It looks great on paper!

I got an auto-reply email from Tom this afternoon that said: "I'm out of the office for WMA Volunteer Day. Try the cell if you need me."

Say what? The entertainment industry is known for many things, community service not really being chief among them. So color me a little surprised that one of the biggest agencies in the country apparently compels its employees to forgo their usual responsibility of generating money for their overlords to sort through donations at the Salvation Army. Is this sort of thing supposed to boost morale?

Of all the strange things I encountered during my tenure working for The Man, mandatory company-wide volunteering was not one of them. Last week at my decidedly non-corporate office we did have the annual event called Celebrate G's Birthday - we took Gwyther out for BBQ and then gave him cupcakes. That boosted morale, especially the part where we had drinks at 1:00PM on a Thursday. But I suspect this is something altogether different.

Under no such mandate, Leslie still volunteers a few times a month for New York Cares. Ostensibly she signed up to met new people - up until that point she had been mostly relegated to hanging out with my friends, most of whom have substance abuse problems and maturity issues. So she opted to sacrifice large portions of her weekend, in the hopes of expanding her group of friends. At one point she was drafted into a program that took kids from a group home on day trips to various places in the city. She was told that she needed to provide lunch for her assigned kids, who were technically poor despite the fact that they could apparently afford a Playstation PSP. Somewhat shady, this. Now she organizes a group of socially awkward misfits to do grounds keeping at a nursing home in Lower Manhattan. That ends up costing her money as well in gardening supplies, and apparently the only interesting person she's met wears South Park t-shirts and curses out old ladies who get in his way when he's clipping the hedges. But...good karma? Right?

None of this is doing much to sell me on the idea that I ought to cater to the community. Not that I haven't already done my time. When I was in high school, I hung around with a bunch of girls who took the whole Jesus thing rather seriously and was thus completely willing into signing up to work in the local soup kitchen once a month. There must have been some sort of Stockholm Syndrome to blame. But then again I did many things in high school that would later seem wildly out-of-character, like being blonde and having crushes on gay boys.

We were not responsible for actually cooking anything we brought to the soup kitchen, much to the good fortune of the patrons. Our only task was to stand on the line and dispense the industrial-looking green beans with strained smiles. At the time I was blissfully naive of the potential danger I was in. Many, many episodes of Law & Order have since have taught me that all homeless people are unmedicated schizophrenics who are one wrong look away from stabbing you to death.

Why would any adolescent do anything that could even loosely be considered work for no money? Because it looks good on your college application. I was reminded of this constantly by my academic advisor. Despite the fact that I had had an actual part-time job since I was 13, I was taking 3 languages and I reguarly made standardized tests my bitch, it was patently understood that no university worth incurring massive student loans would so much as look at you without the requiste amount of volunteering. So off to the soup kitchen I went once a month for all of my junior year. I guess it worked. I do have a lot of student loans.

Much like my propensity to chase after boys that like musicals, my willingness to give of myself seemed to magically dissipate once I got my college acceptance letter. At this stage of the game, I am mercifully finished with the process of academic judgement, and my work-mandated charity is pretty much limited to donating autographed Shinedown drumheads for auction. But it's good to know that the William Morris Agency is keeping the lovely concept of involuntary volunteering alive and well.