It'd Roll All the Way Down to Fargo, North Dakota

A while back an email went out to all of the library employees announcing the upcoming staff development programs. The final program on the list: a staff hobby & talent show. Now, at the last talent show I decided to perform one of the three Competitive Speech pieces which had been burned into my brain forever, Roald Dahl's "Jack and the Beanstalk." It had been quite a success, and was the first time that many of my coworkers realized just how dramatic I could be (let alone mildly entertaining), so the temptation to perform again was strong . . . but then again, so was the fear of not living up to expectations. While trying to decide what to do (should I do one of my other high school speeches? Read from a short story? Read from a blog post?) I sent an email to the organizer to see what the time limit for individuals would be; after getting a noncommittal "it depends on how many sign up" answer, I promptly forgot about it until two days before the show, when the organizer emailed me to see if I was still interested, and if so, what I was planning to do. After much hemming and hawing, I finally decided to go ahead and do one of the two remaining pieces from high school.

In the end, there were only 5 of us participating, which was quite a downturn from last time, but apparently there were quite a few people who wanted to participate but just couldn't because of their schedules. We wound up with a primer on making jewelry; an exhibition of artwork; some samples of music composed by a co-worker; some examples of costumes designed for RenFaires; and me. I did a brief intro ("for those of you not familiar with competitive speech, it's where we did speeches . . . competitively") talking about how this was the only piece I'd ever taken 1st place with (that I can recall, anyway) and it was the first and last time I ever did a poetry piece at competition. I also cautioned that some people think the author is a little weird, but that that was perfectly understandable, since that was part of his name . . .

I then launched into my interpretive reading of "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" by "Weird" Al Yankovic.

I got lots of compliments afterwards, as well as a couple of "Now, what was the author's name again?" questions. I suppose next year I could do the final member of the Competitve Speech triumvarte, but somehow I don't see "The October Game" going over quite as well . . .