Help!
Hi, I'm Bob the Tomato, and I need your help! Okay, so I'm not Bob the Tomato, but I do need help. Mom signed me up for an Individual Event at the debate tournament in March. The event is entitled "Prose." I'm supposed to take a section from a work of literature and give an interpretation. Unfortunately, there's a very strict formula I have to follow. I have an optional 30 second teaser followed by a 1 minute introduction. The introduction is the only place I can use my words. Everything else has to be from the book. In the intro I'm supposed to give the name of the book and the author, and some sort of brief moral lesson that we can glean from the section of the book I read. Then I have a maximum of 8 1/2 minutes to give a dramatic reading of one or more section(s) from a work of literature.
It's not acting, it's dramatic reading, so I'm only allowed to move one step away from my starting position. The introduction has to be memorized, but for the rest of it I have to have a black notebook open. I'm supposed to turn a page every so often to give the illusion that I'm reading from it. Because my hands will be full of this notebook, gestures have to be fairly limited. Now, here's the part where I need your help. I need to find a way to get out of it without making anyone mad... Not really. I've given that up. What I actually need is a topic. I'd like to do something from Pride and Prejudice or perhaps The Chronicles of Narnia. The judges are primarily homeschool moms, so I thought those would be good choices. :)The problem is, I'm having a hard time coming up with a moral lesson that can be explained in under 1 minute and demonstrated without reading the entire book. Yesterday I watched the first half of Pride and Prejudice for inspiration (it was school, really!), but no ideas came to me. Anything you could do to help would be... helpful. :)
It's not acting, it's dramatic reading, so I'm only allowed to move one step away from my starting position. The introduction has to be memorized, but for the rest of it I have to have a black notebook open. I'm supposed to turn a page every so often to give the illusion that I'm reading from it. Because my hands will be full of this notebook, gestures have to be fairly limited. Now, here's the part where I need your help. I need to find a way to get out of it without making anyone mad... Not really. I've given that up. What I actually need is a topic. I'd like to do something from Pride and Prejudice or perhaps The Chronicles of Narnia. The judges are primarily homeschool moms, so I thought those would be good choices. :)The problem is, I'm having a hard time coming up with a moral lesson that can be explained in under 1 minute and demonstrated without reading the entire book. Yesterday I watched the first half of Pride and Prejudice for inspiration (it was school, really!), but no ideas came to me. Anything you could do to help would be... helpful. :)