Marla Cilley — otherwise known to her newspaper readers as the FlyLady — didn't know much about members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before she came out from North Carolina to visit Salt Lake City.
But she will by the time she leaves.
Cilley is getting the royal tour while she's in town to speak to 850 fans at the annual American Mother's Convention today at the Little America in Salt Lake.
While here she'll visit Temple Square, Welfare Square and all the usual tourist sites. She even sat in for a rehearsal with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
"I'll be sitting somewhere in the middle," Cilley said on Thursday after arriving in Utah. "I'm not a great singer."
Meeting members of the choir was something she mentioned as one of the things she'd really like to do when Cecelia Benson, president of the Utah American Mother's chapter, asked her to fly west.
Cilley was also interested in meeting Latter-Day Saints, though she didn't really know much about members of the LDS Church.
"I think they're pretty good people," Cilley said. "My dentist is a Mormon, and I know we don't drink coffee before we go to see him."
Cilley is a little bit curious about the culture because she's been told LDS women could use her down-to-earth advice.
"I think everywhere females have been told 'We can have it all ' and we feel like we have to do it all," said Cilley's sister, Paddy Newlin, who made the trip with Cilley. "The fallacy is that mommy has to do it all."
Newlin said that's a universal pressure felt by women, wives and mothers, regardless of whether they have big families or careers along with being mothers. Cilley agrees.
"(If a woman has a lot of children) I tell them they have an army and you're the general," Cilley said. "Everybody has a job. My own son did his own laundry when he was 9. He always had jobs."
Cilley is dedicated to helping women feel better about themselves and getting to a point where the home and the family runs itself.
She preaches the value of establishing routines that make housekeeping simple.
She advocates using "Finally Loving Yourself" (FLY) as a mantra — thus, her nickname FlyLady — and taking baby steps as a way to get started.
"When women start the day with a smile on their faces, I've done my job," Cilley said.
Cilley is a self-made columnist, speaker and mentor who maintains that women defeat themselves by making keeping house and happy homes together too difficult.
She started her Web site — www.flylady.net — after, as she puts it, "I got my act together." She then wrote a book, "Sink Reflections," that teaches women to start by cleaning their kitchen sink, then using the confidence from that shiny sink to motivate more changes.
Cilley's Web site has 30,000 registered "FlyBabies." She and her partner columnist, Dinner Diva Leanne Ely — who writes a companion column about nutrition — have recently made their advice available in the form of free weekly newspaper columns to 7,000 newspapers across the nation.
They also have several books out, including the recently released "Body Clutter."
The women make the material available for free because Cilley is absolutely determined to get her advice out to as many women as possible.
"When you give," she says in her southern drawl, "you get."
"This is not about making money. It's about getting people the help they need."
E-mail: haddoc@desnews.com