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That year, I was on the Forensics Team at San Francisco State. It sounded like a big deal, but wasn’t. You signed up for the class and were automatically on the team. They made you try every kind of speechmaking, and I was terrible at most of them. I don’t like to argue (there is a long line of exes who will dispute this), so I didn’t fare well with debate. I choked at impromptu and didn’t care enough about current events to speak persuasively, so extemporaneous was out. The only thing I could do - the only thing I wanted to do - was read literature with gusto.

Which made me a natural for Dramatic Interpretation. Through the month of September I culled what I thought were the most confrontational monologues. By the middle of October, I’d won a 3rd place medal for my Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But I’d also met enough seasoned Speech People to realize that everybody does Maggie. Like anyone who does anything habitually, they were hard to impress. I needed to find a truly “out there” piece of writing if I were going to wow my peers and my judges. In Feminist Lit class, some of the most controversial writing I’d ever laid eyes on became fodder for my burgeoning career as a public speaker.

And so I was eager to try out a piece I’d been polishing for the upcoming meet in Santa Rosa. I met with my teammates at 5:00 on that fateful day. By 5:04, I was reveling in their undivided attention as I delivered Margaret Atwood’s scintillating short story “Rape Fantasies.” I prattled on even as their expressions turned to fear. I believed I’d finally found a story that shocked them. Then something weird happened. The people in the back of the room were lifted up, as if on an oceanic wave. The floor beneath them was rolling. I kept delivering my speech, thinking it was just nerves that made the room look like that.

The earthquake was practically over before I realized that what was going on had nothing to do with me and Margaret Atwood. Good Californians, we each tried first to duck and cover under those impossibly tiny desks. I remember window blinds banging and the lights going out, and all of us trying to crowd in the doorway.

Then I followed a line of people to the end of the hall, down the stairs, and outside. I looked at the redwood trees towering overhead and didn’t feel safe anywhere. In a sea of 30,000 people, my boyfriend and I found each other in five minutes. (He’d been in the campus library when the books started flying off the shelves.) We stood at the bus stop with virtually everyone else in the world as the cloud of smoke went up over Diamond Heights, the hill that separated us from Downtown.

One guy with a Walkman radio shouted reports: “They think it might have been a bomb!”

“The entire Marina District is in flames!”

“The Bay Bridge has fallen into the ocean!”

BART and MUNI were out of commission. We got on a bus that that ran on fuel instead of electric wires. It took three hours to go five miles. Back at our apartment building, we felt our way along the walls in the dark as we crept up four flights of stairs. The piano was in the middle of the room and the orchids were on the floor. The cat hid under the futon couch and nothing fragile was broken.

It was weird, how quiet the city was with the power off.

We’d lived in the apartment for 20 months and hadn’t met any of our neighbors. The guy across the hall stood with a candle as he knocked on our door, asked us over for martinis and spaghetti. Everybody in the building was crowded into Nathan’s apartment, where the small rooms glowed in yellow candlelight and where his gas stove was covered in bubbling pots. (He’d started his sauce before the cause of the Marina’s fiery explosion was announced. This turned out to be a blessing for us all.) The martinis flowed from a huge, chilly pitcher and there was a never-ending supply of olives. We were endlessly fascinated with each other’s earthquake stories, which we told until 3:00 in the morning and which were, in fact, better than any dramatic interpretation of literature I’d ever heard.

I would never do better than 3rd in Forensics. I would quit the team at the end of semester.

It was the best dinner party I ever attended.