Aaron Gives Back

A few weeks ago I wrote about my experience with Career Day at Centralia College, during which I enlisted the help of two high school kids (my brother’s friends) to act as fake sources in the fake story I asked my fake journalist charges to write. 

The deal, I originally told them, was that I’d buy them burritos from Tacos El Rey in exchange for the two hours they’d spend “working” at Career Day. 

Once the day actually rolled around, however, one of them decided he wanted a different deal: my help writing a speech in his campaign for ASB president. 

I’d done a little speech-writing in college; the lone candidate I helped won his election in a landslide, thanks in no small part to his enthralling speech. I’m not, however, counting the election during which one of my friends unscrupulously signed me up to run for VP (my speech consisted of imploring other students not to vote for me; 10 percent of them did anyway). 

Anyway, I told now-ASB President Cory Olson I’d write a blog about his speech if he won; he was introduced by a friend wearing a suit and a Guy Fawkes mask.  

Also, if anyone else out there (this means you, Dino Rossi, or even you, John McCain) needs a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger of a speech, I can quote you a price.

Oh, and here’s the speech: 

“I stand before you, my fellow Adna High School students, not as a candidate for ASB president, but as simple storyteller. 

Seventeen years ago, in a cave deep in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, Hephaestus the God of Fire sired a child with Britain’s first female consulate. The result was a 12 lb., 9 oz. monster with hair the color of saltwater and a natural scent that made roses envious. 

By the age of two the boy was solving long division problems by drawing figures in the dirt with a bull’s horn and had mastered basic English grammar.  

By age three he spoke fluent German, Russian and Latin and alternated his days between wrestling wildebeests and composing verses of poetry. 

At age five he quit the mountain life, tossed his mother into a ravine and headed for adventure in St. Petersburg, Russia. Within weeks he climbed to the top of the Soviet underworld, but quickly grew bored with the Communist red tape and headed for a British preparatory school. 

At prep school the boy, now eight, anchored the school polo team and was named to the All-Province cricket team. He was invited to try out for the 2000 Olympic national soccer team but declined, opting instead to play the title role in a London production of Don Giovanni. 

In his 10th year the boy finally made his way across the Big Pond to New York, where he managed the Mets for a season and, during the off-season, won a fistfight with former Knick Patrick Ewing. He appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, where he played piano, and on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where he juggled Siamese cats. 

After the Big Apple experience, during which he also lost a close Mayoral race to Rudy Giuliani, he took on an air of charity. He single-handedly built 16 homes for Habitat for Humanity and donated his entire book collection, all 142,000 titles, to the Alex VanTuyl Memorial Library at Washington State University. He was shot down not once, not twice but three times while flying supplies in to Honduran refugees. 

During his early teenage years the boy won a Grammy for his tuba ensemble, “Love in the Sixth Sense,” and appeared in four episodes of One Tree Hill. He was drafted in the second round by the Atlanta Falcons, but skipped training camp to win the Boston Marathon. He co-wrote the script for Gladiator and produced the first Good Charlotte CD, barely missed the cut for Real World Las Vegas and subsisted solely on deviled eggs for the entire month of April. 

At 14 he sold the plans for the first hybrid car to the Toyota company, becoming a millionaire overnight. Sure he’d never need his wisdom again, he left it in California and moved to Southwest Washington. 

The talent-less wonder enrolled in the local high school, where he achieved below-average grades and failed to make a single varsity athletic squad. His only accomplishments were holding down a job as a manure spreader and reading the daily bulletin aloud each morning, all while waiting for an opportunity to return to greatness.  

That boy’s name was Cory Olson. Give me your vote and let the adventure continue.”