“We’re encouraging people around the world to invite friends to buy the book, cook the recipes, and share a meal at our Global Dinner Party – Connecting through Food,” said Gelman. “In hundreds of homes, guests will be ‘talking’ to us about the stories and discussing the anthology as well as the food. We’ll post your videos, pictures, and comments on Facebook. Please join us.”
Female Nomad and Friends: Rita Golden Gelman
Working hard on my Global Dinner Party. I hope all of you will host a dinner party in your home. Details on my fan page: female nomad. Click on Like to join, Events to host. All over the world we’ll be sharing travel stories, eating recipes from the anthology (Female Nomad and Friends), and helping to send kids from …the slums in New Delhi to vocational schools by purchasing the book. Still working out details.
Rita Golden Gelman: Global Dinner Party
Working hard on my Global Dinner Party. I hope all of you will host a dinner party in your home. Details on my fan page: female nomad. Click on Like to join, Events to host. All over the world we’ll be sharing travel stories, eating recipes from the anthology (Female Nomad and Friends), and helping to send kids from the slums in New Delhi to vocational schools by purchasing the book. Still working out details.
I’m going for “less is more”…
Check out my postings on: Rita Golden Gelman – Female Nomad.
I am blogging on: Let’s Get Global, but that will be mostly for students and parents and educators.
Thanks for following me here.
A party and a talk…in process
I haven’t even thought about Let’s Get Global in two days. The anthology (Female Nomad and Friends) has totally taken over my head and my computer. There are 41 authors in the book and I’m throwing a launch party in Seattle on June 4th so everyone can meet everyone else. My daughter and her husband have offered their house!
There are a whole bunch of authors who don’t live in the US; unlikely that they’ll be flying in for a party. But I’m hoping to get people from around the country. We’re also trying to book a talk that night. What fun it will be with a gang of us talking about our stories. Elliot Bay is booked already, not available. We’re still shopping around. Emily from Crown, Jan in Seattle, me in DC, Karin in Minneapolis, Bonnie in Olympia….there were six million e-mails on the case all day long. We’re not there yet.
I have to confess that I am currently fantasizing about getting on a plane and heading for the jungle….without my computer and phone.
Schools and You and My New Book
April 11, 2010
It’s sunny and warm in DC today. The cherry blossoms on my street have snowed off the trees and the neighborhood is a fresh vibrant green (last week we had pink flakes every time the wind blew).
I’m still over my head in work and challenges. Every day I am more than ever convinced that our country needs a “Gap Year” mentality. Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan woman who won a Nobel Peace award a couple of years ago, says, “You cannot be a leader unless you understand the world you want to lead.”
Check out her interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOnYVeaETps
Isn’t there someone (or sometwo) in the DC area who is looking for meaningful volunteer work? I need a sidekick to brainstorm across the table with me, help me organize volunteers….and follow through with the research, writing, and sending. At this point my volunteers have all disappeared and I’m way over my head. I’m a team player without a team!
So if you are looking to put some passion in your life, and you live in the DC area, send me an e-mail and I’ll send you my phone number. Let’s talk. femalenomad@ritagoldengelman.com
I’m also still collecting volunteers from all over the country….to be LGG’s liasons to high schools in your community. A movement needs tons of people….we do need you. Send me an e-mail, please. Read the last post for more on this.
As I wrote in the Nomad book: I can’t wait to hear from you!!!! (That sentence brought thousands of e-mails! I’m ready and waiting again!) Best, Rita
PS Below is a picture and order form for the new anthology. The publisher, Crown, just told me that if you pre-order now, the sale will go in as a “first day sale” and count toward making this a top selling book in the first week. I’ve been saying wait, but now I’m saying go ahead and pre-order. We want thousands, millions of sales in the first week. It’s a great read and all the royalties are going to send slum kids in India to vocational schools. Buy all your gifts for the year!!! Right here, right now (see below). It’s a wonderful book…..you will laugh and cry and wonder how the world can be so beautiful and so sad at the same time. It’s the perfect summer read. Thanks from me and from all the kids in India whose lives you will change.
