Elizabeth
Scokin Takes Flight
by Karen Parr-Moody photography by Jerry Atnip Any event planner worth her Manolos knows that the gilded age before
the Great Recession has given way to a grueling hangover, even for those who waft through life on a vapor cloud of Annick Goutal, fishtail hems trailing in their wake. Charity giving is just one of many categories stymied by newfound thrift. Into this dank milieu enters Nashville’s queen bee of event planning, Elizabeth Scokin, who this past fall brushed the cobwebs out of checkbooks with a new fundraising program benefiting the Tennessee Art League. Called “Art, Dine, Design,” it consisted of a series of twenty intimate dinner parties in the Nashville area, with the goal of fêting at least ten paying guests each. It began with an Arabian Nights-themed event at Morton’s of Chicago, which featured belly dancers and sheiks. “People get tired of giving money all the time to charity,” Scokin explains. “I had to think outside of the box. It can’t be the same old, same old all the time. “Art, Dine, Design” has been a great fundraiser because people have had fun, and it has generated people giving again, writing a check to a charity again, which maybe they hadn’t done in three years because of the economy.” Recently, Scokin—chic in a black Chanel sweater, leopard print Michael Kors skirt, and Christian Louboutin boots—met with Nashville Arts for brunch in her neighborhood, Green Hills. It’s Saturday, and she looks like a thoroughbred among ponies, tucked into a banquette amid the jeans-and-tennis-shoes set. Her glossy, chestnut mane is still coiffed to the high heavens, Jackie Kennedy style, from a photo shoot the day before. Her coltish figure is that of the model she has been since 19, her height being “five feet nine-and-a-half inches, six feet in heels.” Her features are arranged in the symmetry of the exquisite, with doe eyes,
…she looks like a thoroughbred among ponies, tucked into a banquette amid the jeans-and-tennis-shoes set. diminutive nose, and slightly upturned corners of the mouth, which creates the effect of being perpetually amused. Scokin orders a hot tea, then details how she arrived at event planning, why being a humanitarian is her “core,” and why she considers herself a “rebel with a cause.” Scokin grew up in the mannered world of a fifthgeneration cotton farm in Blytheville, Arkansas, a town founded by her great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Henry T. Blythe. She credits her family with sending her on the path to charity work. “First and foremost I’m a humanitarian,” she says. “That’s my core. That’s how I was brought up; it was my responsibility as a human being to be kinder to the person who has less. That is what my father told me: You’re not kinder to the person who has more, but to the person who has less.”
NashvilleArts.com | January 2O11 | 65