Ted Talks are one of the more interesting things to bubble up out of Silicon Valley and the potpourri of new and digital media increasingly drawing people away from the nasty and fossilized idea of news as present by conventional news organization. There are good reasons for people to abandon newspapers and cable television, they are almost uniformly dull, disturbing, and irrelevant to our lives. Ted Talks are non-profit presentations of ideas worth sharing – they are presented on radio and mostly online. When Ted Talks go viral, as they sometimes do, lives and ideas are transformed.

Mainstream journalism has not seemed to notice that Ted Talk are wildly popular because they are about ideas, and not about arguments. TT groups around the country look for interesting ideas and subjects and invite speakers to present them at televised forums in bursts of about 15 minutes. I turned down my Ted Talk invitation, then re-thought that and accepted it. I chose “Creative Aging” as my talk for a day-long forum on eating, playing and living well. Talks centered on food, nutrition, childhood obesity, the power of bowling, nutrition warriors and their work to get people to eat well.

We went to Montclair State University for a Friday night rehearsal, and then for presentations of our talks to 300 people who had paid $50 a piece to come and hear all of us. I was nervous. I never get nervous speaking in public, but this was a new environment for me, different, more produced and not really connected to my books. I was also returning to Montclair, where I loved for 25 years before I moved to the country and got divorced. I think that rattled me more than the talk. Maria came with me, she loves to take out her sketch pad and drawn the scene. It is so important for me to look up at her and see her sitting there.

I saw right away that I was different from everyone else talking. I am among the older speakers and I was by farm the biggest and most rumpled. Most of the speakers were women – they were almost all attractive, very thin and fit. They were well dressed, poised and prepared – they had memorized their talks, had slick Power-Point presentations. The Ted Talk organizers were also hip, lean, sharp-looking. Before I entered the auditorium, Maria helped me pull bits of hay out of my jacket (I had fed the donkeys Friday morning.) I felt a bit like Jed Clampett going to one of those fancy Hollywood dinners. Nobody looked like me, or was like me, but that is not necessarily a bad thing, it just reminded me that I live in a different world. I suppose of you are giving talks on food and nutrition, you need to look lean and fit.

I had no Power-Point presentation, I declined to do that, I printed out parts of my talk and send about a dozen of my photos to use as screen backdrops. Simon was the biggest hit by far. There were a lot of students in the crowd, and I was stunned to be surrounded by many after the talk. They were eager for messages of hope, discouraged by the grim news pouring into their tablets and smarphones, they had no positive models of aging to study and think about it. I hope I can live up to being one.

The Tedx Talks have lots of rules about speeches (I ignored almost all of them) and ask the speakers to hang around all day to hear one another’s talks. I loved this forum – I am all about ideas, and I am all about a new medium that promotes thinking rather than confrontation and argument. This is the new media, and so am I, in many ways. So even though there were some social and cultural differences between me and the other speakers, I felt it was an important forum to bring my message of hope, self-determination and independence as we move through life. it was well worth the trip, as strange as it sometimes felt.

I do not expect my talk to go viral any more than I expect my new book to sell millions of copies, the “big score” is one of those things creative people need to get out of their heads in the new world of fragmented media. It can happen, it rarely does. I went there with a passion to bring my voice and my message to a place I had lived for so long and which represents the other part of my life, good and bad. I did what I set out to do, and happily returned to my world, the place I now belong, and expect to live out my life.