This may come as a shock to some of you, but growing up, I was a nerd.

Yes, it’s true.

By high school, I’d managed to make friends with a couple of people considered cool, but I never was considered so. People who spend significant time in worlds of their own creation seldom attain popularity in this one. Add to that, I made good grades. And I spent more hours practicing an instrument than conversing with humans. I was hopeless.

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me at the time. Who doesn’t want to be liked?

Because of this, it surprises me when people tell me I’m funny or when someone comes up to me and says, "I wanted to meet you."

Really? You want to meet me? Usually, I check behind and beside me: they’re not talking to someone else, right?

Side note: I always have been and always will be a ham. Give me a mike, and I light up. Exhibit A: home videos of dances I’d choreographed (with Debbie Gibson hat, of course) and performed in front of an audience of stuffed animals. (I usually dragged my sister or a friend into the endeavor.) I’m an interesting mix. Meeting people one-on-one scares the ear wax out of me. Being in groups of people wears me out. But put me on stage, and I’m in my element.

I taught one of the breakout sessions at a retreat this weekend (Popcorn Theology: Encountering God’s Beauty at the Movies), and people came up to me later and told me they liked me!

They actually like me, Mom!

(Does this mean I could be considered cool? I know, I know. I’m stretching it.)

Besides being considered funny and besides having people actually want to meet me, my favorite part was having people come up to me after the session and tell me I challenged them and stretched them to think a different way. One lady emailed me last night to say she watched a movie with her daughter and saw redemptive qualities in it she never would have thought to look for before.

That made me smile.