Big man at the conference [Bryan]

I'm in Boston right now for a conference. I've had a good time. There is one highlight, though, that I need to tell you about.

I attended a session today that was dedicated to criticizing a paper I had written last year. Naturally, I was a bit uncomfortable. The presenters at the session disagreed about almost everything. The one thing they agreed on was that my paper was wrong on several important points.

During the comments, I stood up and said,"I guess I should introduce myself as the person who was criticized today." There was some laughing, and I then tried to persuade them that they had misconstrued my position a bit (understandably, now that I think about it, but that's another story).

Anyway, shift forward a couple hours. I was meeting up with a longtime friend, David Chapman, who lives in the Boston area. David arrived at the hotel and rolled down his window to greet me.

Just at that moment, a man approached me and asked, "Are you Bryan? The same one who wrote the book on imitation? I've been waiting anxiously for that book to be released. I'm going to buy it as soon as I can. When you introduced yourself at the meeting earlier, I was excited to meet me." We chatted for a minute and parted. I was amazed because this sort of thing has never really happened to me before.

I turned toward David's car and it seemed that he had been listening to the whole conversation. I tried to nonchalantly open the car door and sit down, pretending that this fawning behavior from fans is the sort of thing I must endure all the time. David smiled and said, "Well, hello Dr. Warnick!"

I really don't know how much David heard. But what an excellent image: public homage in front of an unsuspecting old friend. This is the sort of thing I would have paid somebody to do, if I had thought of it earlier.