Gala Girl - NYTimes.com The summer after I graduated from college, I moved to New York for a fund-raising job with an institution I soon learned to call "the world's leading performing arts center." I was a fiction and art history major but during my interview, the director of major gifts asked the only question that really mattered: "Are you comfortable speaking on the telephone?" The next week I was dialing the offices of famous publishers, financiers, lawyers and entrepreneurs to remind them about parties at the opera and the ballet. When I wasn't dialing, I was slicing my fingers with solicitation letters. For every hundredth envelope I stuffed, I was remunerated with a ticket to see the London Symphony Orchestra or the Mark Morris Dance company. My world was a whirlwind of envelopes and symphonies, and I began to see one as currency for the other. "What a wonderful job!" my friends' parents exclaimed. I smiled and withheld the fact that I regularly stalked people just like them, compiled spreadsheets with the net worth of their assets, handed their headshots to my boss. A fascinating cast of individuals kept the lights on: millionaires who'd made fortunes from medical imaging equipment; pretty secretaries who had metamorphosed into Park Avenue wives; moguls and heiresses and fashion icons. The nice ones gifted us their discarded color printers and suggested blind dates with their nephews. The mean ones said, "Don't call us in Palm Beach." By the tone of my boss's voice over the wall of my cubicle, I could tell if the money was old or new, Jewish or WASP, in the sweet here-and-now or gone with Bernie Madoff. By the end of the call, I had already made their lunch reservation at Bar Boulud, drafted a thank-you note from our president and sprinted down the hall for his signature. And every week, like a recurring dream, the public relations and development departments met to discuss "how to convert ticket buyers to donors, and vice versa." But the truth was, some donors didn't actually want to attend chamber music concerts. Sometimes a donor just wanted to pay to name a seat in honor of his late mother. There were hundreds more seats to be named, 15 galas to plan, and thousands of members to steward. So God forbid you mixed up an "Esq." and a "Sir," or misspelled Zabar's, or signed a letter "Sincerely yours" instead of "Yours sincerely." "I'm not sure how long I can keep doing this," I told my mom. We all have first experiences. This is a great place to start. You hang on to that job. And slowly, it did start to win me over. At 4 p.m., after I'd spent a day shipping gifts and rearranging shelves, when the pleats in my skirt were crumpled and my mascara smudged like war paint, my boss would ask, "Would you like to see a show tonight?" I took every opportunity I was offered. I saw sold-out performances by Sting, Yo-Yo Ma, Regina Spektor, Joshua Bell and Renée Fleming. I was invited to secret parties at the Plaza Hotel, where the night staff sent me away with bottles of Veuve Clicquot and $200 cheeses. "Romeo" of the Royal Shakespeare Company entered my life, stage right. "I like the freckles on your shoulders," he said, and kissed me on Madison Avenue as the taxis swerved around us. Sometimes as often as three times a week, I sat in the front row of our jazz hall where, behind the stage, a plate of sheer glass revealed Central Park West. One night, when Charles Strouse took the stage to sing "Tomorrow," from his own musical "Annie," it was against a backdrop of stars. "When I was a teenager," he said by way of introduction, "I used to stand out there looking up at this place." I had never looked up at the place, but there I was, and I was starting to understand what it could do for me. Not every night was glamorous. "I'm going to the Empire State Building tonight for dinner and a private recital by Denyce Graves," I told my parents, who revered my position as the family's cultural ambassador. When I arrived, the manager of special events directed me toward the corner of 34th and Fifth, where I was to stand for two hours and greet anyone who looked as if they were coming to our event. No guests needed my assistance, but tourists asked me to take their photos, backpackers asked where the subway was, and when I locked eyes with clean-shaven banking boys my age, I felt like a call girl. "How was the event last night?" my parents asked. "Sensational," I guessed. I was making about $900 every two weeks, and my paycheck barely covered my rent in a crusty basement at the mouth of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. One of my roommates slept in a twin bed behind a Chinese screen in the living room. Mice scurried through the walls and found their way into kitchen. We bought adhesive traps that didn't kill the mice but glued them squealing to the floor. In the mornings, my roommate held her breath, scooped them into shoeboxes, and handed them off to me. Straight-armed, I waltzed them outside and dropped them in the Dumpster. Then I pounded off in my ballet flats to the world's leading performing arts center, feeling beautiful and significant. One afternoon, two years into the job, I sat in a freezing conference room with an N.Y.U. intern, mechanically assembling brochures. Outside a crane hummed, busy at work on our billion-dollar renovation. Recently a similar crane had fallen on an East Side apartment building and killed a few people. "Do you like working here?" the intern asked. I'm thinking of applying for a permanent position. Sun poured into the conference room and lit up the dust. The ghosts of a hundred meetings surrounded us. In a few months, I'd be done with that job, promoted into something new. "I really do," I said, surprising myself. I looked at her, fresh-eyed and eager, knowing nothing. You should go for it. Five years later, it's clear that what I was really developing in my first development job was myself. And all around me, testing my principles and desires, were the city's glory and gore, its players at play, and the fair-weather friendship between money and art. Caroline Hamilton, who graduated with an M.F.A. in creative writing from the New School in 2011, is working on a collection of personal essays.