A Night Out With Protagitron(...'s Overwhelming Stage Fright)

Slide 1 Of My Presentation

Sorry for my sudden disappearance. Duty called. Duty, in the form of a presentation for Toronto's Nerd Nite. Yes, in spite of the crippling stage fright I've struggled against since my childhood, where an annual speech competition meant an annual anxiety attack, I decided I should really get up in front of a roomful of strangers and talk about something. Anything! It could be anything once I got up there, because I would be too nervous to remember what I was actually supposed to be talking about.

However, I had told the organizer I would be talking about comic book films, so I figured I should at least try and give a presentation that was at least 95% about the promised content, and only 5% blank looks and vomiting.

So I dutifully prepared, even through a cold that made me sound like The Thing for a week. Dan made me all of the film clips I requested (awwwww) and I shoved them into Powerpoint (or, rather, Apple's "interpretation" of Powerpoint, Keynote).

Finally, it was go time. But not before ingesting a pint of liquid courage at Tequila Bookworm. Which unfortunately wore off right when I arrived at the venue. Which fortunately was licensed.

The buzz from my gin and tonic was good until I realized I would be following Tyler Irving's excellent and very funny talk on chemophobia. The bar was set high, and guess what was one of my other regular childhood failures - the freaking high jump. Hooray!

Hands shaking, I let the host, Lauren, plug in my laptop, and faced the audience. I opened my mouth. And somehow, magically, most of what I wanted to say tumbled out.

There was applause, and people asked interesting, attentive questions. My one regret was focusing too much on superhero comics with my answers (Stray Bullets would make an excellent TV series! Saga an incredible series of films! And Fatale as well!) but you can't do everything right.

I didn't vomit, and that was enough for me.

If you're in Toronto and have a topic you're passionate about, think about attending a Nerd Nite, and then signing up for a talk. It's not as terrifying as the speech competitions of your youth, and twice as manageable as the high jump.