I just copied and pasted the icons below into an e-mail. It worked! I’m hoping you will do the same….in your e-mails, on your blogs, and on your websites; feel free to copy and paste. In a few weeks I will put an excerpt here, with a recipe. I’m waiting to get the excerpt from Crown.
Oh, and you have to do a control and click to get to the online stores, not just a click. Thanks. I’m going to be monitoring the sales rankings. So buy lots of books, please.
And just in case you’ve forgotten or never knew, the first book is called, “Tales of a Female Nomad.” It’s still available and I get those royalties personally!! Best, Rita
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Another Call for Help
This week I’m rallying the troops. If you would like to be involved in the Let’s Get Global pilot school program in your community, please send me an e-mail and I’ll send you some information. I’d like to know if your local high school would be willing to present the Gap Year option to its students. We are preparing a Volunteer Kit and we’d like to set up a Let’s Get Global After-School Club. We’ve set September as our goal of when we’d like to begin working with the schools. We’re working on a fun program for the after-school clubs with music, art, discussions, contests, etc.
In your e-mail, let me know where you are and send me any demographic information about your school. You don’t have to commit to anything until after you’ve read through our material.
On another note, I am very much a team player. I need to brainstorm, talk about plans, discuss how to organize things. I’m still looking for a face-to-face pal in DC who will work with me, on a volunteer basis, around three times a week. One of the things we’ll do is organize funding research so that down the line we can pay a qualified, experienced coordinator. I spent a day at the Foundation Center last week….here in DC. The research will take many hours. I’m thinking of subscribing so that a group of us can do the research using their data base on our own computers. Any takers?
Send me an e-mail. femalenomad@ritagoldengelman.com
The Bus (on the way back to DC)
There were two main reasons for my NY visit. One, to do that video about “Female Nomad and Friends” for the bookstore sites online; Crown Publishers asked for that. The other reason was to meet with Mary Katzke who is a documentary filmmaker planning a round-the-world trip with her ten-year-old son. She and I are trying to come up with a film that will be a good fit for LGG. Any ideas are welcome. I w0uld love to come up with something as wonderful as Matt Harding’s dance.
About that video: I’m definitely not going to be a film star when I grow up. We must have done twenty takes of me looking at the camera and trying to remember what I had written. I was pretty bad!! I never did get it right from beginning to end. Jay (the marketing person on the anthology) and Holly (the videographer) were so patient and reassuring….but I felt totally inept. You will have a chance to see it when they put it up on the sites. I’ll let you know when that happens. I may not even look at it! They are going to have to do a lot of cutting and pasting. At one point I suggested they get a gorgeous actress to sit there and say, “Hi, I’m Rita Golden Gelman.” Let her memorize my words. I could go for that. Thin, beautiful, and capable of talking for two minutes without blowing the lines!!
I did find out from Jay that all pre-ordering of “Female Nomad and Friends” will be credited as sales during that first week! So you can order the book from an online site today and it will go toward that best-seller goal that I mentioned in my last post. He encouraged me to encourage you to order it now. If you go to my website (www.ritagoldengelman.com), you can click on whichever “store” you would like to support, and buy the book today!!
About that rgg site. I finally got it back and I will be putting daily ( or at least frequent) posts on lots of topics. Serious, silly, and everything in between. It’s been stagnant since July when my last computer crashed and the software I was using to edit it didn’t move to my new computer. I couldn’t edit it until four days ago when I finally broke down and bought the software and hired someone to install it. Now I need to build the traffic it once had. So please, go check it out. http://www.ritag0ldengelman.com. (Sorry…I don’t know how to turn that into a link.! Please don’t let that stop you from going there! ) I am going to stop this post right this minute and write the rest of this message on the rgg site. I’ll talk more about what NY was like for me this time. I lived in Greenwich Village for eighteen years, from 1958, when I got out of college, escaped Bridgeport, CT, and went to the big city to seek my fortune, until 1976 when our whole family moved to LA. This will be continued at: www.ritagoldengelman.com. See you there.
