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 . . .

The Ballad of Mr. Green Rabbit's Foot.

As promised yesterday, today you will learn about my encounter with Mr. Green Rabbit's Foot.

The story takes place my Freshman year of high school during my very first Regional Speech tournament. Regionals meant an overnight trip; we drove down on Friday, spent the night at a hotel, and then headed over early on Saturday for the day long competition. My first event of the day was an HD based on "Don Brown's Body," and it was an unusually somber round; a few folks were laughing, but not a lot. Especially stoic was one of the judges, a man wearing a green rabbit's foot attached to his shirt pocket, presumably because of St. Patrick's Day.

Not too long after the round ended I headed to my preliminary Prose round, only to find that the door was still locked; I waited outside with some other contestants when Mr. Green Rabbit's Foot walks up to me and proceeds to tell me that the HD I had just performed was the worst thing he had ever seen, that there wasn't a single funny thing in it, that he couldn't believe something so horrible had made it to Regionals, etc. He had barely finished tearing into me when someone arrived to open up the room; Mr. GRF then went in and plopped himself down, getting out his judging sheets. Yup, that's right, minutes after being eviscerated by him in the hallway, I had to get up and perform in front of him again.

Now, don't forget, this isn't the semi-sorta-kinda-stable Cap'n Neurotic of today; no, this was the doubt-filled, paranoid, self-conscious, 14-year old Cap'n Neurotic. Needless to say, I was a bit of a wreck, mentally. I was so shocked by the confrontation that I couldn't even begin to process it; I'm kind of proud of myself for being able to put it out of my mind and compete as if nothing happened. Even then, my skills at repression were top notch.

After the round was over, I went in search of my friends in order to fill them in on my run-in with Mr. GRF; it wasn't long before word spread to our speech coach, Mrs. S., who was livid, as was one of our chaperones, which is understandable, since it was my mom. It's probably a really good thing that MR. GRF never ran into my mom that day; he might not have survived. Anyway, Mrs. S. went to file a complaint with the people running the tourney, and I tried to focus on other things; when the list was posted for the finals for Prose and I saw my name on the list, I stopped worrying about the incident.

Of course, in the midst of all of the Mr. GRF hullabaloo there was lots of other stuff going on, both competition wise and "we're bored out of our gourds and must entertain ourselves" wise. The biggest competition related event that I remember was when my HD partner, who was, at best, a reluctant participant in Competitive Speech, and who had been forced into doing Extemp by Mrs. S., basically just blew off his Extemp round; Mrs. S. was not amused. The biggest memory I have of self-entertainment actually involved Diva, Cedric the Destroyer, and a green teddy bear.

The teddy bear was Diva's, and was, I assume, there partially due to it being St. Patrick's Day. While waiting between rounds, Cedric decided to demonstrate his creativity by transforming the green teddy bear into a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, complete with a styrofoam bowl for a shell and mini-ninja weapons made out of paper. I don't think Diva was quite as amused as we were, and restored her bear to normal. A bit later, her bear went missing; in its place was a blackmail note, complete with pictures of the bear involved in questionable activities involving whips, chains, and leather. Diva left the area for a while, and then returned to find that her bear, overcome with shame and guilt from the blackmail, had hung itself.

Please, a moment of silence for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Bear.

Anyway, the time came for me to go perform my Prose piece in the final round. I went in, a little nervous but not too bad, until I saw who one of the judges was; you guessed it, there large as life sat Mr. Green Rabbit's Foot, also known as the man who had just had a complaint lodged against him on my behalf. I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter, that he probably didn't even know yet, etc. Once again, I got up to perform my piece in a highly agitated state of mind, but it must not have thrown off my game too much, since when the awards ceremony rolled around I was named as one of those qualifying for State; the only other qualifiers from my school were the lovely and talented Diva and her DD partner.

