My night with TED

The summer of 2012 brought two Teds. 

One was Ted, the Seth MacFarlane movie I didn’t see. 

The other was TED, the series of events consisting of compact talks by misfits, madmen, and other geniuses.

On 6/7/12, I spoke on a TED stage. Not the big one. And I was not even in the same school district as my best. But the experience was a nation-builder, that’s for sure.

Here are glimpses I didn’t include in my recap:

Of the 31 impressive people there, I know at least one has been invited to the Big TED in 2013—fellow writer Josh Prager. In 2000, in the Wall Street Journal, he published one of the most compelling articles about publishing I’ve read—he found out what happened to the millions of dollars in royalties the book Goodnight Moon has earned. I am looking forward to scoring my guesses of who else will get the nod.

This is the stage mere hours before we spoke. Seeing the TED letters just sitting there as the props they are was both humanizing (someone just sets them up like a window display?) and mythic.