Current mood:

mellow

Extending the weekend just a bit is never a bad thing. . .
Weekend Assignment #210: It's been 40 years since the Mountaintop speech, and even longer since the great speeches of John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and others. Are the days of great oratory behind us, or have you drawn inspiration from some recent public speaker? If so, what was the speech? Do you remember any actual quotes from it?

Extra Credit: Have you ever given a speech, other than in a classroom?

All right, well, I didn't get to the weekend assignment until Monday night, but I'll hope I'll be forgiven. Over the weekend, I gave a presentation (it was for school, so I don't think I can use it for extra credit, even though it wasn't in a classroom), finished and turned in a paper and a 24-slide PowerPoint file, attended a party thrown by Californians for Humane Farms to celebrate their initiative qualifying for the November ballot, rehearsed for the New Play Reading event taking place tomorrow night, and was, out of the blue, served a "termination of tenancy" notice by my property manager because for some unknown reason she thought I did something that I wasn't at all aware I did until she told me I'd done it, and that's because I hadn't. She rescinded the notice pretty much immediately, but this is the latest in an unpleasant series of incidents that are beginning to make me rather unhappy. So, for all these reasons, I didn't find the time or, mostly, the energy to complete the weekend assignment until now.

Anyway . . .

Reading the other blog entries in response to this assignment, it seems that I am not alone am finding this a challenging one. I'm not sure if that really means that oratory is dead, or it just means that speeches are hard to remember, or what. I also watch very little television, so whatever public figures say, I'm far more likely to read in print than catch on the TV. I'm glad we have YouTube these days, so I can go back and listen to speeches I missed, like Barack Obama's March 18 speech on race relations, which I tried to listen to on the radio that morning, but didn't because he started late, and I had to start work. I've been meaning to YouTube it ever since, but haven't found a good time to spend 40 minutes doing so. So I'm actually listening to it right now. Thanks, Karen, for prompting that. Am I impressed by it? Well, he seems to be saying things that are true . . . obviously true. He's saying things that he needs to say. I find it worthwhile. Do find it electrifying or inspirational? I can't say I do.

I also must say I was exceedingly unimpressed by the last time I heard our current President make a speech on the radio . . . in fact, I was so unimpressed I was moved to comment on how unimpressed I was on this blog, just a few entries back.

I'm not sure I actually followed the specifications of this assignment, but heck, at least it got me to write on my blog, right? As far as the extra credit goes, I've given many, many
"please turn off your cell phones; there will be one 15-intermission" kinds of speeches, but I think that's not the sort of thing we have in mind here. I make 30-second announcements to a roomful of Realtors quite regularly. And Madame Pernelle from Tartuffe and Elizabeth from Six Degrees of Separation gave speeches that couldn't have happened without my help, because at the time, I was playing them.

As far as the last weekend assignment, well, the only thing that was true about that was that I attempting to unclutter my apartment recently. Oh, and that I have friends that have laughed at me millions of times.