Opinion

Moss column: Lightning struck by women

By Bill Moss, Published: January 26, 2013

I love women.

So I'm thinking about that when I watched the press challenging President Obama about why his second-term appointments were all white men. It's not enough in a culture hypersensitive to gender, every shade of color, background and belief that the man they were howling at was himself a black American. No, he must appoint more Cabinet secretaries, judges and high-level functionaries that look more like America.
My appointees don't look like America. They just look like women.
I don't know why but I'm surrounded by women. It just happened.
I married a woman. She's the best.
We had a boy and a girl. They're the best. The boy, Will Moss, is an amazing young man. The girl, Melissa Moss, is a young woman. A college freshman, yes, but a grown woman nevertheless. She's interesting. She's impossible to predict. She's already joined womanhood.
Two-thirds of our household dog population is female, and I must say the better two-thirds they are. The male is an idiot.
So I'm thinking about poor old Barack Obama trudging upstairs from a hard day at the White House press room and Michelle glaring and Sasha and Malia saying, "Yeah, Dad, how come you aren't appointing more women?"
So I'm thinking about whether Lightning Media Inc. and Hendersonville Lightning LLC are female friendly. I believe they are.
I hired Denise Ward, paginator, designer, receptionist, complaint taker, Girl Friday extraordinaire and a soprano and church choir director. I hired Paula Roberts, the best advertising sales rep west of the Catawba River. I hired Lorrie Fernandez, a terrific bookkeeper who knows more than Timothy Geithner about taxes because, well, she must, because she keeps up with payroll taxes. I hired a female lawyer to guide the creation of Lightning Media Inc.
So I'm thinking about the Jan. 16 issue of the Lightning and I realize this is the women's issue.
Marybeth Burns of Summit Marketing Group called me up last summer and asked me if the Lightning would sponsor the Frenzied Female conference. Switching quickly from my editor hat to my publisher hat, I said, of course, as long as it fits one of my two price points: cheap or free. When is it? February, Marybeth said. And I thought, this woman is really organized. I feel darn good when I nail something down three days ahead; Marybeth penciled me in eight months ahead.
Marybeth is one of the stars of this issue of the Lightning.
She copped to being too skinny and got help for it. Now she's a warrior fighting anorexia because too many women in our culture are shamed into being too skinny and shunned or made to feel bad if they're not skinny enough. A native of Greensboro and graduate of UNC, Marybeth relied on her husband, Chris, and their two kids, Ethan and Jenna, to support her in recovery. I think they all deserve a huge shoutout.
So I'm thinking about the other stories in this issue and I recall the interview I had with Donna Hastie about the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra. Donna, a retired nuclear physicist, used her acute power of analysis, love of music and determination to help stabilize the structural underpinning of the orchestra.
So I'm thinking about a sidebar to that story, a profile of HSO's new development director, Meg Penny, and how good that's working out, and about her sister-in-law, Lynn Penny, who did such an incredible job helping to rescue the Playhouse, and then I'm looking down the budget of all the stories in this week's Lightning and I see Ginger Brown, who received a battlefield promotion to chair the Highland Lake Park advisory committee and (with help from Sally Campbell) has led a bunch of highly accomplished men through weekly meetings from Thanksgiving through New Year's; and I see Jane Singleton, who beat the DOT — the Dee O Tee! — to get permission to remove the porkchop at her office-retail center in Flat Rock, and I see tourism director Beth Carden, who launched the county's first tourism conference, and I see North Henderson High drama teacher Lisa K. Bryant, a Vagabond who helped organize the amazing 24-hour high school Play Festival, and it hits me over the head like a cast-iron skillet ... Yep, we got the women.
So I'm thinking, this is a great issue of the Lightning in praise of women, almost by accident, and I'll take pride in having played a role in printing it.
As soon as I take out the trash.