Toast
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 “Your audience judges you from the moment you stand up to speak,” the Toast master booklet reads. “If you are dressed well and are neat and clean, their initial impression of you will be positive. However, if your voice is squeaky, your words unintelligible or your voice too loud, their positive impression quickly will become negative. You must pay special attention to your voice.”
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While recovering, I received extra pain meds from Rhoda, an efficient Haitian nurse with a mini-Afro. The surgeon, Dr. Scottelli, had said I might experience some mild hallucinations and not to panic. “Your therapist told us about your harrowing history so we’ve got some extra Ativan on site to assist you if it gets too much,” he had said. “Don’t fret, your smile will thank you soon for what we did.”
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Last summer I went away for a week to a writing workshop in Provincetown. On my first night there, outside of a lavender internet café, a stumbling man in a cherry-red wig waddled up to me and said, “You look like Clark Kent on a mission to save the heterosexuals.” His breath was sweet and warm with alcohol, his teeth, yellowing.
“Really?’ I said and he grinned, saluted, and walked away. Earlier in the afternoon, my family had brought me for some fried clams to a tiny place on the water and gave me gifts for my forty-second birthday.  My little brother gave me a James Taylor CD and whispered something cruel about, “being surrounded by all these fairies;” my father gave me seventy dollars and slapped my shoulder; my mother a prayer card; and my sister some haiku that she’d written. In one way or another they spoke of new beginnings, fresh starts. My mother’s card was something from Isaiah 9:2, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” The whole thing was a bit corny but it felt good to be with everyone – just healthy and alive. Smiling.
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I went to Toastmasters on a dare from my psychologist. “Surprise me,” he said. “If you go I swear you’ll get a month’s worth of sessions for free.”
“Are you serious?’ I said.
“Not at all,” he smiled. “But I think it might be good for you to get out there, to go. Sometimes the best thing is to be a little uncomfortable.”
Dr. Laney is fifty-nine and looks more like a poet than a therapist, or maybe, if he added a beret, an architect. He’s got silver hair that sweeps to the right side of his head, black spectacles and a white beard. He’s very directive, even a little pushy. I’ve been seeing him for a very long time and he wears a lot of linen shirts buttoned up – that’s what struck me when I first saw him. “You’re kind of boring but I like your shirts,” I said.