Hot Pants

As the President of our local area speech-language hearing association, I complained about the cost of speakers for our events.  I strongly suggested that someone from within our group put together the next workshop - free of charge.  All eyes looked at me, so FINE - I volunteered to do it.

The workshop was yesterday, titled The Best Things We Ever Learned.  It was a compilation of favorite tips/techniques/resources, etc from members within our group.  Our national association even approved it for five hours of continuing education credit - sweet!

Nervous?  Who am I kidding?  More like excited!  An entire room full of people  - a captive audience - who had to listen to me all day.  I mean, I tend to ask a lot of questions during these events anyway and make many comments to my neighbors, so why not be the one with the microphone?

I think the event was a success.  We had the biggest attendance in recent years and no one left early.  Plus, there was a lot of laughing.  The biggest bout of laughter came at my expense, however.

I drank some coffee at lunchtime.  I never drink coffee at lunch.  I hardly ever drink coffee at all.  Most of my coffee consumption would be classified as "coffee creamer."

After lunch, the presentation began with some of my favorite items for therapy.  Instead of describing how these techniques/items could be used, I decided to demonstrate.  This was not in the plan.  So I demonstrated how a book with rhyming words could be "rapped."  I encouraged vocal percussion sounds.  I demonstrated how my white monkey puppet named Jingles could be used to motivate kids.  Then Jingles started backtalking me, insisted that he try on some of the items in my sparkly pink shoulder bag - and before I knew it, Jingles was dressed in drag and telling the audience that he was born that way.

But that's not the most embarrassing part.  After encouraging Jingles to take a break from his performance, I returned to the Power Point and clicked on a link for a website with many activities for kids with autism.  My Firefox browser opened, "churned," then finally popped up a website for SEXY HALLOWEEN HOT PANTS."

I was shocked, but it was funny, so I just said, "What?!  I have no idea how that got there!  I swear it's not mine!  I've never seen it before in my life!  I'm not even dressing up for Halloween this year!"

So far, I have received no phone calls from the national office.  And I'm not sure if I've violated anything in our code of ethics. But if you have a need for a speaker to entertain your group, I got a monkey for you.