THE ANGEL IN THE ROOM

by James Lincoln Warren

Janice, the skinny blonde Muppet who plays guitar for Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem, is famous for uttering embarrassing statements at the exact moment that every other Muppet in the room shuts up:

“Look, Mother, it’s my life, OK? So if I want to live on a beach and walk around naked . . . oh.”

—“The Great Muppet Caper”, 1981

“So I told him, ‘Listen, I don’t take my clothes off for anybody, even if it is ‘artistic.'”

—“The Muppets Take Manhattan”, 1984

Now, the silence in the two Muppet movies isn’t entirely coincidental—Kermit has yelled at all the others to shut up, but Janice isn’t paying any attention and blithely keeps talking. But we’ve all had a similar experience at some time or another, when there is an unexpected lull in the general hubbub at a party or in a gathering, and whatever we thought we were saying to only one other person is suddenly and embarrassingly heard by everybody in the room.

According to folklore, these lulls in conversation occur when an angel walks into the room, invisible but not therefore intangible. There’s even an idiom in French that represents any embarrassing pause in conversation, although not restricted to group silences: “un ange passe.”

How does it happen that something we might say in a public conversation may embarrass us if it is overheard? Most folks don’t share their most intimate thoughts while in a crowd, after all.

There are two possibilities. The first is that we’re speaking within a specific context that we have already established with the person with whom we’re conversing, but not with the rest of the people in the room. When we’re overheard by everybody else, the context is absent and may come across to everybody else as Too Much Information. This may be the case, for example, if we’re engaged in discussing anything medical. (At my age, health is a much more frequently visited topic than it ever was in the halcyon days of my misspent youth.) The details of your last operation may be relevant to someone who is facing a similar procedure, but to everybody else, it sounds far too personal to be bandied about.

The second possibility has to do with the dynamics of conversation when one is making a new friend. After slogging through the initial small talk establishing the most basic of rapports, at some point or another one of the conversationalists is going to take an emotional risk in an effort to find out how enduring the fledgling relationship may become. This usually involves introducing something that one feels very strongly about, floated as a test balloon to see if the listener is sympatico. A good example is the unequivocally-worded political sentiment: “I think the most dangerous place in our fair city is the area between the mayor and the TV cameras.”

If the listener has a similar low opinion of the mayor, the conversation will blossom. If not, the conversation will wither on the vine. Taking the chance to find out is the result of a classic risk/utility analysis—you’ve either made a new friend or you’ve alienated a stranger. But the risk is amplified if it is overheard by those who aren’t targeted, because you run the risk of alienating several people at once instead of only one.

(As an aside, allow me to mention that understanding the dynamics of conversation is an underappreciated art among many writers, and results in flat, unbelievable dialogue. Most of the writers I know will be moved to good dialogue by something they’ve actually heard, found fascinating, and subsequently incorporated.)

Angels are supposed to be beneficent. When they enter the room, they are beneficent, at least, to mystery writers. Call me a snoop, but I love to hear unguarded speech. It is absolutely loaded with information about the speaker—how smart or educated he is, what he considers impressive and what he regards as trivial, his sense of humor, how he views his place relative to the group. Cramming as much information into as few words as possible is a short story writer’s stock in trade.

Mana from heaven.