"Rising stars"

I love rising stars. We now seem to have round robins just for them, or at least pods of round robins just for them. What a concept. First of all, presumably these rising stars are, at the moment, dark unseen spots filling up the sky, gray faceless contenders in a sea of forensiciana. They are the kids that come from the sticks, from Allentown, Pennsylvania… “Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It's the lives of all these people who've worked with you. You've got to go on, and you've got to give and give and give. They've got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can't fall down. You can't because your future's in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I'm through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!”

(Odd advice to give a tap dancer, to keep you feet on the ground, but anyone who has ever seen Ruby Keeler tap dance pretty much realizes that for all practical purposes she is keeping her feet on the ground.)

So we celebrity up these unknown kids from Allentown, and we send them out on the stage, and maybe they become real stars, their names in lights on that Great White Way of debate that is the National $ircuit. Broadway rhythm’s got me—everybody dance!!! There’s flowers sent to the divas by the stage door johnnies, blazing marquees, bold-faced names in Winchell’s column, caricatures at Sardi’s. Ah, stardom. Of course, the next thing you know Eve Harrington (also known as Hockaday EH) comes along, and you fasten your seat belt because it’s going to be a bumpy night, and you're yesterday’s news, a has-been, a nobody. Show biz is tough, baby. And you’ve got to be tough to survive in it.

And what about those rising stars who don’t make it. “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.” They start out burning oh so brightly, they are peas in the rising star pods of all the round robins, and then they’re never heard of again. What happens to these bums, anyhow? I see them out on the street, a couple of dozen pencils in their tin cups, begging for spikes off the third criterion turn. Oh, the humanity!

I probably maintain something of a minority opinion on the RR situation, that they’re coming a little too fast and a little too furiously, and that they might be concentrating on the wrong side of the debate universe. They are, after all, debate competition distilled down from everything that usually goes with a tournament. For one thing, even the poor schlimazel who comes in last is probably pretty good, unlike the poor schlimazel at an invitational who comes in last who probably doesn’t know his aff from his elbow but who is nonetheless being exposed to ideas he might otherwise never even know exist. I’m all for that invitational schlimazel. I guess that every tournament can’t and shouldn’t exist for that poor schlub, but all those that do are the reason I show up week after week. As for the others: as Homer Simpson says (in The Day of the Locust—now there’s a trivia question for you), Oh, Lord, forgive me for harboring such unworthy thoughts, but sometimes I wish I could tear it all down!

Thus ends today’s sermon. Please join me for tea and popcorn at the local revival house. We need to catch up on some classics.