Thursday, May 03, 2012

Stock Holders meeting

A couple weeks ago I went to the SJI stock holders meeting in Voorhees, NJ. It was fairly uneventful, although as I got out of my car a gentleman recognized me from the Ram's Head venue (no longer exists), he was with a friend who is a real-estate broker in Ocean City and of Dutch heritage.
We walked in together and they asked me to sit with them during the meeting. The Dutch guy seemed to become very comfortable with me (as a person). Afterwards they asked me to sit with them for lunch, I excused myself to use the rest room and when I came out went looking for them, there were two banquet rooms and I didn't know where they were.

I wound up sitting at a table of strangers to each other and it was almost like sitting at a funeral, so, I opened the conversation asking if they agreed with the reason the CEO gave about the softening of the stock price, everyone finally started to talk.

I was sitting next to an older couple (late sixties early seventies) who seemed very nice, but as the rest of our lunch partners left she had to ask me about my persona. We got into a nice conversation and she mentioned she was a Baptist and never met anyone like me. She continued that she was very happy she met me and I really impressed her with my appearance and respectability.

Bottom line is, act no differently as you would in public when cross dressed as you would in "gender accepted" clothing and you should (hopefully) be accepted by most people.