Story hour

When I was a lab technician for a couple of years post-college, I spend my weekends volunteering at Habitat for Humanity. (I had oodles of free time then, with a 9-5 and no spouse. What happened? Oh, right.)

Anyhow, I enjoyed swinging a hammer, learning about house construction, and getting to know the other volunteers. After I'd been volunteering for a year, the founder of Habitat, Millard Fuller, came to town for some speechifying, and the local chapter head asked me to give one of the short intro speeches to his talk.

I was terrified. As you may have noticed, I am very anxious about public speaking, even of this 2-3 minute stint in front of a ~150 person group. However, I am also too proud to let fear stop me from getting up there. The big question was, what to talk about?

I had started to craft a rather generic, "Seeing smiles of happiness from new homeowners blah blah blah" speech when my mother called. I told her about this short speech I had to give, and how I was nervous, and she said something both wise and obvious (the way mothers do): "Tell a story. Everyone likes hearing stories."

Now, my mother is a librarian, for pete's sake (as well as an astute observer of human foibles), so this was not a quantum jump on her part. But it really helped me figure out what to talk about. I scrapped the pablum and instead spoke about my first day volunteering and being scared to walk on the "roof," which at that point consisted only of trusses. And the audience, to my total shock, liked it, laughed in the right places, and applauded.

Then Millard Fuller got up, found me in the audience, and said in a wonderful admiring Southern drawl, "Jekyll--you're something else." He then proceeded to give a really good speech whose contents I have forgotten, although I'm sure he told stories.

Complete side tangent:
Later, as I walked Millard to his car, he put his arm around my waist. I was a little surprised when his hand slipped to a location that I might have called grab-ass had he been a boy my own age, but I chalked it up to old men being careless, or forgetting where young ladies' waists ended, or something like that. A year or two later, this story helped me realize that old men do not, in fact, forget where young ladies' waists end.

Back to the point:
It's old news in science that our papers and talks succeed the most when we tell a story. Sometimes it's showmanship, in the best sense of the word--framing the work in logical, climactic fashion rather than in a chronological, meandering mess. Other times it's really about finding the common threads to a story to weave a larger scientific implication out of some disparate bits of data.

I was thinking about all this as I prepare a short conference speech to give to, oh, ~150 people. I'm nervous, of course, but I'm focusing on the story, on capturing my audience with my supercool data held together in clean narrative arc.

Thanks, Mom. And thanks readers for your suggestions about allaying fear by focusing on the data rather than on myself.

After all, I have a whole blog to focus on myself.

And on the age-old paradox that even a guy who dedicates his life to helping those the poor might nonetheless be prone to some grab-ass.