[img]1551|left|Dave LaRose||no_popup[/img]LaRose the raconteur.
Who knew?
Anyone who has been observing the new School District superintendent since he parachuted, unobtrusively, into Culver City.
Now that he has moved to Hollywood-adjacent, Dave LaRose’s future may be a few miles beyond the modest walls of the District Office on Irving Place, even if it is just around the corner from The Culver Studios.
He could have been auditioning for Leno or Letterman in the early hours of just his 25th working day when he singlehandedly won the one-man Home Run Derby this morning at the Chamber of Commerce’s Issues and Eggs Forum at the Four Points by Sheraton.
With disarming ease, he reeled off one-liners as if he had been practicing since last Groundhog Day. Or next Groundhog Day.
Time Out for Sagacity
From the frequently visited depths of his considerable mind, he uncorked breezy but weighty aphorisms as if he shleps a 50-pound dictionary in each hip pocket in addition to the digital one beneath his lefthanded wristwatch.
Better if this had been a supper club audience. They would have walked away whistling his name.
He weaved a magical fabric of family humor yarns and silver slivers of motivating education philosophy suitable for framing.
And worthy of playing over again at home for your favorite relatives.
The antithesis of noisy or noticeable, he does not wow so much as he seduces or envelopes his listeners into his confidence. They rest in the palm of his hand as if they had made reservations.
Like watching a fisherman row mercurially out to the center of a freshly stocked lake and hook one jumbo-sized fish after another.
Like watching a civilian standing at the far end of a basketball court, faultlessly, silently, sinking baskets 94 feet away.
At that, though, his tongue will have to arise earlier than it does to outrun his feet, upon which he is deceptively speedy.
Prove It
Asked from the audience what he had done to earn the Chamber of Commerce’s Man of the Year award at his last posting in Washington state, he fired back – even before the man’s tongue had sat down:
“It was my turn.”
A moment later, Prof. Patricia Siever, a School Board member seated at the head table with Mr. LaRose, marveled as she recounted an impressive mountain of previously unrealized District headaches he has smoothly, effectively, and most of all quietly, solved or nearly settled.
“How do you do it?” she wanted to know.
Dressed in a puckish grin and quite without punctuation, he wordlessly slipped out from behind the podium. A sheet of paper in his right hand, he approached Prof. Siever. Speaking sotto voce, he pointed at the sheet and cracked, “You left this line out.”
The crowd loved it.
Next: What he actually said.
(To be continued)
