Giving a speech for many can feel like being a deer in the headlights

Giving a speech is a hard thing to do. It requires careful planning, rehearsing, exact timing and a thorough knowledge of the audience. All these elements have equal importance, even if the speaker is simply offering a toast (particularly if a few drinks have preceded the moment).

For several years I wrote the speeches for Joe Baum, the legendary former CEO of The Rainbow Room and Windows on the World.  The procedure was always the same. He hated giving speeches and invariably canceled at least five of our first scheduled meetings.

The next step required his secretary to retrieve copies of every speech he had ever given since the beginning of time.

Then I showed up and he began by insisting certain paragraphs from his previous talks be included included in the forthcoming speech (regardless of the occasion or the assigned topic).

After dozens of drafts, false starts, whining on my part, whining on his part, my refusal to speak to him, he glowering at me…we traveled together to the meeting.

Introduction over, he’d look over at me — and wink.

Then he’d shove all my neatly typed triple-spaced pages in his pocket and say whatever came into his head.

It was always a huge success.

It took me years to understand my part in this equation was simply to help him summon the courage to accept the notion that he was loved.

The lesson I so painfully learned is that all writers are not great speakers, and speakers succeed only when they accept the original premise that a speech requires “careful planning, rehearsing, exact timing and a thorough knowledge of the audience.” These rigid rules only apply to some people though…

I love this quote from Walt Disney. He said, “I’d rather entertain and hope that people learn, than teach and hope that people are entertained.”

In China,it is considered barbaric to present a piece of meat that looks like the animal from which it came, and it is considered impolite to expect a guest to cut their own food into bite-sized pieces. This task belongs to the cook. Such a philosophy of eating naturally led to the invention of chopsticks.

Fred Ferretti reports in Food Arts magazine that Jae Lee, a native of South Korea, created a job for himself and his increasing number of American employees: he makes multiple million chopsticks for export to China, Japan and other far Eastern countries.

Everybody has to eat, but the methods that people all over the world use to get their food from the plate to mouth vary.  Figures from the Japanese Restaurant Association divide the world’s population into four categories:

• 1.2 billion people eat with chopsticks.
• 1.5 billion eat with fork, knife and spoon.
• 350 million eat with a knife and their hands.
• 250 million eat with their hands only.

In fast food restaurants plastic utensils are optional for pizza.

As they were listed in the office of the Chef of the Queen Elizabeth’s yacht:

Queen Elizabeth II's Royal Yacht Brittannia, which was recently decommissioned

1.     The Chef is right

2.     The Chef is never wrong

3.     The Chef doesn’t drink; he tastes

4.     The Chef is never late; he is delayed

5.     The Chef never leaves his property; he is called away

6.     When you offer the Chef an idea, you are told about his

7.     The Chef is always addressed reverentially as Chef

8.     If you criticize the Chef, you criticize the Almighty