Meg Whitman meets the media head on during an impromptu press conference at the 2010 California Republican Party Spring Convention in Santa Clara, Calif. (photo: Bob Calhoun).

Last year I went to as many conventions and trade shows as I could talk my way into. One of these cons was the 2010 California Republican Spring Convention held on March 12-14 at the Santa Clara Convention Center where I blundered into a very rare press conference with former eBay CEO and gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. EMeg as they called her back then is trending hard right now as she's just been named CEO of ailing computer giant Hewlett Packard, a company pulling out all the stops in its commission of corporate suicide. The following excerpt from my unpublished sociopolitical pop culture memoir titled "Shattering Conventions: Trekkies, Techies, Pundits and Pageantry on the Expo Floor" details my meeting with Meg Whitman.

...It was only an hour earlier that former eBay CEO Meg Whitman had arrived in the same lobby as rows of carefully placed schoolchildren chanted, "Go Meg! Go Meg!" By this point in the 2010 California governor's race, Whitman had already become the terror of the Golden State airwaves by dumping $39 million of her own money into her campaign to succeed Schwarzenegger as the ineffectual manager of my state's $20 billion budget deficit. During those months of the California primary season, and a few before it should have ever began, it was impossible to watch a football game, the evening news or even a rerun of "Cheers" at two o'clock in the morning without being force-fed several Whitman spots denouncing her republican rival Steve Poizner. Poizner was the state's insurance commissioner, but even most registered republicans were hard-pressed to give a foxtrotting fuck about him when the primary was still months away. Even fast-forwarding through the commercials with your DVR didn't seem to help. There were so many of them that a few always managed to slip through and spoil the repartee of a bar full of Beantown drunks.

As Whitman surveyed the planned formation of schoolchildren with the appropriate amount of feigned surprise, a corps of reporters attempted to form a salient in order to break through Whitman's phalanx of preteen supporters. I quickly slammed down a just-poured bourbon and seven and rushed to reinforce the reporters in the hopes that my massive bulk and grappling skill could help them gain the initiative. Whitman met the newshound bridgehead head on and quickly took control of it by merely answering questions. The shock that she was actually addressing the media took the press corps by surprise. This marked a change in tactics for Whitman who had spent most of her already long campaign maneuvering away from reporters for fear of being pinned down in a press conference. Sensing her adversaries' disorganization, Whitman broke through their ranks and led them, myself included, into an empty conference room adjacent to the hotel lobby. The news corps marched behind the former CEO like a conquered army.

Once boxed into a battleground of Whitman's choosing, the reporters peppered her with a flurry of wonkish policy questions in a desperate attempt to regain the initiative. Whitman didn't falter for the first several minutes of this. The press corps remained trapped. Only a question about Proposition 8, the gay marriage ban passed by California voters in 2008, almost brought her down. When asked about the controversial ballot initiative, Whitman's eyelids began to flicker and her fingers motioned as if she were flipping through a card file. Just as she was about to self-destruct with smoke coming out of her ears like Norman the android from the classic "Trek" episode "I, Mudd," she regained her composure and said, "Prop 8, yes, I'm against same sex marriage." She then steered the conversation back to more comfortable topics such as eliminating 40,000 state worker jobs and slashing the pensions and benefits for those that remained on California payrolls.

As I stood there in a circle of reporters, I was overwhelmed by my first high-pressure political press conference. Kerry Lauerman of Salon.com had supplied me with a press pass to get into the con, but my beat for the web magazine was reviewing straight-to-DVD werewolf and cage fighting flicks. My previous experience with journalistic interviews was no more hard-hitting than talking to Lemmy from Motorhead about his amplifier volume preferences (loud) back when I freelanced for "Bass Player." I kept up with California politics, but just knowing who Whitman was usually made me the smartest guy in the room. The experienced political reporters rattled off the names and numbers of assembly bills and years-old propositions effortlessly. Their lack of knowledge of trashy horror movies or bass distortion pedals provided little comfort.

But when Whitman launched into her spiel about how the state needed to hire the best people after she had just outlined chucking all incentives to work for it, I sprung my question upon her, using my booming voice to talk over the rest of the press corps. "When you slash benefits and wages and job security, why would the best people want to work for the state in the first place?" I asked. Whitman answered me with a homily of how her friends in big business were willing to serve at her asking.

But I wasn't asking about her rich friends and their champagne appointments, which they'd likely use to gain big state contracts for their companies. I was talking about people like me and my co-workers at UC Berkeley who tended to make less than our friends who still managed to have jobs in the private sector. Before I could hit her with a follow up question, Whitman had broken away from the mob of reporters for a one-on-one interview for a local TV station. Seeing that she was distracted, the press corps made a hasty retreat for the pressroom.

"Would you call that a surprise press conference?" San Francisco Chronicle political reporter Carla Marinucci asked as we made our way down the hall.

"Well, she surprised us by holding a press conference," Timm Herdt, the Ventura County Star's walrus mustached Bureau Chief, replied.

"I think I'd call that a sneak press conference," I added, causing Herdt to crack a smile.

At least I didn't totally embarrass myself in there.

 Bob Calhoun is the author of  the bestselling punk-wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling, which is available through Amazon.com. He is currently working on a book about conventions, tradeshows, and expos titled "Shattering Conventions." You can follow him on Twitter @bob_calhoun.