Talk Story

By Cornelia

alutations and thank you for being here today, O Esteemed Naked Readers... Friends... Romans... Members of the Jury... Persons Who Just Happened to Accidentally Click Through When We Accidentally Showed Up After You Accidentally Googled "Naked Weekend/Nurses/Rodeos/Operas/Feet/[Fill in the Blank]"... Meine Damen und Herren....

I am today both honored and pleased to share with you the news that (God willing and the creek don't rise, etc.) I shall, one week from tomorrow afternoon, be endeavoring to make a success of my first-ever paid speaking engagement, at the kind invitation of the Outdoor Art Club in Mill Valley, California. As such, I have been reflecting on past occasions during which I've found myself behind a podium, beginning with the debate in eighth grade social studies class when I donned a tam-o-shanter, Elvis-Costello-esque glasses, and an eyebrow-pencil moustache in order to more effectively impersonate Dr. S.I. Hayakawa, the Canadian-born semanticist then campaigning to unseat incumbent United States Senator John Tunney.

(seen here without his preferred headgear, but he totally did
wear tam-o-shanters at the slightest provocation--pinkie swear)

Despite my success in swaying the parental audience in Hayakawa's favor that evening, I take no responsibility for his part in the passage of Proposition 13, the property-tax initiative which many blame for the subsequent implosion of California's public school system.

aving survived this maiden speech without mishap, I eschewed the lecture circuit for the remainder of junior high in order to spend more time with my family and concentrate on my studies--not least since there wasn't exactly a plethora of local venues clamoring for appearances by an underage impersonator of small-statured Asian Republicans, no matter how limelight-mad she happened to have become following that first heady taste of public acclaim.

During my freshman year at Carmel High School, however, I reluctantly came out of retirement, feeling it was my duty to try the patience of the local Lions Club, seeing as how they had announced the advent of their annual student speech competition. The topic was "Tomorrow's Energy, Today's Dilemma," so after a potluck dinner and an all-hands round of patriotic songs, I walked across the cafeteria to deliver prepared remarks on solar panels, Stirling engines, wind turbines, biomass power generation, and the general need to diminish our nation's reliance on coal and petroleum.

I trounced fellow C.H.S. students Laura Edmonds and Nicole Hydorn, but had my butt handed to me some weeks later by this way-older chick from Santa Catalina in the Monterey County semi-finals. Bloodied but unbowed, I returned home with a commemorative pen-and-pencil desk set, which I cherish to this day.




pportunities to hone my oration chops were paltry-verging-on-nonexistent for the remainder of that year, though I was quoted in The Carmel Pine Cone after having leapt to my feet during the Q&A portion of a town council meeting to protest the proposed designation of "Carmel Rancho" as the official name for our secondary village zip code, on the grounds that "it just sounds really tacky."

Denied further excuses to trot out my burgeoning Inner Churchill, I fell into a despondent funk. Still, I kept all appendages crossed that I might someday discover an auditorium willing to have me... not like I want anything huge, I maintained during my nightly petition to the fates for a chance at more juvenile airtime... I mean, seriously, I don't even need a microphone or whatever. But my pleas fell on a deaf-eared cosmos until I lit out for New York as a sophomore.




ending my way eastward, I hoped against hope that this change in geographic affiliation might improve my chances at getting to babble in public. In retrospect, I'm thankful that Jerry Springer did not yet have a talk show to call his own, as I shudder to think what drastic measures I might have taken in order to quench my unrelenting monologue jones.

I was an odd child--the more typical thespic aspirations of my peers held no appeal. I didn't hanker after even the juiciest roles in some high-school-gym production of Blithe Spirit or You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Not for me those summer-drama-camp cabarets, those heartfelt juvenile-dinner-theatre star turns belting out "Tomorrow" or "The Surrey With The Fringe On Top."


he thing I wanted most to do was talk, unscripted. I wanted to pontificate, to expound--to speak, perchance to edify and amuse-- without the trammels of costume or character. Where the hell did that come from, my junior-varsity Bill Buckley-ness? My fetish for Robert's Rules of Order?

