When the club was just starting, getting the various Lizards to regularly attend monthly meetings was an ongoing problem. Perhaps it was SSG-phobia or maybe a desire to avoid hosting the next meeting? The lackluster performance of our early stockpicks certainly did little to generate enthusiasm. (One pick, ClubMed, soon became known as ClubDead.)
Often we'd end up sitting around talking about the missing members while waiting for them to show up, and meetings occasionally turned into an amateur theatrical production of "Waiting for Godot." Our secretary at that time (consensus is this was Mark or maybe Drea) started a monthly newsletter partly as a means of reminding people to show up at the next meeting. The theory was that defending one's honor, love life or the lack of a life in general might be a powerful means of coercing them to attend a crummy Investment Club meeting, and the newsletter ended with the thinly veiled threat:
BE THERE OR WE'LL TALK ABOUT YOU.
Naturally, this threat didn't work worth a rip; people still skipped meetings in favor of volleyball games (even though medical science has made tremendous strides in the treatment of volleyball recently), golf, cleaning horse stalls, haircuts, and of course, one of the cheesiest of all excuses, the ubiquitous business trip. However, when Brian took over the newsletter, he continued the tradition of closing the newsletter with this simple, but ineffectual, threat. It wasn't long before the threat got converted into that mysterious acronymn that has had new lizards ever since scratching their scaly brows in puzzlement:
BTOWTAY
Even after Lizards went over the wall (our metaphor for leaving the club), we continued to talk about them. In fact, we still do. (Are your ears burning David, Deb, Ed, Gerard, Hope, John, Kevin, Lori, Lili, Lynwood, Madison, Mark, and Sam?? They should be!!!)