Wherein Pearl Enjoys a Good, All-Day Fright

These people look really put together.

I back out of the room, check the signage. 

It’s the right room.  I slowly re-enter and take a set at one end of a long table. 

Welcome, my friends, to eight hours of corporate learning, where an innocuously titled course on “Communications” reveals itself, in dizzying, slow-motion horror, to be the stuff of nightmares.

All that was missing was my entering naked and forgetting my locker combination on the Day of the Big Test.

I turn to the woman next to me.  “Why am I here?” I whisper.

She grins, and I like her immediately.  “Because someone loves you very, very much.”

And we burst into laughter.

It is close to the truth.  My boss, a lovely woman who now owes me an adult beverage the size of a day-long lesson in humility, had hoped only to enroll me in a course that would help me resist the urge to send e-mails with the salutation “Dear Inconsiderate Boob”.

In actuality, however, I have been thrust amongst people who speak for a living, the course being designed to teach them how to move across a stage effectively, how to gesture without appearing to have T-Rex arms, how to make eye contact without frightening the audience.

Now why don’t you come to the front of the room – hold on, we’ll be videotaping you several times to go over in your one-on-one coaching sessions – and give us a couple minutes on, oh, let’s see.  How about the rodeo?

One would think that I, personally-renowned writer loved by absolutely tens of people, would have quite the stage presence.  And you’d be right – as long as I am at a podium and reading. 

But this?  Suddenly, I cannot tell a story and walk.  I have forgotten how to blink, I am rocking on my heels, I am holding my arms out as if to play an invisible piano. 

The word “um” comes to my lips and stays.

The room is supportive and generous, the applause genuine.

I have wandered into a room holding a kazoo, and I have been taken in by the violin section.

And I am looking forward to the drink that is surely in my immediate future.