“Accustomed As I Am–” (E3)

Commentary:
Here we find RB in the grip of a signature frustration – his inability to get the last word in a confrontation with an appreciative, uncomprehending audience. The piece begins and ends with our narrator exulting in his near escape from the toastmaster racket. Incorporating bits of Benchleyan biographical detail, the speaker chronicles his first taste of after dinner agony as a society reporter forced to witness the witless in their business class habitat. Seeking to put a stake in this appalling rite, RB prepares his own bourgeois burlesques – and finds himself a stakeholder instead. As the nightmare deepens, the author discovers that every hurtful word he hurls only pulls him more inexorably to the next podium on the circuit. Anyone who would attend such a gathering must obviously hate themselves – and to hate them is to be one of them. You can’t mock mock-civility in a banquet hall.