Monday’s are laundry days. I wish I meant that in some sort of cool metaphorical sense because then it’d be a great opening line to my first novel. But seriously, I do my laundry on Monday mornings because I have the morning free to lesson plan and climb up and down the mountain like some sartorial Santa Claus.[1]
It was about the third time that I climbed up the rock steps between building two and the dryer-housing dorm that I remember to write about Saturday’s speech contest.[2]
As previously mentioned, this contest was for high school students who were asked to either write their own speeches or memorize famous English speeches and perform them. There’s something about English used well in political documents that gets to me in a seriously nerdy way. I get goose-bumps when I hear the Federalist Papers read aloud.
So it was with a mixture of chills and giggles I made it through this past Saturday afternoon. Chills because even when the speaker can’t pronounce any of the r’s or l’s in the passage, the following quote is still baller:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
Heady stuff.
Giggles because it was pretty hard to listen to a kid—who had never seen the good old US of A—use a Korbama[3] accent to recite, “With a father from Kenya, and a mother from Kansas, and a story that could only happen in the United States of America.”
Giggles because it was perhaps funnier to hear how many different ways the beautiful parallelism of “on the color of their skin, but the content of their character” could be butchered.
And many more giggles because when trying to copy Bobby Kenedy’s hand motions, one little girl definitely resembled a Hitler-in-Training.
But in the end, it was pretty amazing to hear this kids rattle 3 minutes of famous American speeches from which I only recognize the taglines.
[1] And yes, this entire blog was written so I could use the phrase “sartorial Santa Claus.” What of it?
[2] Even though all I can really thinkg about it Shinee. New fav: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skZxb5sBoiU&ob=av2e Around the twenty-seventh viewing you stop noticing how odd it is that one of them is wearing ALL RED and start noticing how incredibly cute he is at exactly 1:13 (other favourites include 1:09, 1:38, and 2:54). Who says obsession is ugly?
[3] What? Everyone else combines whatever they want with Obama’s name. Why not me? Korean-Obama!
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