Rubber chicken

    In this time of national tragedy, my mind of course flashes back to the silliest memory possible. Call it a defense mechanism. In high school, I participated in forensics. I put it the pretentious way because I only did debate for the first two years, then did extemporaneous speaking for the other two. I was terrible at it. My analysis was always sharp, but I was flat terrified to be speaking in front of an audience, even though my audience was almost invariably just the judge (or in debate, the judge plus my partner and our opponents). I tended to lapse into a monotone and stay there.
    The one exception was when I knew the judge. Since I participated for all four years, some of the people I debated against freshman year had graduated by the time I finished and thus were able to serve as judges by the time I was done. I remember calling out one of them from Spring Valley from the rostrum. This may not have led to a good extemp score, but it least it broke me out of the monotone.
    The closest I came to breaking out in debate was silly. Really, really silly. Shepard McAninch and I were partnered for a tournament towards the end of the year at the College of Charleston, I think. We were bored stupid. So we decided that we wanted to write a rubber chicken case. It was just a gag, and a weak play on words at that, because I think all we proposed was to distribute prophylactics and chickens. There was a munificently funded board-- I don't know about these days, but back then in debate there was ALWAYS a munificently funded board-- and that was it, really.
    Two sets of opponents mopped the floor with us, not surprisingly. We were having a good time, but we didn't do it to win, but just as a prank. But then we ran into a couple of freshman, seemingly at their first tournament. They were so nervous they made me seem calm and collected by comparison. They couldn't think on their feet and had no idea what to make out of our outrageous case. So we actually won a debate presenting a rubber chicken case. Why we didn't go on to become lawyers is beyond me; hopefully, we didn't ruin the debating careers of those fellows. Of course, by now they're probably in Congress.