This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
05/16/2023 08:00 AMMidge Kayfez loves to plan parties, she loves to prepare food for parties, and she loves to attend parties. But Midge loves something that most party lovers do not love at all. Midge loves to clean up.
She will have the opportunity to do all of those things at Cocktails with Friends, the benefit that the Friends of the Essex Library is hosting on Friday, June 9 (rain date June 10) from 5 to 7 p.m. Along with drinks and hors d’oeuvres, a trio of jazz musicians, all teachers at the Community Music School, will play.
The Friends raise funds to provide ongoing support for library activities outside of the regular budget. The group paid for the automatic doors at the library’s entrance and for all magazines, newspapers, periodicals, and museum passes. Funds from the Friends have also paid for programming for both children and adults.
Midge volunteered for Friends of the Essex Library even before she and her husband Mark had moved from Texas to Connecticut.
“Libraries are the hub of the community; they’ve got the pulse of everything. I felt it the first time I walked in,” she says.
In Texas, she was also a library volunteer at a local library with a memorable name: the Dripping Springs Community Library.
“I’ve always been a volunteer,” she says. “I’ve volunteered ever since I’ve been a kid.”
When Midge lived in San Francisco and worked for the brokerage firm Charles Schwab, she was once honored by the company, which sponsored a variety of community opportunities, as volunteer of the year.
The other thing to know about Midge and Charles Schwab is she is one-half of something called a Schwouple, that is a Charles Schwab couple. She met her husband, Mark, when they both worked at the company.
It was volunteering in California for a child-focused organization called Sunny Hills Children’s Garden that convinced Midge that she wanted to change careers. Every time she finished teaching children about gardening, she told herself the same thing: “I wanted to be a teacher.”
She went back to school, got teaching credentials at Dominican University in San Francisco, and taught computers and technology for two years in California before moving to Texas.
Texas was not only a place where she had friends; there was also a solid professional reason for the move.
“California was laying off teachers. Austin was exploding,” she says.
One of her favorite memories of her computer teaching days is the students who created an image of her face to look like a space alien, but there was a saving grace in the caricature.
“It healed all the wrinkles,” she says.
Midge, who graduated from SUNY Binghamton, was not a computer major in college. She majored in political science but particularly liked political statistics, a course that involved working with computers.
“It fascinated me,” she says. After graduation, she found a job as a data analyst, launching her on a technology career path.
Retiring after 10 years of teaching, Midge, who had grown up in Garden City, Long Island, was eager to move back to the East Coast. She and Mark had also briefly considered the West Coast; Mark is from California, but the wildfires that have marred the California landscape were a deterrent.
“I saw what the wildfires did, and it is scary,” she says.
She did not know Essex before she visited, but it didn’t take long for her to make a decision on the community.
“I saw the library, and I fell in love,” she says.
The town has the advantage of being equidistant from a number of relatives, but that is not the only reason Midge is enthusiastic.
“People are the friendliest, most generous; I have fabulous neighbors,” she says
As a member of the Friends of the Library, Midge worked on the successful library mini-golf benefit earlier this year. She called local businesses seeking sponsors for the event.
She was surprised when she became a member of the Essex Garden Club how many people she already knew as a result of her work with the Friends group.
An avid gardener, Midge says gardening in Essex is a very different experience than gardening in Texas. The ground where she lived in Texas could be so hard that the joke was you needed a jackhammer to plant a tree. Here, in New England, she is thrilled by what she describes as the astonishing diversity of plants. “Have you seen the lilacs?” she pauses to ask a reporter, and when it is time to take a few pictures, she asks to stand by those lilacs in the front of the library.
Her enthusiasm for gardening is something Midge says she first learned from her grandmother. And it is her grandmother who taught her the best way to clean up after a party. The trick is to organize, she says. Group things on different parts of the counter; start with delicate items like crystal for handwashing, then silverware, next plates, and finally things used in preparing the meal.
And there is one other suggestion Midge has before starting all that cleanup: Take off your party shoes.
Cocktails with Friends, a benefit for Friends of the Essex Library
Friday, June 9 (rain date June 10)
Location provided with ticket purchase
Tickets on sale at Essex Library