I Love My Cigar, too (But I Take it Out of My Mouth Sometimes)

Groucho, Groucho, Groucho.

It is newly Wednesday, and I am still banging away at my Groucho presentation for 7pm tonight. On Tuesday I made the Power Point presentation, wrote my speech, made my handout, and practiced it with a friend and John.

Yet, there are still tasks to be done. Finish stray research… Tighten Power Point… Edit and annotate speech… Prepare script to be handed in… Figure out how to put Power Point on CD… Time and choose the clips… Re-watch movies… Practice speech…

Write suicide note… Smash Power Point demon before I go… Smash it into widdle pieces and flush it to where the sun don’t shine…

I am dead. Dead tired. Dead nervous. Dead screwed.

The sad thing is that there are few people in my acquaintance who know the Marx Brothers better than I do. I love these guys, and I can handle any discussion on them. But now how the hell do I give a ritual/ performance studies analysis of them to a class full of Religious Studies grad students who know nothing about them (expect what I have told them)??

And how do I prepare it in a hurry well enough to have some sort of magnificent “performance” of my own in the end??

How can I get this stuff across, while trying to be mindful of my own bodily performance while speaking, and not throw up or just walk out and quit the whole damned business??

It’s all so nerve wracking. Any other time or class, I could have just rambled it off. Now he has turned this into some self-conscious performance thing, and I am suddenly riddled with anxiety.

One piece fails… One little piece… The Power Point fails to fire. The DVD player or projector refuses to co-operate. The audience yawns too much. Anything! And I am dead in the water. And all that could happen so very easily.

I need to calm down, you are saying. I hear you. I could take a couple hours off and do something else. That would be very nice. However, as this thing must be delivered in about 19 hours, there is no time to rest or distract myself.

Until this thing is out of my hands, my life continues to be all Groucho, all the time. Which wouldn’t be so bad if I weren’t ready to vomit over the potential outcome.

Oh LORD. What have I gotten myself into?