Use Your Words

I am absolutely giddy right now with the anticipation of coaching a brand new homeschool speech and debate team, with one of my best buddies, one I met years ago doing college theater. We'll be competing in the same league, against some of the same schools, that I competed against as a kid.

I did not enter high school intending to study either speech or debate. The opportunity sort of snuck up on me. Some of my fondest memories of high school come from debate tournaments; I never would have predicted that.

In honor of this exciting new adventure, here's my memory of my first speech contests. I now help organize my Rotary Club's speech contests; life comes full circle.

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I listened to myself arguing with my husband recently. My angry retort included the phrase, "That is why I can lend absolutely no credence to your assertion…" I'm used to the way I think and speak, and even I found myself thinking, "Who talks that way?"

Dan has always been flustered by the way I argue. "I can't argue with you. You were on the debate team," he used to say when we were dating, and even when we were newlyweds. It drove me crazy.

"What does that have to do with anything?" I'd fume. "If you have a valid point, it remains valid." He was used to determining who was "right" or who "won" by tallying up which of us had the last word; or, alternately, seeing which one of us expressed themselves the best. I was used to both sides weighing what the other had to say. Eloquence is nice, but it doesn't mean the well expressed opinion is the right one.

By some quirk of personality, I express myself best when I'm angry. I'm not a shlump in daily conversation, but I become blazingly articulate when I'm upset. It's a skill honed during adolescence. My friend Dave is convinced that it's a skill also helped along by the fact that I don't swear. Eliminate certain words from a person's vocabulary, and they have to work harder at expressing opinions. I remember fondly Dave's reaction when I described someone as a waste of the air he breathes.

It must be frustrating to be married to someone who becomes better able to express themselves the angrier that they get.

You'd think that I'd enjoy arguing, given this proclivity, that I'd be one of those people who uses verbal jousting as a form of entertainment. In fact, I dislike it. I've learned not to run from conflict, to meet it head on. If need be, I'll be the one to instigate – when a complaint needs to be made to a company about shoddy service, for instance. Still, I do not enjoy conflict.

Ariane, my high school best friend, has an entirely different approach. She thrives on verbal jousting. It took me a long time to understand that about her. I remember being frustrated with her during our senior year, and asking her, "Why do you pick fights?"

"I don't!"

"Yes, you do! You do it all the time. You will deliberately pick a fight."

She didn't quite see it the same way I did. "I just like to see how people express themselves," she explained. She wanted to know how they would support their opinions, especially under duress. She chose volatile subjects and incited strong feelings because she felt that was when she was likeliest to get the purest form of the other person's opinions, she explained.

It was a totally foreign concept to me. I have spent my entire life feeling that we should all just get along and that everyone should find common ground. Ticking people off to see how they expressed themselves was something that never would have occurred to me. It surprises no one that Ariane became an attorney.

The high school debate team was full of lawyers in training and lawyer wannabes. It's excellent practice for someone who will make their living navigating the legal system.

I always felt that those of us who were also actors had an edge over the others. When competing in debate, whether on a team or solo, you are required to argue both sides of an issue. During one round, you will have to convincingly argue for whatever the current proposition is. During the next round, you must argue just as convincingly against it. Either way, you are expected to have documentation to back up your assertions. Actors are used to being convincing while having someone else's words come out of their mouth.

Of course, there are generally debate team members who dislike the actors, who feel that they are less intelligent, less intellectual and just generally too frivolous to be competing against serious minded, brilliant folks like themselves. It's annoying.

I first competed in debate during my sophomore year. The school was frequently sent notices of speech contests in the area, and these notices were always given to the debate team adviser. Frankly, I think the information should be broadcast more widely than that, but the assumption is, or at least was then, that the debate team members are the students who will be interested in and capable of such speeches. So, as a sophomore, I learned of a speech contest sponsored by a local Elks Club.

Four of us ended up representing the school. There was no qualifying task; the adviser just took those of us who were interested. Three of us were also actors. The competitors were myself, Chris, Suzy and Merrie. Suzy, Merrie and I were actors. Chris was a senior and the captain of the debate team. After high school, he was headed to a prestigious school back East on a hefty scholarship.

It was generally accepted that Chris would win, and the rest of us were just along for the ride. Chris especially seemed to think so. He found it to be unconscionable that mere actors were allowed to participate. This was a Serious Event, to be attended by Serious Students who had done Thoughtful Research. I don't know if it bothered him that we were female; I don't recall him being particularly sexist. I did get the distinct impression that he thought I was also too young to be of any consequence, even though Suzy and I were in the same grade. He seemed to be upset that more seniors couldn't compete. He cut Suzy some slack since it was her second year on the team and she'd proven her worth. Merrie and I got no such concession. At least Merrie was a junior, not a lowly underclassman.

