Category: News

Video of My TED Talk

Last December, I delivered a talk for TED. In fact it was the first ever TEDWomen and was a great event. I met  many amazing, dedicated men and women whose work is to help women around the globe. The editors at TED just released the video of my talk.

Writing the talk took over a month. It began as long  speech, and I spent weeks pairing it down to the six minutes I was allotted.  I also worked with a very talented coach, Trisha Bauman, who helped be understand many new (to me) key elements for successful public speaking and performance.  While I have given numerous talks over the years, this was the first one that I felt I should memorize. In fact,  memorization really frees you up, and allows you to connect with the audience and with what you are saying much more naturally.

The audience at the conference was wonderful. In fact you can hear me laughing with them because I was so taken aback by their loud spontaneous laughter. It was great. Many of the other  talks were (rightfully) serious, and I sense that the audience was looking for relief, which I provided. While many of the other speakers were serious with touches of humor, I was humorous with an underlying note of serious.  My favorite way to be.

Dr. Martin Luther King

Dr. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to inspiring people to be the best they can be, and to love everyone, regardless of race or gender.  I grew up in Washington, DC  during the Civil Rights Movement, and Dr. King made a huge impression on me. As a child I could easily understand his message and did not complicate his message in my mind with adult worries.  I felt so blessed that Dr. King loved me, even though I am white, and I vowed at a young age to return the love any way I could as I headed into adulthood.  Then he was shot and killed. It was a huge shock to my young mind that there were people out there that wanted to kill him. I was thirteen.

There are a lot of reasons why I became a cartoonist.  I loved making people smile, and still do. So if I can do that and help make the world a better place, I feel extremely fortunate. Recently, my work with Cartooning for Peace, World Ink and  TEDWomen, has shown me that connecting around the world as people, through the (often wordless) medium of cartoons, can be very powerful. Laughter is universal and peace can be too. It goes without saying that love, as Dr. King so desperately wanted us to understand, has to be.