A Trip to NY
Hi,
I’m getting ready to go to NY tomorrow. Crown wants me to do a two or three minute video to send off to bookstores (presumably online) and talk shows. I’m trying to figure out what to wear. Do I want to look like the basically funky author that I am or do I want to dress a little more upscale? Ronnie, my landlady and friend, is pushing for a more business look. She just dropped by with some necklaces for me to wear with my outfit (haven’t decided which). And I will borrow some mascara from her. I can’t remember the last time I wore mascara. I’m feeling very middle class at the moment; not my usual self-image.
Jay Sones, the marketing director at Crown, asked me to send him some text for the video. I woke up in the middle of last night and wrote and sent something. Haven’t heard back yet. I’m a very confident writer…that part went well. But I must say that I’m not so sure of my skills as a video-maker.
I guess I just have to keep reading what I wrote. I don’t memorize well either. Besides, I think it will sound stiff if I try to memorize it. Oh dear, I don’t do insecurity very well!
I would so love to see that anthology hit the best seller lists. We’re planning to have everyone buy the book (Female Nomad and Friends) the same week (beginning June first) so that it has a chance to hit the best seller lists! I’m counting on you to buy lots of copies; it’s a great read and a wonderful gift. Funny, sad, poignant. I’ve set up a fund that will send all the royalties to Rotary in New Delhi to provide scholarships to vocational schools for slum kids. There are forty one authors in the book and we’re all excited and happy to help so many families. Love, Rita
What’s Up?
I was planning to be in the Library of Congress this week, searching for family foundations that offer planning grants to incipient projects. We need money to hire a coordinator. Yes, we do need a coordinator, someone highly organized and very experienced in this non-profit world. And I now know two things: I’m very much a team player; I need someone sitting across from me to brainstorm and plan, face to face….and I need to pay that coordinator.
In recent months I have found, over and over again, that the fabulous volunteers who are willing and eager to help….pretty much have lives that come first. Totally understandable.
Let’s Get Global needs a strong, full-time, well-paid executive who can balance my visionary contributions with solid, detailed plans and on-the-ground actions. We’d make a great pair. I’m willing to work on it 24/7 (Keep buying and gifting that nomad book so I can continue volunteering full time!) as an idea generator, but I need a counterpart who knows how to take ideas and make things happen. I’d like to be able to hire a fantastic executive with high-power skills, someone who can view Let’s Get Global as a business that will change the country.
The reason I am not sitting in the Library of Congress searching the Foundation Center’s files is that I have spent the last week working on the anthology I’m producing, “Female Nomad and Friends: Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread Around the World.” It will be in stores and online June 1st.
When I got the idea to collect stories about taking risks and connecting around the world and to include international recipes in the book, I never dreamed that it would be ten times more difficult than writing the nomad book. But every time I read it (just finished proofing the final galleys), I can’t wait for it to be available to the rest of the world. The stories are fantastic: funny and sad, provocative and challenging. Readers will laugh and cry and jump on the next plane.
And all the author royalties are already going to scholarships to vocational schools for slum kids in New Delhi, India. None of the 41 authors is making any money on this. We are all very excited to be involved. Those scholarships will change a lot of lives.
The last few days I’ve been collecting quotes from my e-mails about the nomad book to put on the first page of the anthology (same publisher). That involves going through my e-mails, choosing quotes, writing for permissions, and compiling the comments.
So that’s why I’m not in the Library of Congress looking for funding at the moment. I have to get those quotes to Crown by Friday. I think I will put on blinders to other projects at that point and get myself to the grant-search.
Happy to read comments, suggestions, e-mails (info@letsgetglobal.org). And if any of you would like to make a tax-deductible donation, say $500,000, I will personally come to your home and cook you a Thai dinner!! I will also dance and sing, but, as I have said before, you may want to think about that part. US Servas, our fiscal sponsor, will also be happy to accept any amount you want to send. Thanks. Ciao, Rita