Two-Headed Boy:

Today, I took a moment to pause and reflect, and in doing so I remembered that I have a blog.  That’s not entirely true.  This is just great.  I’ve been away for almost a month, and now I’m starting things off by lying to you.  Sadly, blogging (heck, writing in general) has not been my top priority within the past few months.  Life as a high school senior has brought me a lot of new responsibilities and, well, seniority.  For example, this morning at 8:00, I attended my first meeting of my school’s literary magazine, Images, as its official Senior Fiction Editor.  I have already started my duties that come with this snappy new title.  Throughout my free time today, I have been reviewing and editing all of the stories submitted for our first issue this year, except for my own, with which I am already familiar.  Gee, I wonder if my story will get accepted this time around.  Tee hee.  Power has corrupted me already.  By the end of the year, I’ll make sure that I’m writing every word of that magazine, including the poems.  I can produce some remarkably whimsical, thoughtful verses as long as I sufficiently tap into my alternate, poetic personality, Jules Fanis.  Or, maybe I, the fiction writing Will Hoffacker, am the alternate identity for Jules.  That’s a scary thought.  Anyway, this is the mind that the editors-in-chief at Images have trusted with the major responsibilities of their fiction section.  I’ve decided to print out each story and hand-write my own personal comments.  What I haven’t decided is whether or not the author of each story should see my copy of their work with my comments and criticisms scribble all over it.  At the very least, I will summarize my points for them in an email or a face-to-face interaction.  These are important choices for me.  Just how hands-on do I want myself to be?  Should I be the editor who presents himself and speaks openly and compassionately?  Or, should I be the godlike man behind the curtain, issue my acceptances and rejections without any personal touches or traces of sympathy?  I am excessively complicating this.  Any amount of power incontrovertibly goes straight to my head.

Speaking of power, I played God recently, and I played him quite well (divinely, one might say).  Nine days ago, my duo partner Joe and I competed in our first speech tournament ever.  To summarize what I have said in a previous entry, Joe and I have never auditioned for the speech team, but recently the faculty moderator of the team drafted us and gave us a piece to perform in the category of Duo.  In the Duo category of speech, two teammates perform a scripted piece, usually adapted from a play.  There are also such strange but important rules as: the performers must not touch one another, the performers must not make eye contact with each other, and the performers must have at least one foot on the ground at all times.  Joe and I were given the task of performing a skit called “The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged)” by Austin Tichenor.  Throughout the various scenes in the piece, all of which are performed in less than ten minutes, I must play such roles as God, Jesus, Joseph, Goliath, Nimrod, and a narrator.  Joe, meanwhile, must play the roles of Cain, Abel, Shem, Caphtorim, Abraham, David, David’s attendant, Mary, Judas, all of the other apostles, and a second narrator.  During the parody of the story of the Tower of Babel, I must speak in a ridiculously bastardized mix of Spanish and Italian, while Joe does the same with Chinese and Japanese with one of the characters he plays in that scene.  Furthermore, we both must end the piece with a little something called “Revelation: the Musical.”  When it’s done right, the piece is hilarious, but it’s a challenge for me and Joe.  It was difficult enough to memorize our lines at first, but even more troublesome was the matter of creating amusing and innovative motions, called “blocking.”  We spent a couple of weeks rehearsing, and we are still coming up with new ideas every day.

As I said already, this was the debut tournament for me and Joe, so you can imagine that we were fairly nervous.  This particular tournament was hosted at our own high school, so I was hopeful that we would be comforted by the familiar surroundings.  There was no such luck.  The tournament had so many contestants that every room (including the weight room and some teachers’ offices) were filled with rounds of speech and debate, and so the rounds of Duo had to be relocated to the nearby Loyola school, just two blocks away.  Upon entering the classroom where our first room would be held, I couldn’t help but notice how much nicer everything seemed than the everything we have at our own school.  I was more comfortable in Loyola’s polished wooden desks, and the technology of their classrooms was more updated than ours.  It was, all things considered, intimidating.  Like everyone else, Joe and I had to compete in the first three rounds of the competition, all before lunch, which didn’t happen until about 2:00.  (My breakfast had been a small chocolate beverage at 6:00 that morning.  I am surprised that I did not pass out.)  Joe and I had some tough competition in the first round, including an adaptation of Equus, performed by the team of Pete and Eddie, the same two Regis students who performed our skit last year.  We were ranked fourth out of five, according to the ballot we received later.  In the second round, Joe and I both flubbed a line or two, but our performance was getting better.  We ranked third out of five that time.  In the third round, we gave a performance which we would latter agree was our best yet.  The ballot for this round was lost.  During lunch, Joe and I discussed how we might improve our performance for future tournaments, in the hope that someday we would break to the final round in a tournament.  We returned to school to find out that that day had arrived much sooner than we ever expected—immediately, in fact.  Joe and I made it to the final round in our first tournament ever.  Later, my friend Greg, who has been on the speech team for years already, told me that it took him eight tournaments to make it to a final round.  I thought I noticed a little bit of resentment in his voice, which made me smile.  The joy when our names were called was intense.  I was very happy to be in the final round, especially since it gave us a chance to see all of our toughest competition.  At the end of the day, Joe and I had ranked seventh in our category, in a tournament which had twenty-two duo teams.

Our next tournament is on Saturday at Fordham.  This will be the true test.  This tournament will decide whether we really have what it takes or we just had some dumb luck nine days ago.  For the time being, this experience is just affirming what I have known for a long time: I love to make people laugh.  And really, what greater joy is there than to be rewarded for playing God?

End Post.