On the way home we stopped at a McDonalds for dinner; so did another couple of busses full of speech kids. While we were eating, one guy came over to our table with one of his friends and pointed me out as the freaky guy who did the really sick and twisted Prose piece. My response? Grabbing a French fry, dipping it in ketchup, reciting a key line from "The October Game" in my best spooky voice ("The witch came to harm and this is her arm"), and then taking a huge bite out of the fry. Reactions from my table: laughter. Reaction from the other guys: looks of fear, confusion, and disgust. It was at that moment that we heard a tapping on the window next to our booth; our heads whipped around to see Cedric outside, mouth firmly placed against the glass and blowing hard, doing his best impression of Anthony Rapp in Adventures in Babysitting. Our table erupted into laughter while the guys from the other school mumbled something about "freaks" and then scurried away.

How people like that made it into Competitive Speech, I'll never know.

But the story of Mr. GRF does not end there: one of the nice things about Competitive Speech was that after a competition you got to keep copies of your score sheets, so you were able to see how each judge ranked you and see what sort of comments they made. It was easy to figure out which judge was Mr. GRF, since he was the only threepeat name on the sheets. For the prelim round, he ranked me #1; for the final, post-complaint round, he ranked me #8 out of . . . 8. Coincidence? Well, since the other judges gave me high enough scores for me to move on to State, I'd say there's a good chance that there was some spite involved.

But, hey, it sure made for a good story, huh?

The World of Competitive Speechifying

All right, the updated Singles Cast List has stalled out yet again; big shocker, I know. Instead, I've been caught in a "remember that time in high school when . . ." loop. Right now the bulk of my nostalgia is focused on my years in Competitive Speech.

I suppose I should start with a brief primer on the different Competitive Speech events for the uninitiated. The basic speech events (in OK, anyway) were:

• Prose: reciting a prose piece using no movement or gestures
  
• Poetry: reciting a poetry piece using no movement or gestures
• Humorous Interpretation (HI): one person performing a comedy piece with limited movement and voicing at least two characters
  
• Dramatic Interpretation (DI): one person performing a dramatic piece with limited movement and voicing at least two characters
• Humorous Duet (HD): two people performing a comedy piece with unlimited range of movement and characters and two chairs as props
  
• Dramatic Duet (DD): two people performing a dramatic piece with unlimited range of movement and characters and two chairs as props
• Extemporaneous Speaking: persuasive speech based on a randomly drawn topic with limited preparation time; split into Foreign and Domestic categories.
  
• Standard Oratory: reciting a memorized speech written by someone else
  
• Original Oratory: reciting a memorized speech written by yourself
  
• Monologue: one person performing a brief comedy piece with one character and a brief dramatic piece with one character
  

There was also two forms of debate (Lincoln-Douglas and Cross-Ex), but almost nobody from Wyandotte ever participated in that aspect of it, and I avoided it like the plague (too much preparation and thinking-on-your-feet for my tastes) so I can't speak about it much.

Out of the other events listed, I competed in all except for the two interps. I think my favorites to do were Prose and HD, since they kind of played to my strengths; in Prose I just had to tell the story in a compelling way and was able to pick things that were a bit dark and unusual, while in HD I could let my goofy side out but also had a partner acting goofy onstage with me; I don't think I was very confident in my ability to carry an HI off without that backup, and so I avoided it in competition, only performing Roald Dahl's Jack and the Beanstalk (which I had done as an HD) as an HI at talent shows. My first HD was with Diva, a piece called "The Treehouse;" my character's name was Harold J. Snugglewumpy, or a reasonable facsimile thereof; I can't for the life of me remember her character's name; I do, however, remember how there was another group from our school who also did the same piece, and how the girl in that group had a very unique line reading. I think just about anyone else on earth would see the line "Hey, why are the guys all running around shouting 'Harold's got a girlfriend, Harold's got a girlfriend' over and over?" and do the chant in the typical sing-song style (HAR-old's GOT-a GIRL-friend, HAR-old's GOTa GIRL-friend); she, however, recited it like it was all one word, with the pitch and volume jumping up only on the last syllable: haroldsgotagirlFRIEND, haroldsgotagirlFRIEND. Kind of freaky.

