I know very few people who
are comfortable speaking in public. They might be articulate in private
conversation, but freeze up when faced with an audience. It’s usually from lack
of experience but over the years, I have known dozens of people who speak in
public all the time and yet are terrible at it.
Without bragging, just being honest, speaking in public is one of the
few things in life I’m really good at. Even when I don’t know what I am talking
about, I manage to give a convincing performance and people are always telling
me “how much they learned.”
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| 7'x7' Vision Created by the Overhead Projector |
I honed my craft in the gulag
of the South Bronx when I was in my early twenties, teaching art to fidgety,
inner-city twelve year olds at Junior High School #98. I never quite recovered from the experience.
They were worse than any Comedy Club audience; you held their attention or you
died (figuratively speaking). Out of necessity, I became a performer, a
mesmerizer of the highest order. The quality of the artwork produced by my
thirty classes per week (yes, I taught thirty classes with thirty five or more students
every week) was awesome. Once you
unleashed the creative potential of my semi-literate subjects, there was no
telling what would emerge. The main problem was that I had to first establish
“order” in the class, not so easy since I was not much older than my students
and far less worldly. I accomplished this by bluffing them into thinking I
actually had some power. In the end, I loved them; they loved me and the work
they turned out was remarkably good. I taught them they could succeed at
something and they taught me how to hold the attention of an audience, no
matter how rowdy or disinterested. When I returned to teaching a couple of
decades later, it was on the college level and I couldn’t get over how the
class sat quietly and wrote down my every word. But the techniques I had
learned teaching Junior High School served me well; I was, as they often put
it, “the most interesting teacher they had.” Little did they know what had gone
into acquiring that skill.
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| 7'x7' Vision Created by the Overhead Projector |
The subject of public
speaking came up recently when a friend’s husband parked his Porsche
convertible in my garage for the winter. “I have a great Porsche story for
you,” I offered, and it went as follows:
One
year I was asked to give a talk to the Greenwich Garden Club about a book I had
written entitled “Preserving Porches.” I had given the same slide talk to clubs
all along the east coast. This was their annual dinner meeting, held at a posh
country club. Husbands were invited. At the pre dinner cocktail party, I got
into conversation with a stray husband and told him I was the guest speaker.
“What’s your topic?” he asked. “Preserving Porches” I replied. He looked
puzzled. ”Why is the Garden Club interested in cars?” he asked, assuming the
topic was “Preserving Porsches.” I thanked him for giving me my opening line;
it broke the ice, made everybody laugh and I have used it ever since.
