Watching the State of the Union Address tonight I was struck by how distracting Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi could be. Joe’s incessant nodding turned into a drinking game (without the drinks) for my host, who spent the 45 minutes counting how many times the Vice Prez’s head went up and down. I had my focus pulled from the President a few times by Nancy Pelosi’s weird mouth movements: was she chewing a cough drop or something?
She also has a tendency to smirk, which I find a huge turn-off and which I assume has cost her much more than any of us would care to admit in political points.
The president even upstaged himself a little bit during his concluding remarks by gently banging the podium every time he folded his hands, which tended to be after every rhetorical point. For awhile, he got into a hypnotic kind of call-and-response rhythm with his bangs, which became more emphatic as he neared his conclusion. I almost wondered if it was an intentional rhetorical device, but I highly doubt it.
My point, chickadees, is that no matter how long you are up on that dais listening to someone speak or preach, be very aware that you are just as much under public scrutiny as is the speaker, and even perhaps more so. Be aware, be still (no leg jiggling, no eye rolling, no smirking, no frowny face, no overly-vigorous nodding), sit up straight and put on your best game face. If you don’t know what your best game face is, work on it in the mirror until you find it.*
(Kudos to Speaker Pelosi’s make-up and hair people, and to Joe Biden’s tooth-whitener!)
*PeaceBang is TERRIBLE at following this advice, by the way. She is working on it. She tends toward vigorous nodding, “insider” smiling (althoug not smirking) and “mmm-hmm”ing and “amen-ing” (which is fine in moderation).
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t be too hard on Mrs. Pelosi. Her face has some of the characteristic signs that mine did about 2 months after the onset of Bell’s Palsy. There’s some pretty noticeable asymmetry there–it may not be a ‘smirk’, but a facial difficulty over which she has little, if any, control.
And at almost 14 months, I still get twinges and cramps that cause involuntary, small but noticeable facial movements.
Please don’t be too hard on her. [Wendy, that’s very caring of you but
I really think NP just smirks. It’s in her eyes and her smile… and since she seems perfectly capable of holding a respectful and mature expression, I have to think that this is about self-governance and not Bell’s. – PB]
This may seem unrelated… I was wondering why attendance was down at bingo last night. Now I can see.
Now if we can just get the acolytes and other servers at the altar to understand this.
But how ADORABLE that Joe and Nancy matched! His purple tie, her purple dress … all she needed was a wrist corsage, and he, a carnation boutonnierre. [Holy cow, I didn’t even notice! He was wearing a boutonnierre!?? I was blinded by his pearlie whites and her lip gloss. They do make a sharp-looking team. And of course the Mrs. makes me swoon, she’s so AWESOME.- PB]
C-Span 2 kept them out of frame.
Pelosi looked awfully pained to me during the parts on doubling exports. That was a bit of Obama drawing a line in the sand with her over free-trade agreements with S. Korea and Tawain.
Biden was really goofy though. He had that silly grin and that started to really grate after a while.
Not an easy job to sit through 70 mins up there though either.
Of course, then there was Alito mumbling “you lied” during the SCOTUS slap down. [Oh dang, I missed that! I did, however, get to watch a re-wind of John McCain mouthing, “Blame it on Bush” after Obama enumerated the stats of the deficit he inherited. – PB]
That was pretty precious.
I was most distracted by how gaunt she looked. I don’t know if it was her makeup, hair, or if she’d lost weight, but her face seemed downright skeletal. She looks LOVELY in that picture you have in your post, but last night she seemed very different.
I think Joe Biden suffers from ADD. My 18 year old son believed Biden was checking his cell phone at one point during last nights speech. I have noticed that Biden is often trying to make eye contact with someone in the audience.
At seminary we were trained to keep our eyes trained on the person speaking, even if all we could see was the back of the speaker’s head. The instructors told us that anyone glancing at us would find his/her attention redirected toward the leader by our gaze. I still do it, and I wish other podium sitters would, too. Simple and excellent advice! – PB
I started listening on the radio years ago, it is the only way to make it bearable.
I think Nancy P. was simply wearing long-wearing lipstick and her lips were itching. It makes your lips feel like the skin is shrinking! I just had my 13 year old boy read this — all the same points I was making during the speech and he thought I was being overly critical — especially about Obama’s hand-banging on the podium. Ha! Thanks for backing me up!
That Pelosi weird chewing motion has to have a medical explanation, I think.
Glad to see folks considering the medical explanations of these twitches and fidgets. ADHD is a disease, not a moral failing. And nodding and saying “um-hm” and what-not reflect the extrovert’s active listening style. If you’re not interrupting, you’re doing well.
Elz, I *have* to take the medical explanation seriously. I’ve still got twitches, cramps, and flutters in my face more than a year after the onset of Bell’s Palsy. I’ve made a (mostly) good recovery, but I definitely have my ‘bad face days’. A lot of other Bell’s survivors do too, some for many years after. Usually, your face doesn’t look as bad as you think it should (because it FEELS pretty bad).
In meetings or out in public, I’m often still very self conscious about what my face is doing. I thought I’d be fine because I gave a paper at an international conference a month after onset (still needing to wear an eye patch, and still with so little movement on my left side that I couldn’t eat neatly). But I still have those days when I feel a bad twinge or flutter, and I *know* that I must look weird.
People who have had this much longer tell me I may have this for a very long time, even permanently.
I’m ready to give people a HUGE benefit of the doubt. Except for the comedian on tv last night, who clearly COULD talk normally, but for the sake of a laugh, twisted his face up. That burns my onions.
Thank you Peacebang, another useful reminder. Although never told to do so, I also try to look at the preacher, even if it is the back of the head.
I do worry from time to time about ‘insider laugh’ but here it is more that I laugh where the preacher has made a joke, whereas many of the parishioners have obviously been told in the past that to experience any joy during a service is a mortal sin!
I know clergy who do a sort of Nancy Pelosi pasted-on smile sometimes. I get the feeling they’re trying not to look overly serious, or they think smiling = joyful and neutral expression = joyless, so they try hard to default to a smile, which of course looks fake-o-matic if it doesn’t well up from genuine pleasant emotion. The mouth smiles, but the eyes don’t.