ABSTRACT
Everything that happened that night matters; the circumstances leading to eating dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House are fundamental to the author’s tale of joy and the underbelly of joy, which she realized at a point during this particular evening, was the trauma of loss. The mystery of a conference is that anything can and will happen depending on the mix of people. Sometimes what begins as a conscious motive shifts during the course of a conference, other times motives for attending conferences are unconscious, unknown for days or even months afterward, maybe never known. Nevertheless there is one indisputable fact about conferences whether presenting a paper or listening to the paper of someone else; always at risk is our identity.
