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.
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