For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women (or any of Terry Heggy's other writing), please visit www.performancepress.com.

One of the purposes of this blog site is to provide answers to questions that shy men have about meeting, dating, and romancing the women they are attracted to. Since it's fairly new, most of the world at large remains oblivious to its existence. Thus, I have not received many emails from men who have questions.

Yes, the number of porn site solicitations I've received is higher than Carl Sagan could count; but while I'm so very happy to learn that Tiffany and Amber are willing to perform with barn animals for my viewing enjoyment for such a reasonable fee, they really haven't asked any "shy man" questions. Therefore I shall use the space today to instead share some of the story of my journey from shy nerd social reject geekboy to World Famous Relationships Expert and Highly Paid Seminar Leader.

(The story of how I gained the relationships expertise will have to wait. This blog is about learning seminar skills. Sorry.)

When I was a kid, cereal boxes frequently offered merchandise in exchange for a few boxtops and a quarter's worth of P & H. (No, not Pianos and Harpsichords -- Postage and Handling, man. I always wondered, though, whether the people who handle the stuff actually get to keep the handling portion of the fee. And why should they get paid to handle my "super silly straw", when I have never been offered a single dime for handling anything. And while I'm on the subject, I've never seen a panhandler actually handling a pan...what's up with that?)

Anyway...sometimes you didn't even have to send in boxtops. One summer the boxes had Major League Baseball® cards printed right on the back of the box. They weren't quite as good as the ones you could get at the store, because they didn't smell like that pink stick of bubble gum and they didn't have the guy's minor league stats printed on the back. But they were of pretty good print quality for being slapped onto a medium whose original purpose was merely to keep the Crunch Berries® from escaping. I had 6 Mickey Mantle cards, 4 Roger Marises, and a couple of Yogi Berras. Today, I am pleased to say, my collection of these cards is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $27,000.

Well, it would be if I hadn't thrown the whole collection out when I needed to make room for my Authentic Cape Canaveral Launch Pad Set (complete with real spring-loaded rockets -- guaranteed to put someone's eye out!) I'm afraid that in a landfill somewhere in Kansas, a proud grubworm is currently telling his children about the time their great gran'pappy ate 6 Mickey Mantles in one sitting.

One time I sent away a half-dozen boxtops for a set of free "Tumbling Clowns". They were really pretty cool -- they were little plastic guys (about 4mm high) who tumbled down a little plastic ladder. Hours o' fun. The only problem was that my pre-adolescent handwriting had been misinterpreted by the order fulfillment house. The package that arrived was addressed to Terry Hemy, rather than Terry Heggy. I never saw the humor in it, but for the next 3 or 4 weeks, all the kids in the neighborhood would call me "Homo Hemy", and then laugh uproariously until someone else came along they could make fun of.

Anyway, this story is about how a wallflower like myself learned to stand before a large audience and present himself with poise and authority. The key to my success can be summed up with three words: "ball in vase".

It's a magic trick. A mystic secret of the ancient orient, the illusion is also known as "ball in cup", "ball and vase", and for people who think pretentious accents make them sound more sophisticated, "boll in vahzz". By dumping out the contents of six boxes of cereal and cutting off the boxtops, the trick was mine!

That nickle's worth of plastic allowed me to amaze and dazzle my friends. So -- I'll skip over all the work it took to fine tune my magical arts and get right to the heart of this story. On a fateful day about two years after I received my ball in vase, I had worked up a magic act with a friend and we had been hired to perform at the Wichita City Library for a bunch of underprivileged kids.

My partner's name was Jeff Hammond. Jeff went on to achieve great fame as a concert oboist, but at that point in his life was still working on his fundamental social skills, as was I. We were pretty good at the mechanics of magic (keeping the rabbit hidden until the hat was ready, making sure that the secret cards didn't drop out of the sleeve until needed, etc.), but we just flat sucked at using language and stage presence to keep our audience interested until the illusions actually happened.

We decided to start the library gig with one of our blockbuster tricks: Doctor Weird's Mysterious Box O' Plenty. The BOP was an illusion where the audience would see an empty box suddenly fill with bounty as the All-Powerful Magician chanted the mystic incantation. Our patter was that the Box originally came from prehistoric Mongolia, back in the days when a horrible famine was decimating the landscape and the poor people had eaten all the Yaks and Sasquatches and Snow Leopards -- they were starving. A shadowy monk named "Dr. Weird" emerged from his shadowy cave and descended into the miserable village. Rumors of his power had been heard within the village, so the starving populace heaped praise and adulation upon him, and never once did dare ask why a cave-dwelling Mongolian was named "Weird"...nor did they query from which University his medical degree was earned.

The instructions for the illusion advised using rice as the bounty which would magically fill the formerly empty box. But we didn't have any rice lying around the house. However, we did have the contents of six cereal boxes that had been cut up for boxtop redemption. So our Box O' Plenty was filled with Froot Loops® and Cap'n Crunch (with CrunchBerries®).

As Jeff told the eerie tale of Dr. Weird, I skulked around the stage flourishing my cape like some unholy cross between Jack the Ripper and Vanna White. As Jeff began to recite the ancient Mongolian incantation, I prepared to move the hidden mirror which obscured the waiting cereal.

"Oooga booga orka mooga," Jeff intoned. I got ready. "Rama Lama Alabama". Almost time. "Bippity Boppity BOO!" he shouted. I yanked, and then turned to watch the amazement appear in the eyes of our young audience.

