Today I helped coordinate a media event at my client Skowhegan Savings’ location in Madison, Maine. Army Sgt. Eric Pierce, a 27 year old from Embden, Maine introduced his dog Sandy to people who had helped provide the money for him to bring the dog back from Afghanistan.

This is a photo of Sgt. Pierce with his sister Christine, her daughter Abby, and Sandy the dog. Christine volunteers for an organization called Lucky Pup of Kennebunk. She is a ‘foster mom’ for puppies. Lucky Pup is one of the beneficiaries of the extra funds raised for Sandy.

About a year ago, Sgt. Pierce and his army mates found Sandy and his litter mates near Kabul. Pierce says that after fighting all day, it was comforting for the troops to come back to their base camp and have a dog to play with and care for. But there are evidently lots of stray dogs over there so army officials ordered Pierce and the soldiers in his unit to dispose of, or actually to shoot the dogs. They couldn’t bring themselves to do that, so they brought the dogs out in the wilderness and dropped them off. But the dogs came back. At that point, Pierce became so attached to Sandy, he called his mom Maddy back in Maine and asked if she could help him raise the $2900 to bring the dog home. So Maddy put the word out to the local community. Reporter Doug Harlow from the Central Maine Morning Sentinel wrote a story about it which ended up getting picked up in newspapers statewide. Continue Reading »

My son Craig is a junior in high school this year and he has recently started looking at colleges. Over the past week, he and I have visited three different campuses, and today he went with my husband to visit another one. Tomorrow he is actually going to another campus on his own. It’s hard for me to take my marketing hat off when we go on these visits. I find myself being very critical and wondering ‘what were they thinking?’ when tour guides make grandiose proclamations about their colleges.  To protect the innocent and my son, I’m not going to name any college names. Also God forbid I say something negative about the college that ends up being his first choice and then he doesn’t get in because of his opinionated mother.  (But then again, aren’t all mothers opinionated when it comes to choosing a college for their child?)

The tours are conducted by students, which is good because the prospective students would rather hear from an actual student than an adult. However at one college we visited, our tour guide was wearing extremely short shorts. Now I’m no prude, and I try not to sound like my own mother who is always critical of how teenagers dress, but I would think that the Ivy League institution she was showing us around would require at least long pants or appropriate length shorts. Of course my son had no problem with the short shorts and probably wishes that all the girls at the college of his choice would dress like that.

One of the tours was conducted by two students together — a male and a female. It seemed rude at first because they were both drinking these big cups of Starbucks coffee….didn’t their Ivy League etiquette teach them that it’s not polite to drink coffee when your guests aren’t offered any? It definitely came off as if they were trying to show off how grown up they were as colllege students drinking their large cups of Frappacinos and Mochachinos.

Plus they were both walking backwards the entire time around this rather large campus, which was very awkward. At one point they nearly walked into a professor who came out of the library with his nose in a book. I was sure there was going to be a big collision, spilled coffee, broken bones, and embarrassed high school students, but I guess my imagination was running away with me instead of paying attention to the tour. Continue Reading »

 Last night I had the honor of attending the Maine premiere of a new documentary film called The Way We Get By.  It was held at the Collins Center for the Arts at the University of Maine in Orono. When I arrived, there were several  TV crews with their live trucks set up for broadcast, a red carpet leading to the front door, and military troops lined up to welcome the guests to the premiere. The Governor and our congressional delegation was on hand. Little did I know this was the beginning of an experience that was going to have a deep impact on my life.

The film tells the story of the senior citizens in Bangor, Maine who have been going to the Bangor International Airport as “troop greeters” at all hours of day and night for years to meet and greet the members of the military as they arrive or depart from the U.S. to head to Iraq or Afghanistan. Continue Reading »