Damage Control for Embarrassing Moments
* If you lose your place while delivering a speech, try this: “I seem to have lost my place, for which some of you may be very grateful.”
* Author Dorothy Parker once was invited to a dinner party by a Mrs. Peabody, wife of a movie studio executive, who delivered the invitation in person. Mrs. Peabody left, and Parker told her secretary: “Write a note to those illiterate phony bores that I can’t make their damned party.”
Whereupon Mrs. Peabody reappeared, apparently having overheard.
Without a pause, Parker continued: “. . . because I am dining with the Peabodys.”
* During a debate, Stephen Douglas accused Abraham Lincoln of being two-faced. Lincoln reacted to the potentially embarrassing accusation by citing something that had been a source of embarrassment to him over the years: his homely face.
“I leave it to my audience,” he said. “If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?”
--Source: “Embarrassment in Everyday Life” (ETC Publications, 1994), by Edward Gross.
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