The Worst Speech I ever gave was at the 2011 Maker Faire Detroit. I had an outdoor booth at the Faire, where I was making free upcycled water rockets with kids, showing off some of the projects from my book, and generally spreading the gospel of Making Something Rad Out of Rag and Bone. I’d subsequently been invited to give a talk about toys and the sorts of things that were in my book.
It was a 90/90 day in a week of 90/90 days, and because of a misunderstanding during registration, my booth had no shade apart from some stunted ornamental cherry trees. My primary assistant has basically the exact some species of social anxiety as I do–one that makes you a garrulous raconteur when you have an audience, but a total wreck in the solitary run-up to getting in *front* of that audience. Neither of us had any stomach for food, and subsequently had only brought a couple liters of warm water and a jar of cashews as rations. It was like we were on some misguided vision quest. I was slated to talk at 2pm, and by the time I made it onto the savagely refrigerated mini-stage in the Henry Ford museum, I had been standing in the blazing sun for seven unbroken hours and eaten about 200 calories.
My talk was set to run 30 minutes. I had a PowerPoint presentation that consisted of maybe six slides, one of which was an antique photography of a man riding a wall-of-death with a lion in his sidecar. I haven’t the foggiest what that image was intended to convey. The year before, in 2010, I’d given a small-scale presentation, but that was before the book was finished, and I’d ended up speaking in excruciating detail about the project I’d been working on at that time: electromagnetic pick-up design for cheap, easy, home-brew electric guitars (I mean “cheap”–under $10 in supplies–and I mean “easy”: It’s a 2 hour project at most, plus letting some glue dry overnight). This had actually gone over fairly well.
I was supposed to be talking about “toys” in 2011, but my conversations with the folks at MAKE had been sort of foggy in the run-up, and I’d decided I wanted to talk more generally about toys and toy making and why it’s a Good Idea to make toys out of junk with your kids. Meanwhile, a program was printed listing me as the author of such-and-such book, there to talk about toys. I did not see this program until I left the stage.
But, so, when I took the stage I was in front of about 40 people, many of them children. I was reeling from the sudden shock of AC; all I could think of was Shackelton abandoning his whiskey at the Pole. I had six slides, maybe, and although I’d written a book about making toys, and was spending two days making toys out in the fantastically beautiful Michigan summer, I wanted to talk about something abstract and neurosciencey and meta-analytic that occupied, literally, six sentences in the 340 page book that was my ticket on to that stage.
The speech was a disaster. I opened my mouth, got about halfway through my first name, and then a steam-engine power plant exhibit started up, a banshee wail that made it impossible for me to hear my own amplified voice, which was fine, because it also drove every thought from my brain.
Things went off the rails from there: I said the word “toys” at some point near the start, but then found myself in a fugue, talking about Henry Ford and Edison and the “Great Man” theory of history and cellphones. Audience members smiled faintly, in the manner of people slowly stepping away from a knife-wielding chimp. Five children in an Indian family in the third row fell asleep as their parents stared at me blankly, at least enjoying relief from the heat and the crowds. At one point–and bear in mind that I was here because I make super-kid-friendly water rockets out of old bottles and tire stems–I found myself talking about the Arab Spring. A bald white man with a droopy walrus mustache rose from his front-row seat and walked out. Crickets sang during the Q&A, I left the stage to polite not-booing, then almost passed out in a *very* ornate men’s room.
A few weeks ago I was retelling this anecdote to a group of friends who, clearly, I’d regaled with this tale enough times already. My dear friend Fritz Swanson interrupted me at the mustachioed-man-walkout to say “Yeah, yeah, we know, you activated a future domestic terrorist while giving a speech about toys. That guy’s gonna park a van in front of a federal building in a few years, and we’ll all know why. Good work.”
Anyway, if you want to see something akin to the things I was trying to say that day, check out my next column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle (UPDATE: Here’s the direct link to my latest column on education, Great Men, cell phones, picking fights, swapping innovations, and so on. ).
See you at Maker Faire Detroit this year! We’ll be making water rockets, rocking out on electric diddley bows, and learning to make synthesizers you shove in your mouth (maybe)!
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