And Now Gina is the One Who Gets Tricked

On Tuesday, April 29, Beta Sigma Phi sorority in Muleshoe held its annual Founder’s Day celebration. The highlight of the evening is naming a Woman of the Year, someone from Muleshoe who has given of her time and talents for the benefit of the community and its residents. This year our winner was Gina Wilkerson, who has served as Chamber of Commerce President for the past two years and puts her heart and soul into thinking up ways to get the name of Muleshoe out there and get everyone involved in various activities. This is the same woman, remember, who lied, well, let’s call it tricked, Lonnie Adrian into coming to the Chamber of Commerce banquet so he could be named their Man of the Year by telling him that his wife Hellen would be winning an award and that he needed to get her there.

It fell to sorority member Kristine Isaacson to do the same thing, to get Gina to our meeting to be honored. So Kristine and Dawn Williams came up with a plan. Kristine asked Dawn to give a program on the chamber’s activities since Dawn is active on the chamber board and sees Gina all the time at Williams General Store where Gina works when she is not working for the chamber. Then Dawn told Gina she should be the one to give the speech since Gina is chamber president and offered to go with her for moral support and suggested that Becky Hoksbergen, the chamber office secretary, tag along as well.

So Gina went to work on her speech, was none the wiser, and came to the event all prepared to inform her audience on what was going on with the chamber.

-Until it was time for the Woman of the Year to be named and she realized that the person Kristine was describing sounded suspiciously like herself! So she had a taste of her own medicine, the tricking people, I mean, and was genuinely surprised that she had been chosen. She was in tears as she thanked us for the honor and talked about how important Muleshoe and its people are to her and how she loves what she does. All of which confirmed for us that we had made a good choice.

The rest of what we did that night included enjoying salads and desserts brought by members, recognizing outgoing and incoming chapter and sorority city council officers, honoring members of the year for each chapter, in this case Tisha Boehning for Xi Onicron Xi and yours truly for Zeta Rho (Thank you very much; I was surprised, too!), acknowledging the donation of pennies for our Pennies From Heaven project, installing city council officers, and in general laughing and having a good time.

Special guests included  past Woman of the Year Joy Stancell, Dawn Williams, Pat Angeley, Gina’s aunt, honoree Gina, Chamber secretary Becky Hoksbergen, and past Woman of the Year Magann Rennels.

The evening was a success. I think we will do it again next year. And who knows? You might be the one who is mysteriously invited to come to a sorority function to give a speech…