The Harm in Candor
Jill Elaine Hughes
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Morgan seems aware of this dilemma and has devised a host of curious strategies to deal with it in her hour-long lecture-demonstration. For one thing she offers generous helpings of audience participation and poetic digression. She begins by handing each audience member a blank slip of paper, an envelope, and a pencil and requesting that we write a secret about ourselves, seal it in the envelope, and return it to her. Then she gives us a hearing test, asking us to raise our hands whenever we hear various sounds on a tape (she concluded that we were able to hear 85 percent of them). Next she fills in the blanks on a quiz mounted on an overhead projector, correctly identifying her own name, hometown, phone bill amount, and best friend’s address. Then she asks audience members to recite back the information she just divulged, grading our retention. Each of these three-minute sections, like almost everything else in the piece, begins and ends as though Morgan were switching it on and off.
Her unwavering gaze conjuring up a stern first-grade teacher, Morgan is aggressively pleasant, sometimes to the point of officiousness. Yet she seems to ridicule her own self-importance, using the hokiest technical means to make seemingly irrelevant points. It’s hard to imagine where she’s headed with this piece, her emphatic cadence pressing significance into every trivial detail while her intentionally slipshod presentation renders the whole affair ludicrous.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/R. Rosenzweig.
