Navy Beats Army at the Dallas Galleria

Yesterday Bob and I put on our matching Navy Midshipmen shirts and went to Macy's to sell shopping passes to raise money for the military ball held for all Service Academy cadets and midshipmen at Christmas time. The passes were $5 each and allowed you to take a 20% discount on almost everything in the store, except for what you probably wanted to buy. There were other charities trying to sell the passes too, so we were competing with blind orphans for charitable dollars. I tried the sales tactic of reminding victims, I mean customers, of the freedom they enjoy because of the military. So really, the Blind orphans are having a trickle down benefit from our military ball because they live in such a great country. There were a lot of people who said that they were graduates of the Academies and many who had had children or grandchildren who had attended an Academy. Everyone who had an academy association bought one of our passes. We were successful at getting sales from people who were really going to buy something and were not just window shopping. Non-English speakers were not good targets. Poor things just could not catch the verbal complexities of getting a bargain. This is pretty funny because when I go down to Mexico, getting a bargain is my main goal. My children get a little embarrassed when I try to bargain in my broken, pathetic Spanish but even this humiliation does not stop me. Does Pince Caleron still mean the same thing it meant when I was a kid? Because this is a phrase often shouted at me when I walk away without buying anything. We never shouted anything inappropriate to the people who just walked away from us. Maybe we are just more refined. I don't know how we fared compared to the other charities, but Bob and I sold more tickets in our shift than the West Point parents sold during any of their shifts. We were the only Naval Academy parents at the Galleria. So we did our part. Go Navy! Beat Army! We did!