What are Friends For?

Speech was one of the required sophomore classes at St. Paul's in Winnipeg, and one of the assignments was to deliver a dramatic or motivational piece...

Now - I was really excited about the assignment! I knew all about drama - I'd been watching my mom be dramatic since before I started talking... I could flip it on and off like a switch :-) And although mom hadn't managed to teach me to sing, she had trained me to project and control my voice... So, if there was one thing I could do it was deliver a speech!

The piece I chose was the last two paragraphs of Patrick Henry's Call to Arms - starting with "They tell us, sir, that we are weak..." and ending with "... give me liberty or give me death!". It was originally delivered to a group of Virginia colonial leaders urging them to take up arms against the British. In attendance were both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson - it was one of the most masterfully constructed motivational speeches of all time and it changed the course of history.

Now - doing justice to a speech like that goes way beyond memorizing the words. That's just the starting point... You have to understand what the words mean. You have to feel what the writer felt. You have to convey what he intended it to convey.
I spent weeks in preparation - developing a series of mental images to keep me focused and in the right emotional state - and fine tuning the emphasis and intonation of every phrase... By the time "speech day" rolled around I had it down cold...

That was when my best friend Peter Paolucci announced that he was going to sit right in front of me and at some point during the speech he was going to do something to make me laugh...

And sure enough... When I walked up to the podium there was Peter - front and center... I had tried to prepare for anything he might do (he could be pretty creative) - and I tried not to look at him... But it was impossible - I couldn't resist... And every time I glanced down he was sitting there with the same deadpan expression... He never moved a muscle...
The anticipation was driving me nuts. My focus was blown. I could barely remember the words. My dramatic speech had turned into a basic recitation - and not a particularly good one at that :)

Afterward I was like "You blankety-blank!!! You did that on purpose!" and Peter was like "Hey! I didn't do anything!" and I was like "Exactly!!!!"... Yeah - that was the one thing I wasn't prepared for :-)

So - I ended up with a 'C' on the speech and a lifelong memory to blog about...

Hey - what are friends for?