In Which Carmen is High on Speechmaking
Jun. 11th, 2005 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xaaraFirst message is to all of you who wrote words of encouragement yesterday when I was about ready to jump off the nearest tall building into a thicket of rose bushes: Thank you so much for saving me the hospital bills. Seriously, though, all the "You'll do fine"s really did help a lot.
I don't have much time to write, but I just wanted to record my ongoing highness at the reaction to my speech. At the beginning, when I talked about the whole hiding-in-bathrooms thing, they laughed at all the right places, and they all snickered at the bit about avoiding structural elements. The most gratifying part, however, came about a third of the way through, when I arrived at "We live in one of the most diverse cities in the world—our schools should offer every student an intensive holistic education." I finished that line, building up to the word "education" as slowly as possible, and when I produced the last syllable, the audience burst into spontaneous applause and wouldn't let me continue for some time.
What made it even sweeter? The superintendent of DC Public Schools was sitting behind me onstage. Could we have made a better political statement?
I think my speech may have ticked him off just a smidge--I was rather highly critical of the school system. But I don't regret a single word, because I had that audience in the palm of my hand, and it felt good.
I don't have much time to write, but I just wanted to record my ongoing highness at the reaction to my speech. At the beginning, when I talked about the whole hiding-in-bathrooms thing, they laughed at all the right places, and they all snickered at the bit about avoiding structural elements. The most gratifying part, however, came about a third of the way through, when I arrived at "We live in one of the most diverse cities in the world—our schools should offer every student an intensive holistic education." I finished that line, building up to the word "education" as slowly as possible, and when I produced the last syllable, the audience burst into spontaneous applause and wouldn't let me continue for some time.
What made it even sweeter? The superintendent of DC Public Schools was sitting behind me onstage. Could we have made a better political statement?
I think my speech may have ticked him off just a smidge--I was rather highly critical of the school system. But I don't regret a single word, because I had that audience in the palm of my hand, and it felt good.
