All-State Part 1: The Bus from Hell

This weekend, Shane Neilson, Andrew Hanzelka and I won the All-State Speech banner for Improvisational Acting. It was great. I will describe the glorious day.

Early in the morning I awoke as always on the dawns of speech competitions. But this day was different. Today was the last group speech competition of the year. It was the pinnacle of Iowa speech; it was All-State. Unfortunately my one act play, which had all the potential to get there, had fallen flat at state but somehow did make non-performing. Although I was bummed about that, I was still performing in improv and that was what mattered to me. You see, Shane, Andrew and Chase had won the year before and now it was up to us to bring the banner back to Kennedy by the end of the day. Any who, I got ready and drove to the horseshoe at Kennedy where we would board the bus. 

Once on the road, I conversed some with Tanner and Shane, making pleasant conversation and joking around. We then all proceeded to take a roughly forty-five minute nap. When we awoke there was some commotion at the front of the bus where Diane was talking in a panicked tone with our bus driver. Apparently we had taken a misguided route and were redirecting for Ames, where the whole competition would be taking place. It was unfortunate and we were on schedule to miss the opening ceremonies now, but we all shrugged it off an went back to talking. After another fifteen minutes or so of driving and nezzling with Shane, I heard a sound like compressed air was being released and the bus had started to slow. We stopped at the side of the road with a busted radiator. It looked like our day was going to become a little more complicated yet.

See, because our drama department apparently gets zero funding Kennedy was the only school to drive up the morning of and not stay the night before. So we pulled over to a nearby Kum & Go, which I still believe to be a provocative name. After frantically arranging rides somebodies dad came and rescued our musical theatre group in an H3 Hummer so that they could perform on time. The rest of us, however, had to wait. And wait. And wait. BAH BAH BAAHHHHHH!!!!

-see the next entry for more juicy details!