Speakeasy

When I discovered I’d have to spend an entire semester doing public speaking, I just about soiled my knickers.

Autumn of my sophomore year of college would be a months-long heart attack if I couldn’t figure out how to overcome my stage fright, I realized. Public Speaking 101 was a required course, and even though I’d done some acting here and there, reciting pre-written dialogue is vastly different than firing something off extemporaneously. I’d have to be me. I’d have to research things and know stuff. I’d have to learn how to get through the first five minutes of every speech without fainting like a man in the throes of heatstroke. It was intimidating.

Unpleasant things I would rather have done include swallowing an entire package of frozen hot dogs; belly flopping onto a pile of jagged cinder blocks; and singing “I Feel Pretty” on a karaoke machine in front of a gathering of New England Patriots cheerleaders.

Fear of public speaking is pervasive among the general population, to the point where more people are afraid of getting up in front of a crowd than they are of dying. It’s a telling statistic. Society has basically said, “What, you want me to toast my brother and his new bride at their wedding? No thanks. I’d prefer suffering a massive coronary while hunting elk in Siberia.”

Everyone’s got their own reasons, I guess. Mine is shyness.

It’s tough being shy. We live in a society that rewards A-type personalities, those outgoing, conquer-the-world types who flash their bleached teeth at every stranger and turn them into a friend. A-types are like street-level celebrities, endowed with a gravitational pull that sucks people into their orbits, an ever-growing coterie of enraptured satellites. Life is set up for them to succeed, if they take advantage of it. Certain things become easier -- making friends, advancing in a career. If you’ve ever seen someone rocking the crowd at an open-mic poetry slam, without a whiff of awareness that their sonnets stink like muscle cream, well, that’s probably an A-type. They can do public speaking. They were made for it.

Shy folks, a generally misunderstood bunch from the start, have got it tougher. We keep to ourselves. We’re less bold. We have value -- we’re oozing with value, we have value leaking out of various bodily orifices -- but society tends not to acknowledge that value, at least not to the same degree. Our neurotic, eye-contact-avoiding, non-small-talk-making ways seem strange and off-putting to people, and we’re often dismissed as standoffish. Which is a hard label to avoid when you’d prefer to drink hot lava than make small-talk on an elevator with the UPS guy.

When a shy person finds out there’s no avoiding Public Speaking 101 -- no alternate courses, no academic-based witness protection program -- there’s a certain panic that sets in. “Public” and “speaking” are two words that induce anxiety even when they’re independent of each other; combined, they have a power like nuclear fusion, white hot and face-melting. If acting in a play is the equivalent of singing in the safety of a shower, raw public speaking is like singing a schmaltzy ballad under the cutting spotlights of Madison Square Garden. Naked. And strapped to a giant bullseye.

Things I’d rather do include juggling live grenades on a Tilt-a-Whirl; making small cuts all over my body with an X-Acto knife and swimming in a lake filled with lemon juice; and French-kissing a giraffe while an Armenian cover band plays “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion.

Getting up in front of a crowd, for an introvert, requires an act of heroism that the A-types will never understand. This holds true even if the crowd in question is a small group of sleepy college students who frankly couldn’t give a crap how well you can command a room. A natural speaker stands in front of all those people and plays them like a musical instrument, running up and down scales just to show off. A person like me feels the weight of all those eyes, the burden of attention magnified through our neuroses, and no matter how well prepared we are, all our language and vocabulary liquefies in our brains. A cogent, eloquent opening statement comes out as, “Uhhhh…” This is right before our bladders fail.

Our instructor warned us not to memorize our speeches; better, he said, to break our presentation down into talking points and then speak in a more off-the-cuff manner. This comes across as more natural, he argued, and I totally saw his point. I also blatantly ignored it.

Using acting experience as a crutch, I wrote my first speech in a conversational style and memorized it word-for-word, rehearsing until I knew I could deliver it with a smooth and misleading charm. My classmates never knew that the person speaking to them wasn’t Jeff, per se, but a fictionalized version of Jeff,  a character created for the occasion: glib, polished and without the faintest whiff of comic book geekery.

What most people don’t know about the chronically shy is that they’re inventing characters like this all the time, going about their lives in what amounts to jungle camouflage. The smiling, chortling face that neighbors and coworkers see is oftentimes hiding a primal desire for solitude and silence. And in my case, a deep yearning for novels about werewolf slayers with square jaws and names like Brock.

So when Public Speaking 101 comes up on our course schedule, we invent ways to survive. We have to. It’s what we do.

Of course, things we’d rather do include scaling a cliff wearing a backpack filled with live tortoises; volunteering as a sparring partner for a boxer with anvils for hands; and doing a thousand jumping jacks on a bed of hot coals while being shot at by an epileptic sniper.