Collecting Himself by Michael J. Rosen

Author:Michael J. Rosen [Rosen, Michael J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-06-203903-3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1989-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Memoirs of a Banquet Speaker

The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep. I am dealing here with the young banquet speaker, the dilettante, who goes into it in quest of glamour. There is, he finds out too late, no glamour at banquets—I mean the large formal banquets of big associations and societies. There is only a kind of dignified confusion that gradually unhinges the mind.

Late in my thirty-fifth year, having tasted every other experience in life (except being rescued by Captain Fried), I decided to be a guest of honor at some glittering annual dinner in a big New York hotel. At first blush, you might think it would be difficult to be asked. It isn’t. You don’t, of course, have to be a member of an organization in order to address its annual banquet. In fact the organization doesn’t even have to know who you are, and it almost never does. The names of the speakers are got out of newspapers and phone books, and from the better Christmas cards; sometimes a speaker is suggested to the entertainment committee by a woman named Mrs. Grace Voynton. That’s all I know about her. She suggested me. I never saw her again. As a matter of fact, I never saw her at all. She phoned me one day and asked if I would address the annual banquet of a certain organization, the name of which, in the ensuing conversation, which was rather controversial, slipped my mind. I said I wouldn’t address the banquet because my dinner pants were too tight. She was pleased to regard this as a pleasantry, and phoned me again the next day, as a woman will. Finally I said I would make a short talk. I was told to be at the Commodore Hotel at seven-thirty on a certain Wednesday evening. It was only when I was in a taxi on my way to the hotel that I realized I didn’t know the name, or the nature, of the organization I was going to talk to—let alone what I was going to talk about. So high is the courage of youth that the young banquet speaker is likely to dismiss this unfortunate ignorance too lightly. He has an idea that Mrs. Voynton will be at the hotel, or that the doorman will recognize him. Certainly, he thinks, it is going to be easy enough to find the banquet-room. It isn’t going to be, though (the italics are mine). During the banqueting season anywhere from three to eleven banquets are being held, simultaneously, at the average hotel on any given night. Not realizing this, the young guest of honor is almost sure to think that the first banquet table he spies is the one at which he belongs. There is only about one chance in ten that he is right.

I walked into the first

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