This Saturday in my club’s meeting, a guy gave one of the “how to sell a product” speeches from the manual. These tend to be dry, but this member had a cute deal where he was selling premium paper clips - the paper clip experience as it were. Only for the first few minutes he didn’t get that many laughs.

What went wrong? It was kind of my fault.

I was on the program right before him, doing an interpretive reading of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It’s a very powerful speech, even by Abe’s standards. He speculates that the Civil War was God was punishing North and South for the sin of slavery (imagine an American President saying God was punishing us today). It’s where the “With malice toward none, with charity for all” line comes from. I got choked up reading it, which has never happened in my TM career and took the club members by surprise since I’m usually the smartass. Wise Lincoln was assassinated a few weeks after giving this healing speech and was replaced by a petty, vindictive racist who did basically everything the opposite of what Lincoln would have for black people.

Are you kind of depressed now? The audience was and the minute break wasn’t long enough to get ready for the premium paper clip.

What I learned:

• I knew my speech was depressing, even if my getting choked up took me by surprise as much as anyone else. But if I could do it again I would have been the last speaker on the program, so that I wouldn’t leave the audience bummed out for anyone coming after me.
  
• If in the future I give a smartass speech, I’ll make sure that I go first so someone can’t pull this on me. This gets back to my obsession with controlling your environment as much as possible.
• The Toastmaster could have made it a two minute break, not a one, to try and give a bit more time for the “John getting choked up” effect to wear off.