YOUR BUSINESS IS REJOICING!

A Thursday morning last fall found me in a middle school auditorium, reliving painful adolescent experiences of alienation. Once a year our company gathers its many employees together to bestow awards, listen to a motivational speaker, and of course pray. This year’s big inspirational to-do took the form of a mock pep rally, something the planners no doubt thought would be fun and kitschy. We all wore colored shirts to represent our different sites (mine was orange!), and we drove out to a middle school in the West End where my bosses took the stage and led cheers, which I was told it was important I participate in no matter how silly or degraded I might feel because company morale depended on my positive attitude, and so I stood, teeth clenched in a half-smile, plastic megaphone at my lips, hollering in a way I hoped was sincere. Hollering stuff like, “WE’VE GOT SPIRIT YES WE DO, WE’VE GOT SPIRIT HOW ‘BOUT YOU?!?!?!”
Abruptly, a young woman took the stage and began to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a cappella and badly. A hush fell over the auditorium as she sang, and, while her thin, unappealing voice struggled to keep on pitch, the sound of my group’s snorts and sobs was hard to miss. We sat shuddering, heads bowed and faces covered, trying desperately not to look at one another. We knew full well that if we did look at one another we would be overcome with laughter, and that this poor girl on stage might burst into tears and run away. Not laughing at her was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and I only half succeeded. As I shuddered, tears streaming down my face, a new employee who was sitting next to me gently touched my arm.
“Are you okay?” she asked me, genuinely concerned. I nodded that I was, but couldn’t speak for fear of what might come out. She seemed like she might put her arm around me, but I held up my hand to stop her, and we both listened to the bit about the pretty little bluebirds awkwardly.
If “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” weren’t bad enough, it was followed by a very solemn and completely indecipherable prayer—an earnest mumbling that began with a request for bowed heads and ended bizarrely with the words “It is finished.”
At this point the President herself took the stage and proclaimed excitedly, “Today is all about you!” She seemed very pleased and excited by this idea, and, as she went on talking her passionate management-speak, I tried to decide whether she was manipulative or just extremely out of touch. I was sitting in a middle school auditorium dressed in an orange baseball shirt with my name on the back. I had yelled into a plastic megaphone that I had “spirit.” Later I would listen to a minister give a talk about his folksy personal philosophy about overcoming adversity and it’s roots in Popeye cartoons that he was sure most of us were too young to remember. As I listened to him earnestly declaim, “I yam what I yam,” I couldn’t help but think that I had never spent two hours that were less about me.