When I was in high school, I was unceremoniously shipped off to St. Louis for a convention of high school-aged writers. I remember two things about that week. The first is who hooked up with whom. My name being in neither the Who nor Whom columns, that memory is sadly seared in place.
And then there was the competition. I sat in a room with 200 other high school writers and we listened to a soul-crushingly boring man talk about the subsidiaries of his record company. From this, I was to write a general interest feature worthy of Rolling Stone. When he stopped speaking, I was numb. No elderly relative with ass problems had ever bored me into such catatonia. I looked at my notes. They were unusable. So in my subject, I conjured a personality that did not exist. I made up a few quotes to buttress my feeble points. Surely, no one would check that tape just to prove I'd made up quotes. How badly could someone want to prove a kid a fraud?
Not badly at all, it turned out. When my name was called at the awards banquet, my schoolmates and I were in the very back of the room. I wound my way through the tables. It took forever. At one point, my path was obstructed by a breakfast cart, which I pushed to the side. It wasn't on wheels. There was the thunderous crash of silverware and breaking dishes. When I was accepting my award, I was hiding my face in complete humiliation.
I thought of this last night, of course, when Jennifer Lawrence stepped on her gown and face-planted en route to her own award. There were several key differences, of course. Her award mattered. Hers was deserved. She fell in front of a billion people. And her standing ovation wasn't hootingly sarcastic.
