Working -- Michele Butterworth

* Story by Todd Karella; photo by [tk]

SHE IS

Having fun

MANY PERKS

While most people spend a third of their lives chained to a desk,

Michele Butterworth spends her days in the beautiful outdoors playing

games, having ice cream socials, watching movies on the beach and, most

importantly, just having fun.

Being the activities director for the Newport Dunes Waterfront Resort,

having fun is just part of the job. And with the onset of summer, there

are many games and activities planned, all for the entertainment of

guests.

“I see my biggest accomplishment when people are having fun,”

Butterworth said.

A California resident for the last 11 years, she has spent the past

six years as activities director at the Dunes and spent the previous five

working for Disney. She says working with a lot of different people from

around the world was good experience for her current job.

Along with the rewards of participating in enjoyable activities,

Butterworth also takes joy in the people themselves, who she says are

always “very nice,” and seeing how some of them have changed over the

years.

“It’s really strange seeing someone who was 11 years old, and now here

they are graduating from high school,” she said.

PEOPLE WATCHING

Some of the memories that stick out in her mind are meeting a man who

bicycled from the Canadian border to Tijuana and the motorcycle wedding

where everyone rode Harleys.

She guiltily admits that she enjoys watching some of the chaos that

ensues while people try to launch their boats from the landing and

sometimes end up launching their vehicles as well. It’s just like the

movie scenes in which the vehicle door opens and a wall of water rushes

out, she said.

The Movies on the Beach series that she coordinates on weekends brings

back happy memories of her childhood, when her family used to go to

drive-in movies, something that she sees lacking in Southern California.

ALL ABOUT RECREATION

Butterworth is doing what she enjoys and has always wanted to do. Her

career started at Brigham Young University, where she wanted to major in

something that involved games and outdoor activities. After examining her

options and having discussions with professors, she decided upon

recreational management.

While always an outdoors-type person, she didn’t quite count on having

to be good at arts and crafts. She remembers the times when her mother

tried to teach her knitting and crocheting, but she just couldn’t get

into it.

“Eventually my mother said, ‘No more home ec classes for you.’ She was

tired of having to finish all my projects for me,” she said.

Nowadays, she’s had a lot more practice and spends lots of time in

craft stores and looking for books. Now her attitude is that if she can

do it, so can anyone else.

POSITIVE IN A NEGATIVE

The biggest downside to her job is having to work on holidays.

Whenever everyone else is having fun, she needs to be at work. This makes

it difficult for her to visit her brothers, who are scattered across the

nation or to go back home to Idaho to visit her father.

Even what most people might view as a negative, her sunny personality

only allows her to see in a more positive light. She says that what it

really means is there are fewer crowds and cheaper ticket prices whenever

she goes on vacation.