FOURTH FESTIVITIES

I spent my Fourth of July with my best friend and our kids. We checked out the festivities planned in The Woodlands and spent all day swimming, going to parks, and watching fireworks with the kids. The night before, we had gone out to a bar together. Of all the great fun we had during the sixteen hours or so we spent together, the best part, the part I will always remember, was at the end of the Saturday night. Both of the little ones had nodded off, and the bigger kids were outside with my husband and the neighbors, and she and I were just having some girl time. We were standing outside my back porch and she asked me a question about how something I had planned on Thursday worked out for me. We got a good laugh out of the fact that in all that time we had spent together, we had never got past talking about the events of Friday and Saturday. Then, I told her this story, which had us laughing so hard, at my expense, that we were doubled over with our legs crossed trying not to laugh so hard we peed ourselves.
I can't duplicate the story the way I told it. There is something about the written word that is different from true storytelling in person. I'll try to recreate it, though.
Thursday, I had been asked to do a presentation at another company for an audience of people that were much more highly educated than myself on my particular field of expertise. The presentation had actually been moved up a week, so I was kind of thrown off mentally by that, and also by the presence of my boss and her friend, who is the "boss" of the program I was presenting to. In the past four months, I had been asked to give a similar presentation to people within our company, but we are low-tech here and so all the new-fangled presentation devices were kind of throwing me off. On the podium were the microphones and the computer screen with my presentation on it, which was projected on to a big screen with a teleprompter up front on the floor.
There were three presenters that day, and the first one was the "big boss", who runs the entire department and has lots of letters behind her name. She gave a presentation on anatomy and physiology that had me feeling intimidated. Then my boss spoke, also with many letters behind her name, but not as many, and then there was me, with at least half as much education as anyone else and a "fluffy" topic. All these things combined had me a little nervous when I got up to talk. I'm blaming what happened next on all that.
When I got up to the podium and started my presentation, for some reason I walked AWAY from the podium and went up to the floor level, reading my presentation from the teleprompter a' la karoake style. What the hell was I doing? I realized my mistake after the first slide, and headed back to the podium and the mics. However, I was so flustered that the rest of it came out of my mouth like a robot talking. I was trying so hard to not make more mistakes that I was wooden and stiff up there. Also, I was dismayed that all this video footage I had gotten to make my presentation "come alive" would not play correctly.
At the end of the presentation, I sat down in my seat, beating myself up over not being able to "shine" with a stellar speaking performance, when the "boss lady" leaned over at me. I was taken aback with what she said.
"Hey, listen, " she says, "I run this other program at another college, too, and I would like to have you come do this same presentation for those students. Are you interested in doing that?"
Bahahahaha! J and I died over that one. Not what I was expecting her to say at ALL after that!