You have to love the French. Not only can they really cook, but they have such a wonderful way with words. They would never say:
- “He looks good for his age”
- “He reminds me of my father” or worse: “My grandfather”.
- “He looks so much older than his wife”
Instead they say: “Un home d’un certain age” (A man of a certain age). It sounds so much better. A problem our local supper club has is that a lot of members are of a certain age. Many have been in the club for over 20 years. Lots of our good friends have moved away. We are faced with the challenge of recruiting new members not of a certain age.
The key to the health of most supper clubs is growth. The supper clubs that last for a long time are the ones that are open to new members and actively encourage newbies, especially younger ones, to easily get involved.
Just about everybody likes to socialize over a meal, but many of us are daunted by the supper club challenges of:
- Finding the right people?
- How to organize?
- How to host a dinner party?
- What if i don’t cook?
- How to recruit new (and younger) members?
Impromptu Friday Nights – A Guide to Supper Clubs (Available from Morgan James Publishing anywhere books are sold) addresses these concerns in detail. However, encouraging and recruiting new members is a key and more than worthy of a few meaningful, or at least humorous, thoughts.
Our neighborhood is in transition. The homes are 20 to 30 years old and many of the original owners have retired and moved away. The bad news is that our supper club membership has fallen off as the core group has aged. The good news is that it is still an attractive neighborhood with affordable homes near good schools and we have seen a significant influx of younger families. It is a perfect environment to attract new members to a supper club.
The key is to get younger people involved. Our club leadership has taken several steps to do so. Historically, the way we have gotten new people involved is as subs who come to a supper club when a regular member can’t. The good news is that subs don’t have to host and quite often didn’t even need to cook. They show up, have a good time and hopefully get more involved. The bad news is that as subs they would get called at the last minute and quite often couldn’t come because of scheduling conflicts. In an effort to get subs and younger people involved, we have started trying to recruit new subs in advance.
Coincidently, a wine club has sprung up in the neighborhood. Many of the participants are younger. The founder of the club developed a website and used it to get the club set up amongst her younger friends. We are trying to get the wine club set involved with the supper club and at the same time adapting some of the more casual features of the wine club into the supper club. For example, historically the supper club has been scheduled for Saturday nights. The wine club meets mostly on Sundays, but moves the dates around and is more flexible trying to get as many people involved as possible.
A classic example of Une femme d’un certain age was the French actress Simone Signoret in her later years (Pictured above). She was a great actress who was also married to the actor Ives Montand. Ives was famous in the U.S. for the movie he made with Marilyn Monroe Let’s Make Love. It just so happens that Ives was a first cousin of my International Sales Manager at Kraft, John Argiro. John told us the story of how Ives had an affair with Marilyn during the filming of movie. As John said: “Who could blame him, he was French”. Simone never divorced him. She just made him pay. The supper club moral of this story is that getting members not of a certain age involved is good. However, discretion is the better part of valor.
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