Monday, February 07, 2011

State Speech (continued) and my Tooth

My wonderful dentist just replaced my missing tooth piece with a filling, and I'm all done. So all that worrying and fretting I did was for naught. And the cost was covered within a few dollars by an Amazon.com sale I made this morning, not too long before going to the dentist! God does provide.

Okay: All-State nominations are up. Kieffer's Finders Creepers is invited as a nonperforming guest, sort of an honorable mention; they get invited to the festival, but they don't get to perform. On the other hand, both of our radio "broadcasts" are invited as performers! (The radio shows are prerecorded.)

Two of my favorite performances that were not of Kee High are performing: For Reader's Theater, Dubuque Senior with "The Things They Carried" (about a platoon of infantrymen in Vietnam), and for Ensemble Acting, Decorah High, with "Women Must Weep" (about a ladies' sewing circle in a Confederate home just as the War Between the States is drawing to a close). I'm pleased to see the judges agreed with me on those. :)

Regarding "Women Must Weep," one of the young actresses held herself high and stiff, with her chin lifted proudly and her shoulders always square. You could almost see a stiff corset on her, the way she held herself. It was very effective. (Had I been the coach, I would have cut part of that little play, as I thought it was superfluous: The suspected infidelity of the young soldier. The simple fact that one of the women characters was a divorcee would have been scandalous enough at the time.)

1 comment:

Carol Reese said...

What fun! Good for Kieffers group! I did Speech competition in high school. We never did get far, but it was fun. I did impromptu speaking and extemporaneous speaking, but didnt do well in either. I also did Poetry. The first year, we had to memorize, the second, we could read. I did passages from John Brown's Body, the epic poem by Stephen Vincent Benet. (We did American History and American Literature that year.) Mary Lou Wingate was popular, and that's what I did the first year. The second year, I did Melora Dreams. Placed 3rd out of 6 with that one. None of my group went far, but we had a lot of fun.