Stage fright. It can happen to the best of them.
You’re a big-time, longtime mayor — a really-big-time, really-longtime mayor — and you’re used to being in control of things. You’re certainly used to being in control of yourself.
And then suddenly, there’s a … situation.
Something has gone terribly, frustratingly wrong in The City that Parks, in the daily lives of the people in your charge. You’ve got thousands — even tens of thousands — of outraged constituents demanding an explanation. Demanding an apology.
You’re ready to apologize — that’s the thing.
You’re so ready to apologize, your staff has already given reporters the exact words of the apology you’ll be offering just hours from now.
“I’ll be the first to admit that we totally screwed up the way it was implemented,” you’ll be saying.
Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t, but at least you’ll be showing a little candor, a little something that passes for responsibility and regret. Maybe that’ll turn down the heat a notch.
But then the big moment arrives, and …
And you forget your lines.
Something about the lights. Something about all the cameras, or all the microphones. Who knows why? But you draw a blank. Even with those carefully crafted phrases sitting right there in front of you, your brain locks up, refuses to send the necessary signals to your tongue.
Instead of “we totally screwed up the way it was implemented” — personal-pronoun poetic — all you can come up with is this: “The implementation was not good at all from the city’s side.”
In other words, slip-sliding, passive bureaucratese. In other words, business as usual.
Talk about embarrassing!
The pity of it is, of course — and haven’t we all had this experience one way or another? — that once stage fright hits, it’s almost impossible to dig out from under it. The harder you struggle, the more panicky you get, and the more difficult it is to thaw those frozen brain cells. It’s one long downhill spiral of sputtering and stuttering until you can finally get out of that room and back to safety.
So we never heard those other missing lines either, did we?
We never heard Mayor Richard Daley talk about the unifying side of the crisis: how ordinary aldermen were suddenly willing to consider thinking before voting, and what a strange and wonderful new development that would be.
We never heard the mayor talk about the positive side of the crisis: how several pounds of quarters in your pockets can keep you from going airborne when the winter winds come roaring off the lake.
And we never heard the mayor talk about the better days to come beyond the crisis, about that glorious day in 2016 when the Olympics would begin, and when billions of people all over the world would tune in to the opening ceremonies and thrill to the sight of mile after mile of perfectly synchronized parking-meter display screens flashing those famous words:
“CHICAGO, CHICAXO, THAST TOXDLING TWON!!”
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Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist.
