The last CHS salon and SERENDIPITY

The CHS Salon

1. The CHS is a good venue for these kinds of presentations. It's a good size, with totally serviceable acoustics and a nice high ceiling. It's also pleasantly lit, so that even with the lights turned down for the presentation you can still see the faces of the audience; there's no blinding spotlight in your eyes.

2. If we were going to do the Bonus Timekeeper routine again, I would almost certainly want to spruce it up a little, making it more integrated with the presentation instead of something that is happening next to the presentation, if you see what I mean. Anyway, I'm not sure how the audience felt about it, but from my side of the podium it certainly added a sense of urgency.

3. I'm really glad that I got to talk at the Time Traveler series.

4. It seems to me that the last speaker, whose name I have shamefully forgotten, had one main payload to deliver, and he delivered it: make us want to visit the off-limits tunnels beneath Alcatraz. Sure enough, once the presentations were over, and still today, I want very much to go rummaging around in them there tunnels.

SERENDIPITY

5. It is a different experience in the small room than the big one (duh). All the comments and laughs and quips from the audience, in the smaller space, can generally be heard by the folks speaking. The upstairs feels like a large living room, while the big room feels like a presentation hall. That isn't better or worse, but the difference remains striking, at least to me.

6. Now that "winter" is here, it doesn't get nearly as hot up there. Thank heavens.

7. Many of our speakers read from scripts, and for the first time I really paid attention to that. There seem to be ups and downs to script use. Note that this is not meant as a "Thou Shalt Use Scripts" or a "Thou Shalt Not" as much as me offloading thoughts about the thing, so sprinkle with salt to taste:

7a. The up, the really big up, seems to be that you get a stable and reliable place to go no matter how nervous you might be. You get your basic pacing, what you're going to say for each slide, etc. You can experience what Charles Whitebread called "The Great Flush" where everything just flushes out of your head, and as long as you're still literate you can keep going.

7b. You also don't forget something you were supposed to say, which can be a trivial blunder that nobody notices, or may force you to go back in your presentation to correct the omission.

7c. One downside is that, between checking the screen, fussing with slides, turning pages, and audience feedback, speakers sometimes lose their place. Listening to the audio, you can hear now and then a little pause where people are relocating their spot in the script.

7d. I'm not sure, but it may be a little harder to interact with the crowd when you're using a script. There's a lot of thoughts here, too much for this short post, but when you have a script you need to be actually looking at the sheet of paper or whatever in order to read, and that kind of thing has small but meaningful collateral effects.

7e. Some people do very, very well with scripts for these kinds of presentations. I am not among them; it is not a tool that I am proficient at using.

8. [quasi-vanity note] Two separate people commented that although my attire was overall pleasing, the smart phone in the coat pocket seemed out of place. One of them was the doorman, wearing black jeans and scruffy black band t-shirt. I do not say that to besmirch his input. Rather, when the guy in black jeans and a band t-shirt very kindly notes that there is something incongruous about your attire, news flash, there is something incongruous about your attire.