Oh, yeah, I saw amazement. I also saw hope. Then greed. Then frenzied bloodlust... as every single one of those kids leapt up and charged toward me like a tidal wave.

When I had executed the trick, something had snagged and sent the cereal flying. Instead of a serene Box full of vitamin-packed goodness, there was in its place the aftermath of a Level Five Crunch Berry explosion. Cereal was all over the Box, the table, and the floor. The library had become an unintentional smorgasbord.

They must have gotten the kids to come to the show by starving them and promising them some food after the performance. These brats were famished -- then suddenly there's tasty sugar-loaded breakfast food covering everything in sight. What else could they do but storm the stage and start shovelling it into their little mouths as fast as their little hands could shovel it? Their chaperones were shouting at them, Jeff was cursing them with additional ooga boogas, and I was standing there wishing I'd stuck to baseball cards and tumbling clowns.

Luckily, Dr. Weird's mysterious malfunctioning apparatus had apparently generated enough bounty to indeed satiate all the little mongolians. After several terrifying minutes, order was finally restored. The kids returned to their seats with glazed sugar-high expressions on their faces. Thinking that we were the best magicians EVER, they sat mutely transfixed for the rest of the show, probably behaving solely on the off chance that one of the Disappearing Hankies would explode into hailstones of 3 Musketeers bars. Jeff's confidence was at an all-time high, because after all, it was HIS chanting that caused the Crunch Berry eruption. And I was energized by the fact that I had stood eye to eye with a room full of hungry, mannerless rug rats... and had survived their charge.

After that, standing up in front of a room full of adults and speaking about success and motivation -- well, it's a piece of cake. (Well, not literally cake...I'm finished with food-oriented presentations. Let's just say, "It's easy".)

We did not see a monetary profit that day. Our magician's fee for that gig went back to the library to pay for cleaning the Crunch residue off the carpet. Dr. Weird's Box O' Plenty was ceremoniously chopped to bits and cremated during our next Boy Scout campout. Jeff did enjoy a brief acting career, and I think he tried really hard to become a normal person, but the lure of the oboe was too much for him to resist and he has spent the rest of his life under its uncanny spell.

As for me, the magic has never stopped. I received something far better than a cash fee that day. I learned about the power of giving, of sharing the plenty. Each time I share an inspiring story with an audience -- each time I share some tip or technique that gets a person a little bit further down their own path toward success and satisfaction -- each time I see the lights go on behind a listener's eyes...well, I feel like I did when I saw how those kids felt when the explosion of Berries satisfied their hunger.

It's a good feeling.

And I owe it all to boxtops. Enjoy your day, my friends.
Terry

For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women (or any of Terry Heggy's other writing), please visit www.performancepress.com.

OK, now that Thanksgiving is over, I shall complain about things I am NOT thankful for. (And if the "Fat People vs. McDonalds" suit is successful in enriching the obese morons, I shall soon be initiating class-action suits against anyone who appears in this article. Ka-ching!)

Let's start with the obvious: I hate religious fanatics. Anyone who blows up a bus, flies an airplane into a building, or murders a doctor in the name of their god is beneath contempt. I'm the first to confess that I do not know for certain the true nature of any gods that may exist (nor am I willing to concede that anyone else knows for certain, either). But if there even is such an entity, I gotta believe that the smart money is on there being a special place in Hell for the asswipes who try to force their religious viewpoint down the throats of others. I personally take much comfort in my own belief that such people will eventually be roasting in eternal torment. Really, really nasty eternal torment.

OK, on to the less odious (yet still completely obvious) things I'd prefer we didn't have to put up with. People who use cell phones in public places, with a double-pox upon those who do it loudly. Poor service in restaurants. Neighbors who have loud parties late at night. People who don't use turn signals, or who drive below the speed limit. You see, the problem with these offenses is that they are SO easy to correct. Any moron should be capable of basic courtesy; yet it's truly perplexing that there are so many people who don't seem to be.

(I would have included telemarketers, but thank goodness my entry on the No Call list finally kicked in, so I don't have to put up with these lowlifes anymore.)

Pop-up windows on the Internet. Ads that are folded around (or even attached to) the comics section of the Sunday paper. Football stadiums named after communications companies. Software that comes in giant cardboard boxes, even when the only thing in the box is a crummy little CD. TV commercials that I don't understand. (OK, maybe I don't understand them because they're aimed at a younger target audience; so maybe I should be griping about my own old age and unforgivable un-hipness.)

I am not thankful for the fact that none of my relatives are wealthy, with plans to croak and leave me a large inheritance in the near future. None of them even own TV stations where I could use my family influence to get my own talk show. In fact, in my entire extended clan, there isn't even one person who owns a professional sports franchise, or who is close personal friends with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hell, there are probably at least 7 or 8 degrees of separation between me and Kevin Bacon.

What else do I think the world could do without? Newscasters that annoy and harrass people who have suffered losses. The inexplicable fluctation in gasoline prices. France. People who tear down a mall just so they can build another mall on the same spot. The Oakland Raiders. PBS pledge drives. Poorly-timed traffic lights that make you sit and wait, even though it's 5:00 in the morning and there aren't any other cars around for miles. And especially those damned alien abductions and rectal probes.

You know, I think I'll stop now. Oh, sure, I could find more to complain about...but I'm really a pretty optimistic guy. I'd rather think about the things that are good in the world. They certainly outnumber the bad ones. So I'll shut up and let you get on with the great things that are happening in your life...as I get on with mine.

But always watch the skies, my friends. Take care.
Terry