A combined 582 guests sampled gourmet cuisine, drank expensive wines, and shopped for top-notch merchandise in the Dreyfoos Concert Hall lobby of the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts on May 19 for the 14th annual Reach for the Stars benefit.
“The Kravis Center focuses on educating children in five different counties on various topics. Not only are they a performing arts center, but they also supply visiting school children with courses, study guides, and quizzes to make sure they took something from the performance they saw,” explained Alexander "Sandy" Myers, the only sponsor that has been with the Center’s flagship S*T*A*R (Students and Teachers Arts Resource) program since its inception. To raise money to fund the nearly $18 million per year Center and continue busing in children from underfunded schools (more than 1.1 million children to date), the Center and its various committees often host fund-raiser events.
On this occasion, the event’s decor and entertainment were kept minimal. The entertainment was live ambient music and was being performed from atop the stairway by La Feria Ramon Baez y Orquesta, a multi-member Latin jazz collective. Black drapes served to separate the silent auction area from the rest of the event, where 18 restaurant stations scattered throughout four floors included everybody from Echo and Havana Restaurant to Mark’s CityPlace and Morton’s, the Steakhouse—as well as a handful of wine and spirits purveyors, including Dewar’s 12.
Each of these restaurants, as well as some others, were serving a tapas sampling from their respective menus: Gatsby’s Palm Beach served chipotle glazed shrimp and chorizo skewers, as well as baby lambchops; Jinja served the Thai version of Kung Pao Chicken and a Kyoto Mahi Mahi; Maison Carlos was sampling their lobster tortelloni with aurora sauce; Corina’s in the City was dispensing a shrimp ceviche, as well as sliced pork tenderloin bites; while The Grape at Downtown at the Gardens featured their shrimp remoulade and, for dessert, a chocolate fountain with strawberries, pineapple, peanut butter blonde brownies, and coconut macaroons.
In the silent auction area, where area businesses donated the majority of the items, the choices were plentiful. Items ranged from framed signed photos of performers like George Carlin, Natalie Cole, Wynonna Judd, Dennis Miller, and Joan Rivers to books inspired by designer store Tiffany’s, such as John Loring’s Tiffany Pearls or his Tiffany in Fashion. However, the most sought-after items of the night were the one-month rental of a luxury car, the 15-inch Sharp Aquos LCD flatscreen television, the BMW mountain bicycle, an autographed national championship football and helmet from the University of Florida Gators, and a two-night stay at the Bauer II Palazzo in Venice, Italy. Additionally, earlier this year, the Center asked visiting school children to paint portraits of the performances they had seen. All of these were submitted into a contest and the first-place recipient’s drawing was auctioned off at this event, as the only item in the live auction.
Adding together the top bids from each of the auctioned items, as well as the ticket sales—$45 for members of the host “Young Friends of the Kravis Center” organization, $75 in advance for non-members, and $85 at the door—the total amount raised was $90,000.
