Julia Orbino, a junior communication studies major, reads and acts accordingly to her theme, "Doing What it Takes to Get What You Want" at Tuesday's "Speak Up" event. [Click to enlarge]

Five members of the "speech half" of the team, as director Darren Goins called them, delivered brief excerpts of prose and sequences of related poetry during the Oct. 11 event.

Goins opened the proceedings with an intriguing comment: "The idea is that words are better than weapons."

Freshman Megan Stewart began the performance with a litany of poems on the subject of violation. With every poem, she took on a different persona.

Opening with a high-pitched tone about a girl who forgave her abusive boyfriend because he sent her flowers after he hit her, she effortlessly segued into a poem in which, with tears in her eyes, she recited, "I died every time he touched me."

Second on the program was sophomore Darlene Ugwa with a prose excerpt from "The Harvest," a piece about a motorcycle accident for which the storyteller required 300 stitches.

Senior Trinya Smith gave another blending of poems titled "Sugar in the Raw." These poems focused on discrimination. Like Stewart, Smith changed her character with each poem, moving her arms in rhythm with a rap poem and stooping down to portray an old woman, fired.

"It took years to realize I could speak and never say a word," Smith declared, as her voice rang out over the silent room.

Another prose piece, "Creatures of the Sea," spoken by sophomore Amanda Henninger, followed by poems under junior Julia Orbino's theme: "Doing what it takes to get what you want." This segment closed out the hour-long performance. The audience consisted mainly of the "debate half" of the team, along with a few parents and students there for extra credit in Goins' class.

"I feel more laid back," because of the familiar crowd, Henninger said. Ugwa disagreed: "I feel more pressure around people I know," she said.

The team had a competition last weekend in which it scored second of the 10 schools in its bracket, and sixth of 18 total schools. Stewart and Henninger both qualified for nationals at the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

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