Sunday, April 27: The other reason I was in the Peach State this week was to speak at the Alive Expo, a natural health and wellness event held at the Georgia World Congress Center, the huge convention hall right next to the CNN Building in downtown Atlanta.
My son, Joshua, and I spent Saturday morning at Canaan Valley Ranch (read my blog from Friday, April 25), hanging out with John and Kim Pace and their family. We couldn’t keep Joshua, not even four years old, off the zip line all morning long.
At noontime, we drove to downtown Atlanta, where I had an evening speaking event at the Alive Expo. The weekend convention was open to the general public (a one-day general admission ticket cost $10). Besides lectures from health industry people like myself, you could walk past booths featuring 15 local and national companies that produce organic and natural foods as well as watch nutritious cooking demonstrations.
In a pre-convention press release, I said I would give the first 5,000 ticket holders a copy of my Perfect Weight America book. Well, more than 7,300 copies went into people’s hands during the two days, which means great attendance. I spoke Saturday night at 6 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon.
After I spoke Saturday night, Joshua and I walked a few hundreds yards away to Philips Arena, where the Atlanta Hawks were playing the Boston Celtics in the first round of the NBA playoffs. Big crowd on hand, big energy.
We were sitting in the season-ticket seats belonging to Dr. Gez Agolli, the founder and managing director of Progressive Medical Center, which is using a Perfect Weight America pilot program with more than 100 clients. (I wrote more about this in my blog from Friday, April 23.) Talk about great seats: we were parked just seven rows behind the Hawks bench, so close that we could practically reach out and touch the gargantuan players. Watching a future Hall of Famer like Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics was pretty cool. And all those guys are so big and so fast that they make a big court look so small. Unbelievable.
I don’t normally like to go to games like this because I get a better view on TV. Joshua, I must say, was a little overwhelmed. He was the only kid in these prime seats behind the Hawks bench, but he got into it, yelling “Dee-fense” and clapping whenever the Hawks made a big play. I bought Joshua some souvenirs: a hat, a ball, and a T-shirt, and afterward he announced that he no longer wanted to become a pilot when he grows up; he wants to become a basketball player.
He’ll have to grow up big and tall. His pediatrician said Joshua should top out at six feet, four inches, which is about the minimum size to play in the NBA these days. Anyway, those NBA athletes were amazing. You can ask him today what number that Celtics’ star Kevin Garnett was wearing, and he’ll say “Number 5.” What’s his nickname? “Big Ticket.”
It doesn’t get cuter than that. Joshua has a toy basket at home that he can dunk on, which is great because I subscribe to the theory that you can never teach a child to dunk too early.