Tom Madden,  Founder & CEO, TransMedia Group

Strange dystopian strains of thought run through my mind as I imagine conducting my PR orchestra, trying earnestly to keep apart the woodwind and brass sections at TransMedia Group.  

First, I listen to the lilting clarinets play a rhapsodic variety of health and medical passages from traditional doctors, surgeons, and assorted specialists predicting a melodic end to the pandemic.

Then, prior to performance I take into account the gender differences in instruments.  For example, clarinets and flutes are feminine and conductor Gov. DeSantis believes they should be banned from playing with the more masculine brass sections in orchestras.  Just as fervently he disapproves of flutes pretending to be trumpets. 

Interspersed are oboes offering alternative, holistic chords or more fashionably integrative selections reminding audiences not to be so shy as to simply rely totally on Western medicine.  

Then a blare of trumpets heralds a crescendo of profits from soaring sales as businesses rebound, consumers celebrate, our offices repopulate and media applaud the merry-go-turn-a-round.

Then erupting timpani provoke cymbal crashes of breaking news of trillions more rushed into the now monumental musical stimulus program in A-flat major.   

For those in trouble needing crisis management come violins to sweetly soothe or distract and cellos to underscore repentance while bass fiddles and French horns emphatically promise it won’t happen again, so help me Flugelhorn Fauci, Trombone Trump and Bassoon Biden.

Yes, public relations is indeed an exhilarating, enterprising orchestra filled with many instruments played by talented musicians called publicists, each with an ear for news and an eye on some maestro’s baton, while in the front-most balcony sits the royal clients.

Thank you.  The concert is over.  Go in peace.  Drive home safely.  Get yourself vaccinated and it’s up to you if you want to please the governor by competing just with players who were born with the same instrument as you. 

Excuse the scherzo.

About the Author: Besides an inveterate blogger, Tom Madden is an author of countless published articles and five books, including his latest, WORDSHINE MAN, available this summer on Amazon.   He is the founder and CEO of TransMedia Group, an award-winning public relations firm serving clients worldwide since 1981 and has conducted remarkably successful media campaigns and crisis management for some of America’s largest companies and organizations.