Our local Toastmasters club selected me to compete in this year’s International Speech Competition.  So, I got up early one Saturday and competed.  My speech was entitled, “I Like to Make Things,” and I hope it captured how important creativity is to me; I talk about building a theatre organ from a kit when I was 10 years old, and then the paper model of Chartres Cathedral that I built in the summer of 2007.  A friend of mine who was competing in the evaluation part of the contest brought his camera and we taped each other’s performance.

This is the first time I’ve ever competed in a speech contest, and the first time in a long while since I’ve been on a stage.

So here it is – I hope you enjoy it (I was so scared and worked up that I could hardly seel the night AFTER the competition!).