Black Box Outside Amsterdam

I'm in Den Haag, just now, and am not even sure how it's properly spelled in Dutch. The road (or, more accurately, the railroad) has greeted me -- so much more civil, I think, than me "hitting the road" -- to listen to some stories about the future of the telecommunications industry. I find it very easy to play the stand-up for most Europeans. The Dutch, as an audience, however, look too much like Americans to sound as silent as the Japanese, but they pull it off. They have going for them, however, both height and, on the days when it is not raining, beautiful sunsets. Today was one of those days. And they weren't even silent. They even laughed at more than the minimum number of jokes and generously indulged my brash anglo-saxon enthusiasms. The venue for the speeches was an actual theatre. Not one of those terrible made-up hotel auditoria with doinky chandelliers. No, this was a little black-box, art-house theatre. I hadn't been under fresnels in so long, I felt a rush of youth flush my face even as I had to compose myself to talk about Convergent Service Delivery and IP Multimedia Subsystem Architectures. Darn good thing I didn't break out into "When you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dyin' day!" Because, you know, I didn't have the right outfit.