The Public Speaker
A new tangent.
I’ve been a writer online for three decades. I have been pleasantly surprised at the number of people, some notable, who have followed my commentary over the years. This year at a reunion of the local chapter of my fraternity, one of my conversations convinced the two of us that I really should be doing more speaking in person. His particular interest was in relationships. It was something I realized that I have a lot to say about. Here are two rules of many I have found particularly useful for me.
If you’re not going to knock it out, don’t get into the ring.
The way to keep a marriage is to commit to the marriage over your commitment to yourself.
Both need some qualification and explanation of the sort I do as a writer, but they are the sort of killer lines that work well in a speaking engagement. As I look towards my own future, I gaining interest in myself as a public speaker and the ways in which I may leverage the few advantages I have to make this part of my avocation. It turns out that if you are in the Phoenix area this week, you can come and check me out.
One of the more interesting things about my youth is that I was on set for that groundbreaking show starring Diahann Carroll, Julia. Yes I was to be the kid Corey, whose best fried was freckle-faced Earl J. Waggadorn. I didn’t end up with the part because the other kid’s dad was already in the union and had connections. I was also going to be the first black kid on that hit show Bonanza. In this episode, I’m a disconsolate son of a farmer whom the KKK is trying to run off his own property. My own actual father, a Black Nationalist, would not, under any circumstances allow me to speak a particular line of the opening scene. Guess which one.
I had been on TV a couple times and my association with the Ebony Showcase Theatre in Los Angeles kept me within some proximity to Hollywood goings on. I also auditioned for Hallmark’s The Littlest Angel with Johnny Whitaker, but I definitely did not have quite the singing voice required for that show. In all retrospect, I’m glad I wasn’t part of that first generation of dedicated black child actors, although I did hang around with them in various parades. Marc Copage, George Spell and James Brown III were the three I remember in particular. My younger brother Bryan was the one with the stage bug. I didn’t have it. He attended PASLA and Canebridge (with the Bridges family) and may have stopped by Al Fann’s Theatrical Ensemble. But those days are long gone. It is worth mentioning that I very well may have survived all of that Hollywood stuff. In highschool, my best friend’s father was a notable writer, but as you can imagine in the bad old days, he didn’t get nearly as much credit and money as he was due. But they didn’t do poorly. Oh and you can believe that Hollywood Shuffle was the truth.
In my chosen profession, I’ve done a number of large presentations. There were three I remember in particular. The first two were in Las Vegas, of course, and both were attended by at least 500 folks each. I forget the subject of the first of those but I do recall that some of the international translators took time out to tell me that it was one of the best presentations they had ever seen. I made the complex technology comprehensible to ordinary people and my speech was organized and coherent; I made their job easy.
The second one had a punchline that I had to keep until the end. Essentially, at the old Hewlett Packard research center which is now the home of Apple Park, I used one of their massive Superdome computers to spawn, run and close [punchline] 500 individual databases in under 10 seconds. I got people to stand and clap. That was nice.
The last one happened in Monterey, CA and suffice it to say that I impressed two of the sharpest database guys I ever met. That made me employee #3 in the business we eventually ran and sold.
Back in the early 90s, as many of you know, I did some of that old guerrilla poetry stuff. It was critical for me to breakthrough from being a diarist to an essayist. Getting in front of people and speaking personal truth demystifies and clarifies. That is, if you’re aiming to tell the actual truth rather than to merely please the audience. Lots of temptation in that space. Nor have I tried to make something about myself as a bearer of truth. It’s not about me, it’s about the truth. Moreover it’s about the process of discovering it, proving it and dealing with it.
In many ways, I have ‘lived large’ as we used to say. It’s because of the way I discipline myself and the standards I have sought to honor. But I think above all it comes down to two things - speaking for myself. One is to have a kind of unbreakable core. I have near absolute faith in myself, but it is couched in a kind of humility I can’t actually describe. Maybe I’m just sandbagging my entire life. The second is the understanding that there are fallible people behind everything - all you need is to get to understand what it is that people actually do, and the secrets of life reveal themselves one chunk at a time. So being perceptive and articulate puts you in an interesting position. It helps to have a good memory and these are some of my blessings.
What’s interesting and surprising about me now, as compared to my younger days is my increased capacity to deal with chaos and the stochastic nature of life. As a youth I wanted everything nailed down and explained. It’s why I got into computing and databases in particular. There’s a time and a place for every fact, and I’m just the guy to containerize it. So I have how many computers in my house? Five in my office alone. How many books in my library? Only 200 in my office, another 200 upstairs and at least 30 boxes in storage. I’m that kind of hoarder.
My aim is to share. What I think makes me a different kind of sharer is that as strictly as I desire to be right, it’s more important for me to be helpful.
In this week’s presentation, my subject is AI, and the theme I have chosen is “What About Us? Human Value in the Age of Thinking Machines.” There’s way more to say in the time that I expect to be allotted, but Stoic Observations subscribers have the following advantage: My eight previous essays as this subject got hot this past year.
Times, they are a-changin’.