An Alternate Address

After significant number of requests at various graduation parties, I have decided to make available the comedy routine portion of my graduation speech audition. I will not post the more serious portion of the audition because: 1) I deleted the file and can’t be bothered re-writing it and 2) this was really the only part that would have set my speech apart from anyone else’s. Here goes.

Hi!

Well. Here we are. Law school is over. I hope I don’t come across as pushy about religion when I say “Thank Christ.” Now we can all go out into the real world and try to recapture those personalities this institution spent the last three years trying to kill. Can’t wait to start that grace period ticking.

It’s a great privilege to address this graduating class. There are so many people out there with talent, vision and unique perspective. I want to take this moment to thank the vast majority of you for not auditioning against me.

Seriously, though, you guys dodged a bullet. It’s really difficult to come up with a theme to speak on when addressing such a diverse group. As Dean Johnson noted both now and at the beginning of our time here, we come from a lot of different places, and where we’re going is no less varied. Sure, the parents and friends in the audience think we shake the Dean’s hand and magically transform into lawyer-drones, but we recognize that there is a big difference between practicing corporate law and family. Some of us will become public defenders, others in house counsel for large corporations. Plenty of us won’t even practice, we’ll enter business or politics. Some may even join the prestigious ranks of law professors, some may even (gesture to Dean Johnson) become… ummm….ummm…. ninjas. Or pirates. Susan Gainen keeps telling me I can do anything with a law degree. I think I’ll be an astronaut. Maybe study the effect of zero gravity on the Erie Doctrine.

Wherever we go, one thing is certain. Loans. I got to Northrup early to run through the speech, chase away the butterflies. I saw this Sally Mae rep come in with 240 individually labeled stopwatches. She's ready. Soon as you shake the Dean’s hand: Click!

With a name like Sally Mae, you think she’d be all helpful, you know, “y’all just bring that money back whenever ya can, y’hear!” No. She’s a stone cold bitch. Did you know that they are charging is interest on these loans. I know!

Anyway, from there I tried to make some tired points about how getting admitted to law school is a privilege, despite whatever we have overcome, our society has given us an incredible opportunity and we shouldn’t go about repaying our fellow citizens by creating a more complex legal system that benefits the pocketbooks of lawyers rather than the citizens it, and we, are meant to serve. But we’ve heard that a thousand times and repeatedly prove that we aren’t listening.

Congratulations to my classmates, thanks for making three horrible years more bearable.