoon at the beach playing horseshoes, drinking margaritas and meeting significant others for the first time.

Each year VOLLMERPALOOZA gets better. The cast of characters is always different, as is the location. What stays the same are a freedom, transparency and openness that breezes through by letting our hair down and breaking the barriers that come with titles, offices with windows, and responsibilities.

We get to be just ourselves, warts and all. We come and go as we please, with no questions asked. This is just fine, because no one is perfect, no one has all the answers, and everyone has their own point of view to add to the stories getting told by the barbecue grill.

This year we gathered in Gruene (pronounced Green) outside of New Braunfels, on the Guadalupe River. The 2009 VOLLMERPALOOZA was a “do-over,” since originally it had been scheduled the weekend Hurricane Ike essentially blew us all away last September. So even though the water in the river was down to match the sagging economy, our spirits were high as we celebrated what we have in common as well as our different takes on the world.

What did I learn from our outing that has made me think about things in new and different ways?

• Rachelle Khalaf, our avowed foodie, had her first martini and really, really liked it.
• Katie Butler is a champion Cajun dancer (I have yet to find out what that really means).
• Kate Sutherland, our New Englander, can master dark Texas winding country roads with little sleep.
• Tony Shelton’s partner, Ross, is a mean two-stepper at a dance hall.
• Julia Weede, who is a shoe aficionado, has extraordinarily eccentric taste in handbags (it was a stuffed frog, for God’s sake).
• Dayna Steele’s pre-teen son can write thank you notes (with a wicked point of view that must come from his mother’s side).
• From a distance and with enough beer intake, our ladies from Austin Kim Tillinghast and Meredith Michelson, look a lot alike.

You might think, so what? But each of us at VOLLMERPALOOZA gained insights about each other that may never have occurred to us before the weekend. Think about it . . . you never know when you’re going to need someone to dance their way down a winding country road in search of a frog-shaped purse in the middle of the night with a martini in one hand. Thanks to VOLLMERPALOOZA, I now know where to look.