Upset by Treatment in Column

I was one of the two people featured in Around the Valley on Aug. 17, and I was upset by its complete inaccuracy.

The writer, T.W. McGarry, was invited by the Registry Hotel to be a guest at a poolside party given for their corporate clients. I was hired by the hotel to provide entertainment with a seminar. The topic was not “How to Get Romance.” It was “Fifty Romantic and Unusual Things to Do in L.A.” The “practical tips” Mr. McGarry refers to in the column were jokes made in connection with describing certain places.

The article clearly creates the impression that the evening was intended to be some kind of serious workshop on relationships and that I am some “male model” type who makes a living off his looks but who has absolutely nothing to say. He even states, “Badal’s lectures are punctuated by sudden burst of rhyme or song and staged madcappery, like throwing members of the audience into the pool,” as if he had actually been to several.

I work very hard to make sure my seminars do have content and that they are appropriate for the occasion. The workshops on finding relationships that I give through community colleges are quite thorough and are well-received by both men and women.

This was the first time I was in a position of entertaining party guests who were eating and drinking poolside. My solution was to make the lecture notes more fun and have a generous amount of information the guests could leave with.

I feel that Mr. McGarry did me a great injustice in the way he not only depicted the evening, but implied that this was how all my seminars are. Someone reading this article could not possibly know what the evening really was about, would assume it was on the same subject as the other one and conclude I was an airhead with nice teeth who tells women to wear shorts in his workshops.

ROBERT BADAL

Long Beach