A motivational speech for ‘Passion’ peddlers

By Brendan Buhler

Thursday, April 3, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Jack Canfield, motivational speaker and millionaire creator of the best-selling “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series, takes the stage as New Age music plays and success slogans are projected on screens. A woman screams, “I love you!”

Canfield points back and says, “I love you more.”

He congratulates everyone on “taking the risk to be as fully human as you can be,” as though it were an audience of robots learning to love and to laugh.

The audience claps and cheers, for itself, for Canfield. For everything.

Canfield is connecting with about 1,200 people Tuesday afternoon inside a Bally’s events center. It seems to be an odd fit.

They are attendees of a convention for Passion Parties, a Las Vegas company that has about 25,000 “passion consultants” selling lotions, powders and intimate bedroom devices at house parties that are, except for the sales techniques, entirely unlike Tupperware parties.

At last year’s convention, the speaker was Candace Bushnell, author of “Sex and the City,” the column and the book, which became the HBO series. That image of raunchy-but-pink-and-sassy would seem to be a perfect fit for Passion Parties’ image, and well apart from Canfield’s.

But there is only a short distance between “Sex and the City” and “Chicken Soup,” says Pat Davis, president of Passion Parties. “Candace was empowering them in the bedroom, he’s empowering them at the bank.”

Davis herself has followed Canfield’s principles for success for the past 15 or 20 years, she says.

As for Canfield, he hadn’t heard of Passion Parties two months ago, but now he thinks they’re swell. “In a very tasteful way, they’re teaching women how to improve their sex life, which enhances intimacy and, hopefully, increases life span.”

Onstage, standing between two cardboard Oscar-like statues with hearts for heads, Canfield starts the audience laughing with a quick slide show of cartoons.

(Some of these cartoons are pretty funny. This is because they are old “Far Side” cartoons, drawn by Gary Larson. Creators Syndicate, which represents Larson, says Canfield does not have permission to use the cartoons.)

Then it’s on to the inspiration.

Oh, it was tough, back in the day, Canfield says. So many publishers rejected “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” the collection of short, cheek-moistening, molasses-gooey and maybe kind of sappy stories he helped create. But finally, one publisher believed. And now they’re all millionaires and the book turned into a series, with titles such as “Chicken Soup for the Woman Golfer’s Soul” and “Chicken Soup for the American Idol Soul.”

Canfield tells them not to let anyone laugh at their dreams.

“I truly believe you struck oil when you found this company,” he says.

The crowd laughs. The laughter starts as twittering and deepens into rolling, lusty chortling.

It was the word “oil” — a naughty joke with this crowd.

Despite a few scattered husbands and other accessories, it’s a crowd of mostly middle-aged, mostly middle-sized and mostly pink-wearing women. There’s a strange power in seeing 1,000 women who could pass for a grade school teachers union twisting innuendos out of anything, even “lawyer’s briefs.” The thought of them later, patrolling the Strip armed with 3-foot pina coladas, is terrifying.

Canfield chuckles and recovers. He’s here to tell them about success, not for the speaker’s fee but because he wants to help.

“I’ve sold 15 million books at a dollar a book royalty, so I don’t need the money,” he says.

“Do you need a daughter?” a woman in the audience shouts.

Canfield demurs.

“She comes with toys,” says another woman, barely sotto voiced.

For the first two hours, it’s like this. Canfield can barely go for five minutes without stepping on a hidden dirty joke betrayed by knowing laughter. But he keeps going.

Canfield’s PowerPoint-aided talk is gumbo of things your parents told you — work hard, don’t hang out with the wrong crowd, believe in your dreams — cartoons, anecdotes borrowed from other motivational speakers, such as Tony Robbins, and mumbo jumbo about trusting the “great GPS system in the sky” and the universe’s “infinite intelligence.”

He strays into the “The Secret,” another motivational, get-rich philosophy he’s involved in selling. The Secret can be summed up as “wishing makes it so.” Think about cancer and the universe will give you cancer. Think about a nice mansion and the universe will give you a nice mansion. Canfield is willing to say there may be other factors involved other than wishing, but wishing is pretty much the key.

After two hours, the lusty laughter grows rare. People are taking notes.

As the end of the third and final hour of his talk approaches, Canfield would like to mention a package of his books and CDs that will be on sale outside the auditorium. Normally this package, the Success Package, sells for more than $300, but today you can buy it for only $297.

“I encourage you all to do the $297, not because I need the money,” Canfield says, “but because I think you can use it.”

The package comes free if you sign up for his $3,495 success seminar later this year.