BOSTON. It’s the beginning of the charity ball season in Boston, and enterprising event planners try to “front-load” their galas on the calendar in order to catch affluent donors before they come down with a case of “empathy fatigue” as winter drags on. “I want to get first crack at those big wallets,” says Brian Festorini as he adjusts floral centerpieces in a ballroom of the Ritz-Stadler Hotel here. “Not to be crass, but I’m not leaving any money on the table for the ASPCA if I can help it.”
But Festorini glances anxiously at his watch as 7 p.m. approaches, the hour when pre-dinner cocktails are to begin. “I’m getting a little nervous,” he says as there is no one waiting at the serving stations for drinks. “Usually when you put ‘open bar’ on a social invitation in Boston you risk getting trampled to death by old money cheapskates who throw nickels around like they’re manhole covers.”
“I’d especially like to thank Bob Williamette, who only gave $100 but insisted on being named a Sponsor.”
What Festorini doesn’t realize is that the problem is his client, the Unmitigated Gall Foundation, a non-profit that raises funds for an ailment that few people sympathize with. “It goes by many names in different cultures,” says Emil Tang, editor of The Eleemosynary Review, a quarterly devoted to charitable giving. “In Yiddish it’s ‘chutzpah,’ in Latin American countries it’s ‘cojones,’ in Germany it’s a pain in the keister.”
There’s even a country song about it.
Unmitigated gall, sometimes referred to as “sheer effrontery” in medical literature, is a disorder that manifests itself by the discharge of bile from the gall bladder into the small intestine. “An outbreak can also be detected by changes in the nervous system,” says Dr. Floyd Marchand of the University of New England Medical School. “Someone will cut in front of you in line, or fail to clean up after a poodle that takes a dump on your lawn, and your immediate involuntary reaction is ‘Of all the nerve!’”
Back in Boston, the room slowly begins to fill with clumps of people moving in herds of ten, driven on by corpulent men and overbearing women who have cajoled their firms to sponsor a table at $10,000 a pop, using appeals based on their personal experience with the disease. “You think it’s easy being pushy?” says Mort Grandison, a senior vice president at a commercial real estate firm. “I have to live with the tragedy of unmitigated gall every day of my life, or at least my associates do.”
The groups move, like Macbeth’s army in Shakespeare’s tragedy, “only in command/Nothing in love,” but eventually take their seats and are greeted by the mistress of ceremonies, local radio personality Candi Mayerman. “Thank you all for coming tonight,” she intones once she’s adjusted the microphone.
“You’re welcome,” comes the response from the crowd.