by I’ve been absent because I’ve been preparing and obsessing and terrifying myself about a Tedx talk I did yesterday at Tedx Montclair.
Friday night I was a mess. We did a dress rehearsal and I blanked out twice and dropped four small sections in my talk. ‘It will be okay,’ I thought. ‘I’ll work on those sections when I get home.’ Except I got home and I practiced and practiced and each time I got a little worse. I was blanking out more and dropping more. Finally, I realized I was psyching myself out bigtime and I stopped. ‘I’ll be better in the morning, when I’m rested.’ I was even worse.
I briefly considered calling in sick. “I have a 103 degree temperature!” Of course I couldn’t seriously consider doing that. So I left for my certain doom. We shall see how I did in a few weeks, when the videos come out, but I didn’t blank out! No dropped sections! And the feedback I got seemed genuinely enthusiastic!
Thank you Sue Grady for surprising me and being there. And thank you Amy Gash, my editor, who was also there. It was so great to have friendly faces in the audience.
Thank you Suzy Kass for inviting me to speak, and fellow organizers Kathy Smith and Robin Seidon, for all their help and support. And a BIG thank you to Kathy’s husband Steve, for picking me up and taking me home after the event. I would have been a thousand times more stressed out if I had to get up at some ungodly hour to take a train-bus-bus to get there and back. Instead I had wonderful company (and a pep talk) and here was our other companion for the trips, Joe, the Dance Walk Guru from Brooklyn who was endlessly charming.
Note: Here is more of Joe’s story.
