Dr. Williams asked us to blog about four
funny things that happened to us this semester and why they were funny to us.
Since the Laugh Lurker assignment counted as one of these blogs, that brings me
to sharing three of the most memorable and funny experiences I’ve had this
semester.
I decided to wait until the end of the semester
because I wanted to share moments with you all that really meant something to
me—moments that still make me laugh days, weeks, (even months) after they
happened. So here we go with funny moment number one:
If you’ve been keeping up with my blogs,
you know from a couple of my conversation partner writings that I’ve been doing
a lot of dialect work this semester. This year was my first year on the TCU
Forensics Speech and Debate team, and one of my individual speeches was a
Program of Oral Interpretation (POI). A POI is basically a bunch of things
spliced together to build an argument. You can pull an excerpt of pretty much
anything you want to put in your program: prose, poetry, newspaper/journal
articles, tweets, published diaries, etc. The only catch is that the speech has
to be performed in an interpretive manner. That means you’re basically
performing a one-man show with as many different
characters/voices/personalities that you want.
So, long story short, my POI addressed
handicap accessibility issues in Europe. I argued that there was extremely
little concern for people in wheelchairs trying to survive every day life in
various European countries. (If you’re interested in learning more, let me know
and we can talk about it.) I had four different characters, and I started this
speech in January.
Now, let me tell you, getting these
characters to work was not an easy job. When I first started competing, I
consistently got dead last in every competition I entered. Judges kept telling me
that they couldn’t tell a difference in my characters, that I needed to add to
my argument, etc. I have no idea how many hours my coach and I put into that
piece, and how many times we changed the characters and voices I tried to pull
off.
I kept failing and failing, and by the
time February rolled around, we were coming up on our last chance tournament to
qualify for nationals: the district tournament. I finally had three of my
characters down pat: a southern belle, a Midwesterner, and a British teacher.
It was the week of the competition, and I still couldn’t find a way to make my
fourth character distinct and memorable enough to even have a chance at making
it to nationals. The competition was on Saturday, and I met with my coach on
Tuesday morning to practice. We ran my piece once and went back to the same
struggle of trying to figure out what to do with the fourth character. Finally,
she had an idea. She turned to me and said: “You’re going to want to shoot me,
but…can you do a French accent?”
That definitely caught me off guard. I had
spent two weeks trying to perfect a proper English accent and still had trouble
with it sometimes. She wanted me to get a French accent four days before the
competition? But, I wanted to make it to nationals, so I agreed to give it a
try. We made a deal: I would work on the accent over the next couple of days,
and if it wasn’t good by the time we met on Thursday morning, we would nix it
and take the piece to competition as is.
So, I came back to my dorm and spent hours
trying to perfect the distinct sounds in a French accent. Luckily, I happen to
have a friend in my dorm that spent four years of his life living in Belgium;
therefore, he was pretty much my savior. Matt coached me for a good three to four
hours that Tuesday night, trying to get me to say my vowels and “Rs” properly. By
about one in the morning, we were both tired and a little brain dead from my
inability to produce the proper sounds.
We were about to give up, and I only had
one more question for him. I had been watching how he moved his mouth to
pronounce words for the past hour, trying to mimic him, and I just couldn’t
understand how he seemingly wasn’t moving his lips when he talked. I looked at
him and asked him how he was making his mouth so still and why he was puckering
his lips outward to make the French sounds. Now, when Matt gets tired, he can
come out with some pretty ridiculous and random things to say. As it was one in
the morning, he’d reached his limit. He just looked me straight in the eyes,
and, using his French accent, responded: “It iz becuz ze French, they want zeir
lips to be closer to yours when ze speak.”
Matt’s answer completely caught me off
guard. Here I was legitimately trying to figure out how to move my mouth, and
he came out with the most unexpected response playing upon the stereotype of
the French being overly-sexual people. We both died laughing, and I still smile
when I think about this occurrence today. It was the perfect comic relief to
the frustrating situation I was in, and it was funny because I definitely was not expecting that cognitive shift. I’m
just sad nobody else was around to witness the moment, because every time I’ve
tried to tell somebody about it, it’s just not as great as when the original
moment happened.
To put a happy ending to this story, Matt’s
coaching somehow managed to get me to perfect a French accent in two days. My
coach approved the accent on Thursday morning, and I competed in districts with
the accent on Saturday. It seemed that the snooty French character was just
what my piece had been missing all along, because I made it to nationals. And,
when I look back on my first year in debate, what I’m most proud of isn’t the
fact that I made it to nationals my first time trying Forensics. It’s hard to
do, but it’s a feat that other people have accomplished. What I’m most proud of
is going from placing dead last in every competition to getting a French accent
in three days and using that to fight
my way to nationals. My underdog story is what I’m proud of, and the fact that
I got to have a memorable laugh to go along with it just makes the story even
better.
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