I also enjoyed doing Extemp, insofar as it really didn't require any preparation at all. Oh, sure, our speech coach wanted us to read papers and magazines and clip out articles about world events to use as references, but we were way too lazy for that. I know at least one girl from my school made up some quotes for a competition at Welch, citing some fictitious man's opinion from a fictitious man-on-the-street interview, concluding the fiction with the line "And why does Mr. Fake-Name's opinion matter? Because he's an American that's why!" . . . pretty sure she placed, too. My all time favorite Extemp question was at a tourney in Commerce: "What does God think about pre-marital sex?" That was a fun one to do, since our prep-room was the school library, which gave me access to a Bible to find the relevant scriptures. My most frustrating question (outside of ones where I honestly had no clue what the questions were talking about and had to fly by the seat of my pants) was one about the Olympics, wherein I mentioned that they had decided to stagger Winter and Summer games, and the judges criticized me for because they just knew that they weren't going to split up the games; not having any physical sources with me, I couldn't dispute their disputations. Probably the most embarrassing Extemp story I know happened to one of the girls from my school, who got a question about whether the electoral college should be eliminated or not, and proceeded to do a speech about universities; the judges waited until she was done to tell her "Um, just so you know . . ."

As for the other events, I didn't mind DDs, was bored doing Standard Oratories, wrote my Original Oratory "The Nerd's Soliloquy" the day of competition, and pretty much loathed doing Monologues with their half-serious/half-comedy/all-eyes-on-me-and-me-alone set-up; only did most of these because Mrs. S. insisted that we take at least 3 things to each tourney, and once you'd qualified for Regionals in an event, you couldn't compete in it again except in "Champ" rounds, and there weren't that many tourneys that offered those.

As I've mentioned before, my first year in Competitive Speech was also the first year for my school to have the program; the bulk of the material we had to draw from in the beginning was provided by Gargamel's speech program, which was nice since we didn't have to start from scratch, but bad in that they were basically Picher's hand-me-down pieces which everyone and their dog had already done. It always bugged me when I'd get my score sheets back and they would compliment me on my performance but rip me apart for doing such an over-done piece; in retrospect I can understand their pain. After all, if I never hear "The Nightingale and the Rose" or "A Sandpiper to Bring You Joy" again in my life it will be too soon.

"Sandpiper" is the worse of the two for me, I think: "Nightingale" drove me crazy because I had to hear the same girl do the same over-dramatic reading of it at umpteen competitions, so I always hear her very Shatner-esque reading of it in my head: "The . . . Nigh-ting-gale . . . sang." Painful the first time around, becoming more excruciating with each additional viewing. "Sandpiper," on the other hand, never bothered me all that much until one round of the Prose prelims at State. I recognized one of the girls in the round and knew that she was doing "Sandpiper," which I'd heard several times before at that point; since we knew what order people were supposed to perform in, I excused myself to go to the restroom while she performed so I wouldn't have to hear it again. I waited outside until I heard the polite applause that followed most performances, and then let myself back in. No sooner had I sat down than the next person to perform got up and launched into (you guessed it) "A Sandpiper to Bring You Joy" . . . as did the person after that . . . and yet one more before the round was over. And then I get comments about doing an "overdone" piece like "The October Game" which I never heard anyone else perform . . . but I digress.

One thing that speech students become very good at very quickly is finding ways to entertain themselves during the long, long wait between rounds; some tourneys were notorious for having interminable waits, with Miamuh's being one of the worst; I don't think a single year went by that we didn't go delirious sitting around the cafeteria, waiting for the names for the finals to be posted. And, being Competitive Speech students (which is really just another way of saying Drama Geeks), our methods of entertaining ourselves were usually loud, often silly, and frequently involved mocking and/or mimicking others; some of these mimockeries were debuted at tourneys and then brought back for an encore back home. I can still vividly recall Diva's rendition of an overly-dramatic monologue she witnessed which began with the performer saying (in a raspy voice), "The first time I saw an abortion, the baby was sucked [inward gasp of air] . . . from the mother's womb," and ended with the screamed phrase "The babies! THE BABIES!" It's hard to do it justice in print

