So this weekend I went to a state-level high school speech competition. My girlfriend's friend's sister was competing (in the dramatic interpretation event) and we went to watch her and the rest of her heat. There were 19 competitors, 6 were in the heat we saw.
Of the 6, the person we went to see and this one guy who did an amazing interpretation of a hobo both had excellent performances. There were two others that were fairly good and two others that were outright bad: one with no soul or drama at all, whatsoever, and another who did an incredibly inaccurate, extremely insulting to anyone who knows anything about the subject impression of an autistic savant.
Results come in, and 8 of the 19 people make the "finals". I was incredibly miffed to see neither the person we came to see nor the bum made it. (In hindsight, I am not at all surprised, as the person we came to see had to go first out of all 19 the day we saw here, and the bum had to go first the day before in the first set of presentations. A note to everyone in high school who ever eters a subjectively judged contest: if you have to go first in the order,
don't even compete. You WILL NOT make the next round no matter how good you do. Your scores will be AT LEAST 10-20% worse than they would have been had you gone near the middle of the order.)
So out of curiousity I went to see who exactly DID make it ou of the group we watched: One of the decently good people AND THE PERSON WHO MADE FUN OF SAVANTS.
NO REALLY IGNORANT SOCIETY
So let's have a recap of her performance:
The point of the dramatic interpretation event is to take a passage and recite it as the person who wrote it or the character who said it would have. She chose to do a passage by
Daniel Tammet. Daniel Tammet's abilities (including reciting pi to a wuarter million digits) are partly due to savantism, but more due to him being synaesthetic and seeing numbers as vivid, unique shapes. The girl's interpretation of this man was a horrible, insulting character very similar to Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man, except more debilitating and stereotypically ignorant and with a voice very close to Steve Urkel.
Daniel Tammet's voice was NOT THAT BAD. Strike 1.
The girl repeated what she said and stuttered thoughout the whole thing and often just starting screaming numbers out of nowhere because autistic people just DO INCREDIBLY ZANY UNPREDICTABLE THINGS AMIRITE GUYZ?!!?!?!? Note to ignorant populace: an autistic person who is that impaired
will not speak. At all. Or, at most, in spurts of 2 or 3 words at a time, certainly not in complete sentences with flowery language in between. Tammet was certainly not this impaired in speech, at all. Strike 2.
Her eye contact with the crowd was nearly flawless. This is great in speech contests. EXCEPT THAT AUTISTIC SAVANTS GO WELL OUT OF THEIR WAY TO AVOID EYE CONTACT. Strike 3.
Then when she tried to reinact Tammet meeting his life partner (he's gay btw) she just sort of very gradually became "normal". Now, the end result was closer to how Tammet actually acts, but I thought she was breaking out of character and it was horribly done and outright confusing. Strike 4.
And yet, despite this incredibly flawed, horrifically inaccurate performance, she managed the best score in the heat. I'm more autistic (as in: have an extremely strong suspicion that I have Asperger's) than she ever will be. I cringed. My girlfriend, who is taking a class in autism and actually working with a genuinely impaired 17 year old, cringed more. Of course, the judges ate it up because it was soooooo over the top and savants are just useless people who deserve to be made fun of.
The other person who made it was more accurate... but also based her performance around an extremely disabled person, one with a disfigured face, a hunchback, no right hand, and extremely slurred speech. The moral of this story: making fun of disabled people = good drama, and talent simply cannot overcome that multi-millionaire who makes a nice
bribe grant to the speech organizations in Illinois in the name of a high school. Seriously, watching the person we went to see cry for a half hour because such undeserving performances just... ugh.
In conclusion: Screw talent, if you want to go far in life, make connections and play to everyone else's unfounded predjudices. It'll take you a lot farther than wasting your time making yourself a better person.
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