HERE IS A QUICK RECOLLECTION of a lunchtime talk I gave at a Charlotte, NC advertising agency.

I worked for a Southeast Manitoba manufacturer and our weltlich new VP of Marketing – a Ka’toolsch from Montreal – had hired a new agency. As the advertising manager, it was my job to work with them.

The agency was made up mostly of transplanted New Yorkers, New Jerseyites and Penn State folk who had moved to warm and charming Charlotte. They all had pre-conceived notions of what a Mennonite was and now they had a new Canadian client spending money like it was znackzote.

Our contact at the agency conscripted me to give a presentation about Mennonite culture and religion. I felt largely unqualified, but I agreed to step up to the plate.

I sat on a tall stool in the centre of the office bullpen, surrounded by mostly female media people, graphic artists, creative types, PR professionals and copywriters. They sat with their pens poised expectantly above unsullied, lined notebook pages, legs crossed.  Their freshly glossed southern lips made me nervous and unsure.

Piety anxiety of the highest, and most distracted, order.

I spoke and they, well, they listened. Intently. They nodded silent approval as they played with their hair; tiny beads of perspiration dotted the bridges of their pert noses and those belle cleavages. I gulped back my self-doubt and forged on past einbach and zweibach and beyond, my figurative cleats digging up clods of antebellum red clay as I rounded second base and bore down on the Holy Ghost. I slid home; safe in a cloud of mixed metaphors.

It was astounding – I had discovered . . . Mennoporn!

Afterwards, there was quiet conversation together with rollkuchen and watermelon and I allowed to my agency contact, in my very best Barkman Avenue utsproak, that it had been a successful, and tasty, “launch”.

allfornow – Mitch (from one parallel north of Minnesota)

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016