Back when I was gainfully employed, I gave a fair number of speeches – especially this past year.  I spoke quietly to the eight members of the United Methodists Women’s Club as we sat together on beige metal  folding chairs pulled in a circle.   I spoke to over twelve hundred assembled members of the local university Greek Association who would randomly break out into competing house chants.  And then I spoke to just about every shading and size of group in between.

I don’t really have a problem with public speaking.  I can give you a costs breakdown presentation.  I can give you a slick general overview that covers the highlights and won’t put you to sleep.  My stock in trade speech was telling stories that would make your eyes prickle with tears while you reached for your wallet.

There’s only one thing I hate to speak about in public:  myself.  My life’s been odd enough that to speak of it can mark me as either pretentious or a flat out – albeit imaginative - liar.  I spend most of my real life editing myself for midwestern public consumption.

So the mandatory three minute speech membership requirement was going to be a challenge.  It had to be given last Monday; it had to entertain a group of 200+ Kiwanians after a starch-heavy lunch; and, worst of all - it had to be about me.  In three minutes. 

Well, having been laid off at the end of April, work highlights were out as it would probably end on kind of a whiny note; I live in the liberal bubble bastion of the Midwest, but I’m not sure that the wildly variable personal life would be a good idea either as these are kindly, well-intentioned people, some of whom are just way too old to be shocking for the hell of it.  Politics, out.  Religious beliefs out too.  And it had to be about me. 

Hello, my name is  ________, and I’m a new member of the ____ _____ Kiwanis Club. 

You may remember me from either my twenty minute presentation in support of the children’s program last fall, or from a few weeks back when I was leading you in the shower  game and asking you to take your clothes off to help raise money for CS Mott Children’s hospital.

I’ve asked and begged and pleaded, but apparently neither of those count and I still have to give a three minute new member speech.

I also understand that some of our wise and charming members time these things to the second, so I will try to keep well within my allotted time, just hitting a few highlights of my varied existence.

Now to personal statistics: I am the mother of four wild children, aged twenty-two, nineteen, ten and a very charming four. 

We have high hopes that the twenty two year old will find himself soon, as he’s been looking for several years now.   

My oldest daughter is nineteen, gorgeous, and working through a degree in film production in Atlanta, where she is endlessly pursued by cute redneck boys with really good pickup trucks.  

My youngest daughter has lived with her father in Luxembourg this school year and can’t decide whether her best accomplishment in the past year was singing a solo for at a school production or the fact that the boy she has a crush on asked her to dance at the end of school party.  

My youngest is a big mama’s boy, who says he’s going to marry me when he has a job and a house.

I was fortunate enough to have been raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – it was a very good time and though you may not be able to tell just by looking at me, I can make sweet tea and bake biscuits with the best of them.

I was fortunate in my parents, both visual artists who encouraged my interest in the arts.

I was also lucky as a child to have been surrounded by people dedicated to service.   Whether the educators and artists who encouraged me in my first writing attempts, or - perhaps most thrillingly for an imaginative child - several groups of missionaries who were dedicated to their beliefs, some making mission trips to the same area of Ecuador where Jim Elliot’s group had been massacred and yet still others who were smuggling bibles behind the iron curtain.

So then, I was brought up with the idea that acting on your beliefs and service to others could change the world for the better.  I pursued this idea with wildly impractical undergraduate work in literature and philosophy, followed over a decade later by more practical graduate work in marketing and management.

I have been fortunate to pursue service through my small writing skill, my willingness to work hard for incremental change and my ability to make strangers cry and then shamelessly ask them for money in support of groups that believe that we can change the world, one idea, one project, one person at a time.

I am truly happy to have been accepted as a member of this club and hope to continue to serve the community through the excellent work we do, which would not be possible without each one of you being dedicated to the idea of service. 

I am honored to be a member of the ___ _____  Kiwanis club; and, since this clocked at two minutes fifty-eight seconds in the at home run through, I think you’ll find we’re good on the time.

Thank you for your kind attention.