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The contest has been a thing since 1938.
I entered it twice in high school, almost ten years ago, about two decades after Schreck did.
(After that selection, you get five minutes to prep.
My strategy involved writing entire five-minute speeches in advance and memorizing all of them.)
In my senior year I entered again, using the same speech as the year before.
(It wasnt against the rules.
In Indiana, where the national competition is held each year, there was one speaker from every state.
None of my other friends participated.
I did not exactly face stiff competition in the early regional heats.
Per my hometown newspaper, Malone Kircher won the local competition because no one else entered from her school.
Schreck described the Constitution as a crucible of sizzling and steamy conflict.
Even bigger on anecdotes.
Combine a few of those and some firm gesticulations, and youre in business.
For me, that involved a story about some elementary-school playground bullies who wouldnt let me use the slide.
Midway through Id pause dramatically and ask the audience to listen.
Do you hear that?
Silence as shoehorned metaphor for oppressive, nondemocratic regimes.
The judges lapped it up.
I talked about the Zenger trial and freedom of the press.
I talked about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the early womens-rights movement.
I talked aboutHollingsworthv.Virginia,which established that the president has no role in amending the Constitution.
But I also cringe at my narrow-mindedness, the oversimplifications through which I saw the world.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in hindsight, was a big, fat racist.
Theres so much more Id want to say today.
Thats what struck me most about watching Schreck.
She gets to revisit all those oversimplifications.
She gets to do her no-fewer-than-eight, no-more-than-ten again.
(The show is being filmed for future release but details have yet to be announced.)
Id talk about the Fourteenth Amendment which now at leastfor now gives me the right to marry my girlfriend.
Id talk about Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.
That speech, even with gestures and dramatic pauses for effect, would not win.
His caption was something about sticking it to phallocentrism.
The winner that year, whom I remember as extremely kind, talked a lot about the family Bible.
Schreck says her only real competition was a young woman who told delightful stories about her pioneer grandmother.
Now theres a metaphor.
