[Seattle Luthiers Group Notice] Honorarium for Michael Gurian

[Wishbone]

NOTE:  PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD OR MENTION THIS TO MICHAEL.  IT IS INTENDED TO BE A SURPRISE!!!!

OK, now that that's clear, what I'm proposing in cooperation with Scott McKee, our esteemed web site guru and, I think, sole active Oud maker, is that we do something for Michael to show our appreciation for his contributions to the Seattle Luthier's Group.  For those of you that are new on the block and may not know the history of the group and why Michael has been so instrumental, here's a brief rundown of it. 

In the beginning, David Haxton pulled a few people together at his house after a GAL show and proposed that we start a luthier's group to trade ideas and provide each other with moral support.  There were only 5 or 6 of us there and we were a little stumped about how to grow the group.  About this time, I had heard that Michael was here in town and thought to myself, well, now there's a name that would draw some attention to our little group, so I approached Michael and asked him if he would be willing to lend his name to our solicitation for members.  He said sure and further, that we could use his mailing list and that he'd arrange a place for the dinner meetings.  This was generous deed number 1.  Since then, he has selflessly donated his time in arranging all the bi-monthly dinner meetings, offered up his shop space for numerous technical meetings and parties, has helped many members with technical, design and other professional issues, has gone out of his way to provide us with the materials we need at very decent prices, has provided help above and beyond the call of duty by using his materials and laser cutters to make signs for each of the participants in the Folklife booth and generally helped this group prosper and grow.  On top of that, he's just a heck of a nice guy!!

Last year, we thanked David Haxton for his contributions as our founding father and energizer bunny.   Scott and I thought we should do something for Michael too.  Without these 2 gentlemen, we'd just be an unconnected collection of poor instrument builders (as opposed to a well connected collection of poor instrument builders).

Sooooo, what do we want from you all?  Two things. 

1) Agreement on participating in this endeavor.
2) Ideas on what to do for him.

Regarding #1, please reply to this note in the affirmative if you want to participate

Regarding #2, we figure money or guitar parts won't mean much to Michael, so we're trying to solicit ideas for what we could do for him.  The ideas we've had so far are 1) Everybody pitch in a bottle of their favorite wine (no, not Ripple or Boone's Farm...) to make up a few cases of good spirits for Michael to enjoy.  2) Take a group photo (or make a collage from submitted photos of people and/or their instruments), blow it up, have everybody sign it along with a statement of their good wishes.  This one might be logistically impossible, but it might generate other ideas from all of you.  

So, we know there are more clever folks out there than the two of us, so please submit any other ideas to us and we'll mull them over and send out another note to the interested parties with the proposed plan. 

We'd like to make this happen in the next month (or two at the latest), so we need to keep things moving.

Oh, and if you know someone we missed in the e-mail distribution (besides Michael, of course...), please let them know.

Well, that's it for now.  

Thanks,
David and Scott
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