I confess I don't have the slightest clue. I was otherwise a shy kid, an outright geek. I still suffer from stage-fright when it's my turn to call the burrito place with a takeout order. I have no political aspirations, no impassioned agendas, no burning desire to rail against corporate skullduggery or the abnegation of the rights of baby seals or anything. I just really really like to stand up and spout random stuff in front of people. Wedding toasts, dinner-party anecdotes, diatribes when my sister was trying to get the zoning board to let her build a small addition to her old house. I don't plan what I'm going to say, I don't show up with a fistful of index cards or any prepared notes, I just love that moment when my buddies at a banquet-hall table tink their forks against glasses of ice water so I can stand up and ramble for a few minutes.


t's not like I'm always great at this, especially considering the no-notes part. There have been times when I totally fell on my flop-sweat ass, stammering and blushing my way through heinous chunks of utterly incoherent and unfunny blather. But oh, when it goes well! The rush of it, the joy... that surge of glorious feeling you get when you've tapped into a little piece of zeitgeist that matters for people who've been kind enough to lend you their ears. Nothing else compares, for those of us with a bardic bent. We want to step into Spalding Gray's or Perry Mason's hallowed shoes for just a little while, try our hands at conjuring down a skein of word-voodoo from the very air. I expect it's why people become trial lawyers, or cracker-barrel raconteurs, or shamans. It's heady stuff, when it works. I love to hear it done well even more than I enjoy the chance to offer up my own attempts at the art.



aybe I won't succeed at this a week from tomorrow, but it's really cool that the fine people at the Outdoor Art Club are willing to let me give it a go. I'm sure this speech-fetish thing is aligned very closely with the urge to write, but it's not the exact same compulsion. It feels like it falls somewhere between writing and acting, without being either.

It's not something that there's a whole lot of call for, in this day and age. Not to say we don't have contemporary lecture circuits, just that we don't see grand Chautauqua gatherings anymore, or clan dinners in the long hall at which a traveler might earn his keep for the night by reciting Beowulf. The heyday of Boston's Atheneum and even Manhattan's 92nd Street Y has passed. We have other entertainments, more readily accessible. And I don't say this to bemoan the loss of William Jennings Bryan while shaking my fist at the advent of iPods and HBO--I like my instant-gratification Sopranos fix as much as the next person. But there's something visceral about getting to "talk story," as the Hawaiians describe it, that isn't captured by any other medium.


ach time I've had the pleasure of listening to someone with a gift for the oral tradition, it has changed me--especially when I've heard it live. I can't imagine anyone is unmoved while watching Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, but it must have been a thousand times more gobsmacking to be standing on the Mall, taking in that golden arc of language direct from the source. I've been lucky enough to see a few raconteurs of world renown in action--Douglas Adams, Jimmy Carter, P.J. O'Rourke, and Madeleine L'Engle come to mind, as do the many fine mystery writers I've had the pleasure of listening to at conferences and book signings--but the speaker doesn't have to be globally famous to give me that pure hair-on-end pleasure of drinking in the spoken word. I have been moved to tears and/or shrieks of laughter by a great number of people who wouldn't consider themselves repositories of erudition, or even storytellers. Airplane seatmates, little kids, old dudes in bars, even this homeless guy my cousin Eric and I ran into outside a Manhattan deli at three a.m. one summer night when we were in high school--a raconteur of the highest order who spent half an hour standing on a milk crate describing this flock of dragons he swore was flying up third avenue by the light of the full moon.

I love it when people talk story, and as I've said herein I adore any chance to do it myself. The idea of actually getting paid for that pleasure is nothing short of miraculous, to me. I just hope I spout something worthy of the honorarium, though I worry it will make my Inner Winston swell up like a giant poison-toad pinata if all goes well in Mill Valley.