I wouldn't say that I was that great at Competitive Speech, but I wasn't that bad either; I rarely took first place, but there was seldom a local tourney where I didn't place in the top three in at least one event. The only time I remember ever placing first was at my very last speech tournament my Senior year in Picher; I took first in Poetry with my reading of a piece by that world-renowned poet, "Weird" Al Yankovic. But, while placing at local competitions was common, placing at Regionals was less so; out of three Regional competitions attended (the one my Senior being skipped due to my trip to Mexico), I only qualified for State at one, and then just barely, thanks to Mr. Green Rabbit's Foot . . . but that's a story for another time.

Like, tomorrow.

I've Always Maintained That I Can't Act All That Well, But I Am Very Dramatic

A couple of weeks ago Cap'n Cluck and I were drafted by Papa Lightbulb to do a skit for the full Singles dept. as part of a promotional spiel for the FAITH program. Like all good performers, we had our first practice less than 24 hours before our performance. A good portion of our practice time was spent punching up the script; it was fun being able to go "Okay, how can we get this same point across while making it actually semi-humorous and mildly entertaining?” The end result probably wouldn't have won any awards, but we both felt it was a heap better than what we started with. It was the first skit I'd done for quite a while, and I was pleased at how easily I could still memorize the lines; of course, I've had a lot of practice at it, since I've been performing in front of people for about as long as I can remember.

The first play I can remember was a 1st grade safety play, where I played the main character "Dr. Wise," which I mainly remember because the teacher had actually made up a little diploma with the name Todd Wise on it which I got to keep afterwards. I was involved in various other little plays and skits through school, church, and 4-H; I remember being very upset in the 4th grade 4-H Share the Fun when my role as a dancing dog got cut out because the narrator’s note cards stuck together, but the only other elementary school performance which really stands out in my mind was my role as Rip Van Winkle in the 6th grade play. Well, to be more accurate, I played half the role of Rip; the old half. Don't know if it was because they didn't want to worry about one person memorizing the whole thing, or if they just wanted to give more kids a chance to participate, but the role of young Rip went to my classmate Punkin, and old Rip went to me.

The elder Rip role required me to sing a solo, "A Nap That Lasted Twenty Years," a ponderous song that was the source of some frustration on my part. You see, in the original script, the reason Rip sleeps for twenty years is that he drank some magic beer; well, of course they couldn't have sixth graders acting like they were drinking beer, so they changed it to "magic water," which, in turn, required a change in the lyrics of my song. This change irked me to no end; it wasn't that I was up in arms about them censoring the play for more palatable grade school consumption; I couldn't have cared less about that. No, what irked me was that the substituted lyric neither rhymed nor scanned properly; yes, that's right, even prepubescent Cap'n Neurotic got bugged by that sort of stuff. I mean, come on! Beers: 1 syllable, rhymes with years; water: not so much. But, I was a powerless 6th grader, so I grinned and bore it. Well, I bore it, anyway.

In addition to plays and skits, my time in 4-H honed my speech-giving skills as I competed with speeches peppered with facts taken liberally from my ZooBooks collection: first whales, then sharks, then spiders. This speechifying would carry over into my experience with the Technology Student Association, where I dove into the Prepared and Extemporaneous Speaking competitions with gusto; I much preferred the Extemp, since it required much less actual work and prep time, and generally involved topics like "What makes a good leader?" or "How has technology improved the world?" I joined TSA my 8th grade year, which was the same year the seeds were planted for the start of a Competitive Speech program at Wyandotte.

The legend goes like this: Mrs. S., the Jr./Sr. English teacher, was also the Student Council sponsor, meaning she was in charge of the school talent show at the time. She had brought in the speech coach from her hometown of Pitcher (a man who was known to many speech students as Gargamel), to be one of the judges. To open up the talent show, Mrs. S. had her StuCo members do a little Oklahoma Land Rush skit; somehow I got drafted to be the one who read the passage that opened up the skit. Reportedly, as soon as I was done with my recitation, Gargamel turned to Mrs. S. and told her that we needed to start a Competitive Speech program immediately. Don't know how true that is, but that's how my momma told it to me, and my momma wouldn't lie about such things, now would she? Regardless of the truth of the legend, the fact is that the next year was the first year of Wyandotte's Competitive Speech program, a program that would last a whopping four years, dying out as soon as I graduated; make of that what you will.