The contest topic was, "Freedom and Its Responsibilities." I rolled that thought around in my head for a few days before I started to write anything. I didn't want to fall on my face the first time out, especially since it would confirm Chris' opinion that actors were inferior. We had to submit a written copy of our speech to our adviser to be approved before we competed. I gave mine to the teacher, rather anxious about what she would say.

I expected to be given some revisions to make. Instead, when she handed it back, she had nothing more to say than, "Good job." I was slightly puzzled, but glad that she liked it. I thought I had some pretty sound points. If she had no revisions, she must feel it was ready to go

The competition was to be held during an Elks Club lunch, so we got out of school to go. We all dressed up, and our teacher drove us to the luncheon. It was held in the Sky Room at the Mapes Hotel, a plush downtown property. The Sky Room was on the top floor, with windows all the way around two sides. The view was gorgeous. The hotel had, in the past, entertained such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. I don't remember what we ate, but I remember that we ate it at a table in front of the room, facing the club members. I worried a lot about spilling food on myself or displaying manners that would shoot down my chances.

I don't remember in what order we spoke. I thought I delivered my speech well, and that my actor's training helped. Never let 'em see you sweat. It's an asset to be able to appear unruffled when you're unsure and intimidated. It was also easier to do when I was presenting my own ideas.

I think we were all shocked when the winner was announced, and it was me. I remember being called up to the podium, the audience smiling and applauding, and the presenter sincerely congratulating me. Merrie and Suzy were both happy for me, but Chris looked like the proverbial ton of bricks had fallen on him. In his universe, it was supposed to be his award, and I was supposed to be filler, someone to take the slot that gave us enough participants to compete. He was not supposed to lose to a sophomore drama student!

The hotel was across the street from the bank building where my mother worked. I insisted that we all go across and up to the 15^th floor to tell her before we went back to school.

Today, my mother would probably be called an administrative assistant or something of the sort. Back then, she was called a legal secretary. She was the office manager, typist, bookkeeper, appointment book and general right hand of an attorney. He and his brother had a practice together in what was then the First National Bank building.

Someone, maybe the teacher, worried about us just dropping in on the office. I was sure it would be just fine, and insisted as much. We trooped across the street and up in the elevators, teenagers and their keeper loose in the downtown business district.

I introduced everyone to my mother. Chris smiled politely. He didn't say or do anything that was outright rude. He was too controlled for that. He did, however, sulk all the way back to the school. After the obligatory remarks to me immediately after the competition, I'm not sure if he ever spoke to me again. Word was, he never quite got over being furious and feeling cheated.

Back at school, the teacher dropped a small bomb on me, one I was immediately glad she'd saved for after the competition. "When I read your speech, I didn't understand it," she said.

I was floored. "What?"

"Well, you know, you used the words 'however' and 'although' right next to each other. I didn't see how that would work. But when I heard you say it, it made sense."

My mind spun. She'd told me it was good when she read it! How is it even possible, I wondered, that she has a college degree, is currently at work on her Master's Thesis, and she could not understand the writing of a high school sophomore? If she had told me this before the competition, it would have completely thrown me. I would have been convinced that the fault was mine, that the ideas were unclear and badly expressed. Having just won, though, having not only won but won against Chris, I knew the speech was good. Other people obviously "got it." I had to entertain the new and frankly frightening thought that my teacher was, well, perhaps not very well suited to her profession.

Maybe it was this kind of angst that contributed to the process of creating the next speech I used in a contest. This time, we were not required to submit the text beforehand. Consequently, I did not put anything down on paper until I was in the bus, on the way to the contest, this time for the Rotary Club.

I won.

My mother, while proud, was beside herself. "What can I say to you? If you'd lost, I could say, 'Well, if you had prepared, you might have won.' What am I supposed to say now?"

I tried to explain my processes to her. I had composed the speech in my head weeks earlier, and had simply been fine tuning since then. By the time I write anything down, I have rolled the words around in my head, trying out and discarding dozens of phrases. I have internally debated the merits of "azure," "cobalt" and "indigo." I try out half a dozen ways to say something before I actually say it. I even do this to a lesser degree in everyday conversation. Just because I hadn't committed anything to paper didn't mean that I hadn't given it any thought or expended any effort. I finally wrote it down just so I could have a "cheat sheet" for the competition. I know that most people need rough drafts on paper. My rough drafts are virtually always internal. She wasn't sure whether I was serious or rationalizing. I was very serious.

My husband, God love him, is not a language lover. He works best with machinery. Machinery makes sense to him. Words are nebulous, interchangeable, inefficient. Give him an electrical circuit any day. In this, we are totally incompatible.