29 Lessons I Learned the Hard Way

Lesson 8

One of the most important lessons I ever learned was learned right here. Here in a convention hall full of boys talking about how to be manly men….. Shoot me.

This convention had started much like it had every other convention I had gone to over the last couple years. There were vendors setting up booths in every nook and cranny on the first floor, security guards pacing back and forth beside the escalator in the second floor and finally on the third floor, the teen tract.

 Every year the convention would invite a new person to come and speak to the teens. There would be about five seasons each day over the two day event. It was always someone awesome and I always anticipated who the speaker would be all year round. Last year’s speaker had been incredibly funny and had the whole audience rolling in laughter. This year speaker, would have a lot to live up to.

Per usual, we rushed up the two sets of escalators and into the huge ballroom where they held the program every year.

There were well over three hundred teens each year, so if you wanted to get a good seat it was mandatory that you be there early. Late comers were often forced to stand in the back of the room for the hour long lecture because they were simply no seats. And being that my friends and I wanted to sit together we needed a lot of seats, which meant we had to hurry even more. All together there were about nine of us.

We hurried into the hall and sat down in the middle, not too far from the back in case we decided we wanted to sneak out if the speaker was terrible, but not too far from the front that if he was wonderful we could still hear him and participate.

“Do you have a pen I could borrow?” my friend Katia asked

I bent down and fished through my bag on the ground.

“Here,” I said and handed her one of the many spare pens I kept in my bag for this weekend.

 “Do you need paper too?” I asked

“No, I’m good.” She replied, “Thanks.”

We settled down and prepared for the speaker to start as one of the convention staff introduced him.

“Now please give a warm welcome to Eric and Leslie Ludy!” the introducer finished.

We all clapped warmly and politely as we sat on the edge of our seats waiting for him to start.

The speakers walked on stage and we all buckled down, reading to see if these two would pull it off or not.

“THEY ARE AWESOME!” my sister and I told our mom when we met up later, after the first two lectures had ended. “He is really funny and smart and his wife is so sweet. They are really good.”

My mom smiled, “Yeah, I heard that they are already expecting so many people for his last lecture tomorrow that they are going to have to move to another room.”

“What next?” my mom asked

“Well, there is one more before lunch break and then there are two after that. One is only for girls and the other one… we are not sure, I think it’s only for boys but we don’t know.”