A Lot Going On, Part One

Each of the high schools in the area, including Alma High, has a speech team, and my grand-daughter, Enchantra, is on the Alma team. She is a Junior and is very articulate when she speaks, which is not necessarily that often since she seems permanently attached to her MP3 player and always has those ear buds plugged in to her ears.

The speech teams compete in various competitions against other schools. They have various categories that must be covered, such as Oral Interpretive Dissertation, Informative Speaking, Duet Acting and Humorous Prose.

Having done the rounds of schools, the teams prepared for the district finals, which this year were held in Alma. For a final dress rehearsal, the team put on its full performance a week ago last Thursday night at Joe Camera in downtown Alma. Joe Camera is a combination coffee house, one hour photo and bicycle shop with a sort of community recreation room in the back. The parents gathered in the rec room at the appointed hour and packed the place. It was great to see that many of the town's residents take an interest in what the kids are doing. Face it, speech team is not as popular as football or basketball, so to see 45 to 50 people jammed into that room was terrific.

Enchantra did a solo performance in Informative Speaking on the history of Daylight Saving Time. She did some good research and came up with a lot of facts that raised the eyebrows, not the least of which (as you may have noticed) is that it is "Saving" time , not "Savings". Singular, not plural. Hmmm.

The Oral Interpretive Dissertation was a team effort involving five people, one of whom was my granddaughter. Her best friend, a young lady named Riane, was the featured performer and did a presentation on "The Insanity of Mary Girard". Girard was the wife of the one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. shortly after the American Revolution. He had his wife, Mary, declared insane and placed in an asylum, where she spent the last 25 years of her life. History is not that clear as to whether she was truly deranged or if her husband just wanted her out of the way so he could have a parade of mistresses in his life without criticism at home. It was a terrific presentation.

A senior, a young lady named Allison, did a humorous prose piece by performing what was a magazine article by Nora Ephron titled, "A Few Words About Breasts". It really spoke about what it's like in this Playboy oriented society for a girl to grow into maturity "undeveloped". It was indeed humorous, and sometimes downright funny.
If the reader is not familiar with the name Nora Ephron, she is a writer who specializes in romantic humor, writing things like "Sleepless in Seattle", "When Harry Met Sally" and adapting an old Jimmy Stewart film called, "The Shop Around Corner" into a new movie she called, "You've Got Mail". Nora Ephron's work has given Meg Ryan a career.

The evening was terrific, and the following Monday the real district finals took place at Alma High. There were four judges in four different rooms, and each performance had to take place in front of each judge. That meant that Enchantra took her visual displays on Daylight Saving Time to four different rooms and went through her routine four different times. So did each of the other groups.

Unfortunately, her Informative Speaking performance did not place her among the winners. The presentation on Mary Girard, however, took first place in its category, and those five kids, including Enchantra, will travel to Lincoln next week to the state finals competition. Allison's presentation on a young woman's growing up pains also won first place, and she will take her act to the state capital for the finals.

I certainly wish them well, and I hope you do too. I'll let you know how they do.