I kind of wish this entry was about toast. But, it’s about public speaking.

One of the things about where I work is even though it’s relatively small, negating opportunities for advancement, it’s committed to professional development. To that end, they have various workshops and talks and whatnot for the taking. I took one.

Specifically, I signed up for a two-day professional development workshop on public speaking. It was up in the big city of San Francisco, and, man, do I miss the rhythm of working in a city. For a million years or so, I was used to work and live around Cambridge and Boston. Here in the Wild West, it’s been suburban open spaces galore. I don’t lack for seeing trees and lawns.

For two days I drove in amidst the skyscrapers of SF’s Financial District, and I even grabbed a hotdog from a vendor for lunch. OK, it was an uber gourmet, free-range type of dog purchased among the foodie heaven stalls of the Ferry Building. Still and all, urban dining experience it was.

The workshop itself made me excruciating self-aware, which, of course, was part of the dealio. They filmed you speaking and played back the discs of private agony, as a few of my co-workers and I offered each other thoughts and encouragement.

Given that I have done stand-up comedy, nay, naked stand-up comedy, it was actually not that painful for me. I’ve seen much shittier tapes of myself mumbling into a microphone anxiously, caught between the physical urge to wet or shit myself or the desire to burst into tears. All of that work it turns out is completely translatable to professional, like workplace conference room-based, public speaking. Same difference without the beer.

Weirdly, watching the disks of my own performances and those of my colleagues, I had the personal epiphany of realizing how different I am today from the day before I tried stand-up. Even weirdlier, because now I’m so smart I can make up words and shit, I think I had a premonition about that epiphany before I even started the class. We were told that upon arrival, we had to give a two-minute spiel on something we felt a commitment toward. I decided to speak about what a shitty writer I am, or in the end maybe not a writer at all.

Here’s the video of that not exactly interesting interlude.

Now the whole point of this first exercise and the camera rolling and all subsequent exercises was to show how folks tend to present and then break them. Or at least highlight habits and warts and all. That’s where anyone who has maybe tried a little stand up has an edge.

In fact, before we gave it the proverbially shot and spewed our two minutes the instructor broke down the plan. Her buzzword phrase, because for fuck sake’s this was executive training type grownup stuff so there had to be a buzzword or phrase or slogan or motivational gimcrackery, was that it wasn’t about “Speaking out, but speaking IN.” Dig it, she earnestly intoned, without the actual use of the word “dig,” that the whole fucking point was the listener.

Now, if you have ever stood in a shitty open mike or a quality comedy club, and, if even stupider, you climbed on the stage, if everything is working right, you learn one fucking thing. Just the one. It’s about the audience. If your joke is a fucking gem of a concept but you can’t sell it to another human in the room, you fail. That’s about all you ever learn in comedy.

This expensive (I’m assuming), downtown San Francisco trainer was selling the same gut punch lesson you can get from any grizzled vet comic for the price of a glass of beer or soda water. It ain’t about you, Sunny Jim.

Now, the audience to this trainer’s message was my fellow work comrades, a well-educated, scrubbed and earnest bunch. These are not folks who go looking for the gut punch lesson in seedy dives. Without the “fucks” and “stupids” and without the grim march of drunks shutting you down with disinterested stares, we learned the just the same.

At one point, I told the instructor about the wonder that is Tony V. Everything about that man on stage could be a thesis for this kind of training. From the commitment, the authority and the energy they bullet-pointed on a flip chart. With the techniques they were teaching to face the audience and sound like you give a shit and know what you are talking about, the stance, the demeanor, everything they were selling, he can turn an angry mob or hostile open mike to a goddamn show.

Turns out, one of the instructors at this impressive facility, I was told, runs his own show up somewhere in the wilds of Marin County.

My epiphany wasn’t really around the fact that I have actually learned some shit over time. Not very impressive if I hadn’t at least picked up a dime’s worth of info.

Nope, my epiphany was over the dreaded 20-somethings who were alongside me in the training. Now, I still continue my hatred and contempt for eager youth, but it was good to see them damn insecure and queasy in the realm of public speaking, one of human existence’s greatest phobias. In truth, though, they could have been me back about a thousand years ago, when the blush of youth still shown upon me.

I tried stand up, precisely because it made me want to crap my pants to even think about it. I was G. Gordon Liddy eating a rat or tying himself to a tree to overcome his greatest fears.

Now, today, right now, it’s largely second nature. That to me is the weirdest truth of all. These kids who only have met my California-living self see someone who speaks straightforwardly, bluntly even, confident-like. To them, I am fucking lying to say I was just like them. They know not of the Walsh Brothers mocking my nerves, or my total envy of watching Patterson devour an eggplant parm sub before a show.

I have become a different person, far as I can tell. And, I guess I owe the current incarnation to that day I actually got on stage and tried. Probably would have been a lot less painful and less alcoholic to pay a corporate trainer some bucks. But, jeebus knows, I wouldn’t have met a finer collection of characters.

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