I had a blast in Speech, even if I only made it to State my Freshman year; I like to think that I could have made State my Sr. year if I hadn't opted to go to Mexico with my Spanish class instead of competing in Regionals: my poetry selection of "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" by Weird Al Yankovic was unbeatable, I tell you, unbeatable! Anyhoo, as I've noted before, being in Speech was a big factor in helping me start the breaking-out-of-my-shell process; I have a ton 'o Speech stories which I'll get into at some other time. To this day I can still recite Roald Dahl's "Jack and the Beanstalk" and Ray Bradbury's "October Game" from memory; also, after hours and hours of watching my classmates practice, there are portions of certain plays which are burned into my mind forever, like, say, Steel Magnolias . . . thanks, Diva!

After High School, my speech skills came into play primarily during my time with the BSU Drama Team, although they did come in handy from time to time in class. For example, during Intro to Speech Communication, my professor’s comments on my grade slips started out as "Very good; have you considered speech as a major?" with the first speech, and amped up to "You need to be a speech major!" with the final one; it probably didn't hurt that 4/5 of the class had never gotten up and given a speech before in their lives.

I also got to put my modest acting skills to work in a couple of classes. First there was my "American Drama" class; my professor split us up into groups of three: one director and two actors. The director got to pick a play from the syllabus, and select a scene for the actors to perform in front of the class; afterwards we would have to answer questions about our choices from our classmates. We wound up with Sam Shepard's "The Tooth of Crime," which is an interesting play, but one whose stream-of-consciousness dialogue during the duel scene does not lone itself well to memorization by an acting neophyte, which is exactly what my scene partner was. Getting through the performance in class was quite an exercise in mental gymnastics as I gamely tried to bring him back on-track every time he'd skip to the end of the play; the questioning session from our classmates was a bit brutal, as most of them were theater majors, who still seemed bitter that the class was under the auspices of the English Department. Our director pulled me aside after class and complimented me on my ability to stay on-book; I told him that years of Competitive Speech had trained me for just such an occasion.

My other classroom acting experience happened in my Shakespeare class; again, we were split into teams of three, assigned a play from the syllabus, and asked to pick a scene to perform; this time, we were also expected to lead a class discussion on the play as well. Our play was King Lear; at the time I would have preferred Macbeth, since it's still my favorite Shakespearian tragedy, but I have to say that doing Lear definitely gave me a deeper appreciation for it. My experience with this project was pretty much a flip-flop from the American Drama experience, largely due to the fact that this time my scene-partners were both over-achieving Honors students from Parker, one of whom was a member of the S.C.A. (Society for Creative Anachronism) with easy access to period costumes; yes, we were the only group to don costumes; heck, I think we were the only group who bothered to even memorize the lines. We even did two scenes; one from an earlier version of Lear by a different playwright, and then the corresponding scene from Shakespeare's version. It was the final scene, so I got to perform Lear's big mourning sequence:

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so
That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!

Oh, the drama of it all.

Of course, what I didn't expect when I walked into class that day was to find my Bible as Literature professor sitting in on the class to observe the Shakespeare prof in action; I could feel his mischievous smile on me the entire time. After it was over, he proclaimed that he had never known I was so dramatic, and that he was going to make me do a dramatic reading portraying Yahweh for his class; thankfully, he never followed through.

But after graduating that was pretty much it for my acting experience, up until the first Murder Mystery party. Oh, and I did perform “Jack and the Beanstalk” at my office talent show a year or two ago, which was one of those breakthrough “holy crap, didn’t know the Cap’n was capable of such things” moments for many of my co-workers, I think. And really, who can blame them? All must bow down before the wonder that is my revolving-British-accent.