How To Fall Gracefully.

posted in: Tips 1
Photo: Wikipedia
Photo: Wikipedia

David Neville, the guy in the foreground up there, is an American sprinter who specializes in the 400-meter dash. He’s a gold and bronze medalist, and in a race in 2004, he clocked 9.8 meters per second. Almost ten meters a second. Basically, he bends time and space and practices a lot. That’s what we know about David.

The picture above was taken at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. It looks like David’s falling, but that’s actually him diving for the finish line. He came in third on this one which, whatever, David. Clearly, you didn’t want it enough. Five-thirty a.m., tomorrow. All-day practice and I’m bringing two stopwatches.

Yesterday at the airport to beautiful Puyallup, WA to headline the big Sewing & Stitchery Expo event tomorrow night (I’m also doing signings and a demo and basically hanging out and having fun, so check the program and come see me), I saw not one but two people trip and almost fall. Neither case was a serious one; these were able-bodied people who would not have sustained serious injuries if they had gone down. One lady was stepping onto the moving walkway and kinda gave her hair a toss as she did. Well, her inner ear didn’t like that too much and she pitched forward and barely caught herself. “Waa!” she cried, and then she was okay.

The other guy, he was wearing shoes with grippy rubber, I guess, because he was just walking and tripped on the airport floor. “Gak!” he cried, and pushed his glasses back up his nose. It goes without saying that both of these people did the embarrassed look-around after they tripped to see if anyone had seen them. Usually, someone does, but it’s really no big deal.

But if they do see, if you biff hard in front of a lot of people and you really do fall, you just say, “Haha, oh, no. I didn’t fall. I was diving for the finish line.” People will look at you like you’re not well in the head and that’s good: they will forget about the falling entirely. Instead of telling their friends later, “Oh, man. It was so hilarious. I saw this woman turf out at the airport today,” they’ll say, “Today at the airport I met the craziest woman I have ever met in my life.”